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The EU and global climate justice seen from the outside
... The EU, as a leading player in the 2015 Paris Agreement, has adopted inclusive policies to promote participation and justice in the global governance of climate change. Existing literature departs from the EU's dedication to normative values and positions the EU as a leading force for green norms vis-a-vis other global actors (Falkner, 2007;Lucke et al., 2021;Wunderlich, 2020). The European Green Deal, the EU's flagship project for green transition, seeks to promote a 'just and inclusive transition' approach to ensure that 'no one is left behind' in the shift to a climate-neutral economy (Eckert,202). ...
The European Union (EU), renowned as a green normative power, has adopted ambitious policies to promote a more inclusive and just approach to global climate governance. Existing research has already highlighted how excluding issues related to gender and social inequities from the European Green Deal undermines the EU’s green credentials. Yet, what is often overlooked, is that the EU’s gender- and justice-blind climate policies also perpetuate epistemic injustices, especially beyond its borders. In such contexts, the EU’s asymmetrical power allows it to prioritize its own climate goals while disregarding the unjust policies of incumbents against local climate struggles. This article, however, argues that bottom-up mechanisms can still open epistemic space for marginalized voices and local concerns and promote climate justice beyond the EU. Evidence from a local climate struggle in Muğla-Akbelen, Turkey, demonstrates that bottom-up ecofeminist activism driven by local environmental communities in collaboration with ecology advocates and experts has empowered villagers – especially women – against the hegemonic power structures and contributed to their epistemic recognition. However, despite their efforts, mining activities in the Akbelen forest have not stopped. The article also explores the structural factors that hinder the incorporation of ecofeminist viewpoints in Turkey’s policy-making process, which is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
This paper makes the case for a discursive understanding of ontological security and demonstrates the utility of such an approach in an analysis of European Parliament (EP) debates between 1990 and 2020. We argue that articulations of ontological (in)security operate through the (re)inscription of a set of metanarratives in what we call ‘discursive nodal points’. Building on an extensive analysis of EP debates over 30 years, we demonstrate that in contrast to the prevailing view of the European Union (EU) as an ‘anxious community’, at least on the political level, EU actors remain surprisingly confident in the European project. While they do invoke challenges to the EU, they see these as incentives to strengthen the integration project and often consider operating in crisis mode as an essential EU characteristic. In doing so, they draw on modernist metanarratives of progress, control, and power to construct an ontologically secure EU. We argue that the future ontological security of the EU will partly depend on allowing for more ambiguity in this modernist narrative without accepting a nationalist counter-narrative that undermines the idea of European integration.
As two major powers that are willing to lead the design and evolution of the global climate regime, the EU and China have maintained a dialogue on climate change and biodiversity while clashing over other economic and political issues. This paper investigates EU-China relations in the global climate regime by briefly analysing three main areas that are key for the global green transition: standardization, green taxonomy, and the renewables sector. The paper claims that EU-China relations in the global climate regime develop within the dialectical collaboration-competition nexus, showing moments of consensus as well as contention between the two major powers in the three selected cases.
Research on the social justice aspects of climate change adaptation is in its infancy and focuses on organising contemporary societies to cope with emergencies rather than on a long-term vision that provides predictability and resilience in the face of climate challenges. Procedural and distributive aspects of social justice are an important part of scientific advice in this area of research. The chapter will integrate, in addition to social justice aspects, the examination of the nature-education-culture trinomial, in their causal, structural and functional interdependence, in order to identify and describe the basic relationships between the three entities that could lead us to a sustainable solution to the global challenge of climate change. Finally, the chapter draws a shortlist of macro-directions of action, based on the proposed trinomial, thus it ensures that we have the capacity to be prepared to respond to the impacts of climate change based on existing resources and capabilities.KeywordsSocial justicenature–nurture–cultureClimate changeRiskCapabilitiesPredictability
Since the 1990s, the European Union has started to enter a policy area that until then had been one of the exclusive prerogatives of the nation state: the public dealing with Europe’s bloody past. Within a few years the European Parliament passed several resolutions dealing particularly with the commemoration of human rights violations that took place on the territory of the EU while the European Commission made several funding instruments available aimed at using the realm of memory as a mechanism of public sphere formation. While European efforts for transnational historical remembrance have focused almost exclusively on the Holocaust and National Socialism as well as Stalinism, the EU remains curiously quiet about the memories of imperialism and colonialism. This essay analyzes the conflictual memory constellations at the European level with the aim of explaining why European memory politics are characterized by a sustained focus on specific time periods on the one hand and amnesia on the other. By closely analyzing protocols of the European Parliament (EP), the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Council and European Council meetings using frame analysis, the essay digs deep into the complex dynamics lying at the heart of memory contests within the EU and provides a differentiated view on the ways in which memory is continuously dislocated, via resistance, consensus-making and conflict.
