The role of rights, risks and responsibilities in the climate justice debate
International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management
ISSN: 1756-8692
Article publication date: 15 August 2016
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to use the results of a synthesis of six social science fellowships to explore how alternative framings of the climate justice debate can support fairer climate policies.
Design/methodology/approach
The original fellowships drew on sociology, economics, geography, psychology and international relations. Cross-cutting themes of rights, risks and responsibilities were identified following a series of workshops. Results of these workshops were discussed in a number of policy fora. Analysis of the feedback from that fora is used to propose the case for a rights, risks and responsibilities approach to building a more accessible climate justice debate.
Findings
Existing climate policy unjustly displaces a) responsibility for emission reductions, b) risks from climate impacts and c) loss of rights. Foundational questions of acceptable risk have been ignored and a just climate policy requires procedurally just ways of revisiting this first-order question.
Research limitations/implications
The contribution a rights, risks and responsibilities framework can bring to a process of educating for climate stewardship is at this stage theoretical. It is only through trialling a rights, risks and responsibilities approach to climate justice debates with the relevant stakeholders that its true potential can be assessed.
Practical implications
Policy actors expressed strong resistance to the idea of overhauling current decision-making processes and policy frameworks. However, moving forward from this point with a more nuanced and tactical understanding of the dialectical relationship between rights, risks and responsibilities has the potential to improve those processes.
Social implications
Educating for climate stewardship will be more effective if it adopts an approach which seeks a co-production of knowledge. Beginning with the foundational question of what counts as an acceptable level of climate risk offers an inclusive entry point into the debate.
Originality/value
Reveals limits to public engagement with climate policy generated by a ‘justice’ framing.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The results discussed in this paper emerged out of the ESRC-funded Climate Crunch project, which ran from May 2013 to May 2014. I am grateful to the ESRC Climate Change Leadership Fellows for their help in synthesizing the results of their fellowships. Further details of the fellowships are available at: www.esrc.ac.uk/research/major-investments/fellowships.aspx
Citation
Shaw, C. (2016), "The role of rights, risks and responsibilities in the climate justice debate", International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, Vol. 8 No. 4, pp. 505-519. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCCSM-10-2014-0127
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited