16/05/2022

Brazilian Political Science Review

Call for Special Issue:

Climate Justice and Social Justice: Integration or Conflict?

Guest editor: Lucas Petroni

Climate change is fundamentally a normative issue. Although the increasingly accurate – and daunting – findings of the environmental sciences, the strategic interactions between local and international actors, and the legal framework for environmental policies are likely to attract public attention and academic scrutiny, the normative dimensions of environmental policies are still unavoidable. The basic institutional arrangement for climate policy is constituted by normative considerations. For example, one of the main objectives of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) is to protect current and future generations and our ecological systems from harmful but avoidable anthropogenic effects on climate. These considerations also form the conceptual core of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2022) which uses notions that are distinctively moral, such as responsibility – both for past and current emissions –, basic rights, equitable criteria for economic development, and the very idea of human vulnerability. We can certainly address climate problems without mobilizing their moral underpinnings, and in doing so we may avoid unnecessary normative talk. What we cannot do is escape the fact that our decisions will be either just or unjust and that the goal of climate and environmental politics is to somehow find a more just ecological and energetic regime for a more equitable world.

On the important premise that questions of justice are unavoidable both for the common language of environmental politics in general and for the normative criteria of climate policy in particular, theories of climate justice have attempted to analyze, evaluate, and propose justice-based arguments as an indispensable tool for climate scientists, policymakers, and climate activists. Theories of distributive justice are mainly concerned with the right distribution of burdens and benefits between concerned agents. Applied to problems of climate justice, theories of justice tend to be articulated through three separable (even though practically intertwined) sets of distributive problems: What is the just allocation of greenhouse gas emissions between countries? What is the just allocation of greenhouse gas emissions between generations? And, finally, what are the proper standards for valid claims of justice? Is it basic rights and moral duties regarding such emissions, its consequences for individual or collective welfare, their impacts in capabilities and human developing, and so forth?

However, in the last two decades we have seen scholars in this field becoming increasingly reluctant in conceiving climate justice either as a mere problem of applied ethics or an insulated field of inquiry. There is a widespread demand for the problems of climate justice and the more conventional – although still persistent – problems of social justice to be better integrated. Isolationists hold that climate justice (or environmental ethics in general) should be fended off from more encompassing – and arguably more intractable – issues of social justice, such as economic inequality, historical claims for reparations between countries, unfair international arrangements in trade and security, and the coerciveness of national-state border regimes. Integrationalists, in turn, argue that an insulated politics of climate change might not only worsen traditional instances of global injustice, but also lead to unfair consequences deriving from a high-carbon energy regime that relies heavily on the fact that the costs of climate change are highly unequal from the emission perspective.

Nowhere is the clash between isolation and integration more evident than in the place occupied by the Global South in the current climate politics. By far the poorest and more populated region of the world, the Global South’s severe poverty rates, its challenging path to economic development, and its historical obstacles to political self-determination tend to create more difficulties to solving the problem of climate justice.

How do ethics, law, and political and social theory conceive of the difficult relationship between climate and social justices? Should environmental issues in general – and climate issues in particular – be treated separately, arguably in response to the urgent stakes of disordered ecological and energetical regimes, or should they be articulated with more conventional theories of distributive justice? What does a theory of climate justice look like from the Global South? How can we balance the pressing stakes of rapid climate change with the historical claims for economic development and political reparation? How can we enforce principles of social justice in the current international arrangement for climate change, and what do past climate negotiations teach us about that?

The special issue Climate Justice and Social Justice: Integration or Conflict? aims to contribute to the normative research on climate justice by focusing on the interplay between environment/climate and social justice. It encourages contributions from a wide range of disciplines, theoretical traditions, and policy-making studies seeking to address the following issues:

1. The theoretical foundations of climate justice: how should we conceive of the unavoidable normative dimensions of climate change and its impacts on countries and individual lives? Should we aim at specialization and division or at generality and integration between social issues and climate issues?

2. The environmental stakes for the worst-off: what are the frontiers (if any) between climate justice and social justice, specially from the perspective of the most vulnerable economies, cultural regions, and social groups in the world?

3. The political agency of climate justice: what are the political and juridical venues currently available for justice-based claims and what are the main obstacles for an environmental political agency based on considerations of distributive justice?

These topics are not exhaustive but merely illustrative; articles focusing on related topics are also welcome. Articles should be submitted between May 16th and November 30th in Portuguese, English, or Spanish through the BPSR portal at https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/bpsr-scielo

Articles submitted should not have been previously published and should present their results according to the BPSR’s guidelines (https://brazilianpoliticalsciencereview.org/author-guidelines/).

Articles will be reviewed in two stages: desk review and, if accepted in the first stage, a double-blind peer review. All the rules of the BPSR’s editorial policy also apply to this special issue, including not publishing authors who have last published in the BPSR within two years of this issue. The publication will be in English and the BPSR will pay for the translation costs for articles submitted in Spanish and Portuguese. The BPSR is an open-access journal that embraces the policies of open science and does not charge for editorial processing or publication of special issues.

Questions can be sent to: bpsr@brazilianpoliticalsciencereview.org