Concepts of ecological and environmental democracy seek to reconcile two normative ideals: ensuring environmental sustainability while safeguarding democracy. These ideals are frequently conceived as being in conflict, as democracy is perceived as too slow and cumbersome to deliver the urgent large-scale collective action needed to tackle environmental problems. Theories addressing the democracy-environment nexus can be situated on a spectrum from theories of ecological democracy that are more critical of existing liberal democratic institutions to theories of environmental democracy that call for reforming rather than radically transforming or dismantling those institutions. This article reviews theoretical and empirical scholarship on the democracy-environment nexus. We find continued theoretical and empirical diversity in the field, as well as vibrant debates on democratising global environmental politics, local material practices, and non-human representation. We argue for stronger dialogue between environmental political theory and empirical, policy-oriented research on democracy and sustainability, as well as further exploration of complementarities between ecological and environmental democracy. We identify four main areas of challenge and opportunity for theory and practice: public participation and populism; technocracy and expertise; governance across scales; and ecological rights and limits.
Youth articulations of climate change injustice are experiencing an unprecedented moment in the spotlight as, inspired by Greta Thunberg, young people around the world take to the streets demanding justice for their generation in the face of climate emergency. Formal opportunities for youth voices to be heard in environmental governance are slim, although the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) offers a rare opportunity for youth to share their perspectives as one of nine civil society constituencies: YOUNGO. Recent research in Global Environmental Change has called for empirical exploration of justice claims-making by different stakeholders to develop understanding of how justice is conceptualised and negotiated in climate change governance spaces. To date, climate justice claims from youth have not been explored in the academic literature. This paper draws upon rich, ethnographic, longitudinal data on the evolution of justice claims made by a group of youth participants in the UNFCCC to contribute to this empirical gap. In our research, a UK-based case study organisation and long-established member of YOUNGO was studied between 2015 and 2018, including observation of their participation at the 21st, 22nd and 23rd Conferences of the Parties. We find that youth participants first articulated injustices based on perceived future risks to their generation but, over time, switched to solidarity claims about injustices experienced by other groups in the present. Whilst laudable, this impedes their mandate as representatives of younger generations. We also make three theoretical contributions to environmental justice theory. First we expand participation justice theory to both the visible structures of participation (procedural justice) and the informal rules and discourses shaping participation (representation justice). Second we demonstrate the importance of both external and self-recognition for the articulation of justice claims. Third we clarify the relationship between power and justice claim-making, proposing that we must look beneath what is articulated to shed light on the exercise of ideological power that shapes the framing and claiming of justice in environmental governance spaces.
In Katowice, Poland, the 24th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP24) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) took place in December 2018. The parties adopted a rulebook for the implementation of the Paris Agreement, which was an urgent and necessary step to operationalise the climate regime that is taking effect from 2020 onwards. The COP also addressed short-term climate ambitions by finishing the Talanoa Dialogue, a platform dialogue including stakeholders from civil society for sounding out mitigation potential before 2020. The European Union (EU) and its member states are among the few global actors remaining with the means and determination to follow up on supporting the international climate agenda. Thus, in preparation of the 2019 September climate summit convened by the UN Secretary-General (UNSG), António Guterres, the EU will have to demonstrate its willingness to reduce emissions by upgrading short- and long-term targets and to support poor countries, politically and financially. The vulnerable developing countries rely on the EU and its member states as leaders and partners for the national implementation of the rulebook’s technicalities. Not least, the EU has to focus on deepening cooperation with emerging countries and on raising awareness for climate change across policy fields.
Europe, and particularly the European Union (EU), have for a long time represented a pillar and a laboratory of the liberal order. The EU’s role in the world was very much shaped around a self-understanding as a liberal democratic area which applies to its foreign policy the same liberal values that shaped its internal development. Now libera-lism is in trouble and Europe seems to be afflicted with a ‘fascination with the illiberal’ which puts the unique model of European integration at risk. This seems to be largely the result of a failure of liberalism to deliver on at least three fundamental fronts (which are also three aspects of the crisis of liberalism): economic equality and solidarity, liberal democracy and pluralism. Europe and the EU are today less egalitarian, less democratic and less open to cultural diversity. The EU, under the pressure of populist and new nationalist forces, is also more concerned for its own survival as one polity. Attempts to respond to ontological insecurities both at the EU and member state levels are leading to policies that compromise human rights and make our societies more closed and ascriptive. The result is a
Emissions of CO2 from the EU can be estimated using different system boundaries, depending on the policy question. We analyze and compare the trends in territorial emissions (1990–2016) and consumption-based emissions and emissions embodied in trade (1990–2014). We find the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008 was an important turning point. Territorial emissions were roughly stable in the years before the GFC but have since declined. Consumption-based emissions rose from 2000 to the GFC but then declined in concert with territorial emissions. A Kaya identity decomposition suggests that the main factor pushing the EU’s territorial emissions up before the GFC was a growth in GDP, balanced by constant improvements in energy and carbon intensity. The large increase in consumption-based emissions up to the GFC was mainly due to emissions from the production of imported manufactured goods, particularly from China. After the GFC, the Kaya identity decomposition suggests that lower GDP growth facilitated a sustained decrease in territorial emissions. The decline in consumption-based emissions since the GFC was partly due to decreasing territorial emissions but accelerated due to a decrease in the emissions from the production of imported products from China. Preliminary data indicates that EU CO2 emissions have increased from 2014 to 2017, with the Kaya identity decomposition suggesting the increase is due to a return to stronger GDP growth.
As a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, but also as a developing country starting from a low emissions base, India is an important actor in global climate change mitigation. However, perceptions of India vary widely, from an energy-hungry climate deal-breaker to a forerunner of a low carbon future. Developing clarity on India's energy and emissions future is challenged by the uncertainties of India's development transitions, including its pathway through a demographic and urban transition within a rapidly changing policy context. Model-based scenario analyses provide widely varying projections, in part because they make differing assumptions, often implicit, about these transitions. To address the uncertainty in India's energy and emissions future, this letter applies a novel interpretive approach to existing scenario studies. First, we make explicit the implied development, technology and policy assumptions underlying model-based analysis in order to cluster and interpret results. In a second step, we analyse India's current policy landscape and use that as a benchmark against which to judge scenario assumptions and results. Using this interpretive approach, we conclude that, based on current policies, a doubling of India's CO2 energy-related emissions from 2012 levels is a likely upper bound for its 2030 emissions and that this trajectory is consistent with meeting India's Paris emissions intensity pledge. Because of its low emissions starting point, even after a doubling, India's 2030 per capita emissions will be below today's global average and absolute emissions will be less than half of China's 2015 emissions from the same sources. The analysis of recent policy trends further suggests a lower than expected electricity demand and a faster than expected transition from coal to renewable electricity. The letter concludes by making an argument for interpretive approaches as a necessary complement to scenario analysis, particularly in rapidly changing development contexts.
The Euro, refugees, Brexit, thriving right-wing populism and time and again a lack of coherence and consistency in EU foreign policy, as in Iraq 2003 or in Libya in 2011—seem to point to the EU in crisis. The idea of normative power Europe (NPE) essentially entails that the EU has a transformative impact on international society also outside its own borders. In light of such developments, the question arises whether such a transformative impact still seems possible. Rather than dealing with all such different moments of crisis, this article focuses on an alleged EU foreign policy crisis and asks whether—as NPE sceptics argue—inconsistencies and a lack of coherence in EU foreign policy undermines the idea of a transformative agenda and thus puts NPE to crisis. This article introduces the concept of ambiguity as a particular way of studying NPE. Ambiguity in this sense is an inevitable feature of the social world—of the EU as a global actor and of processes of change. Thus, the argument is put forward that ambiguity does not necessarily impinge on the EU’s transformative agenda. Rather than being an indication of a foreign policy crisis, the ambiguous nature of the EU and resulting ambiguous policies actually do underpin the EU’s transformational potential.
This article develops an English School framework for analysing the emergence of new primary institutions in global international society, and applies this to the case of environmental stewardship. The article traces the impact that global environmentalism has had on the normative order of global international society, examines the creation of secondary institutions around this norm and identifies the ways in which these developments have become embedded in the constitution and behaviour of states. It assesses the ways in which environmental stewardship has interacted with the other primary institutions that compose global international society, changing some of the understandings and practices associated with them. The conclusions argue that environmental stewardship is likely to be a durable institution of global international society, and that it might be a harbinger of a more functional turn in its priorities.
In debates about peace most discussions of power implicitly revolve around four types: (1) the hegemonic exercise of direct power related to force; (2) relatedly, the existence and impact of structural power related to geopolitics or the global political economy; (3) the exercise of international governmentality, soft or normative power, by IOs; and (4) local agency, resistance, discursive or physical. Each of these types of power, while relational, may be exercised from different sites of legitimate authority: the international, the state, and the local, and their legitimacy is constructed via specific understandings of time and space. Each type of power and its related site of authority has implications for making peace. This paper examines in theoretical terms how types of power block, contaminate, or enable peace of various sorts.
Prior to the Nixon administration, environmental policy in the United States was rudimentary at best. Since then, it has evolved into one of the primary concerns of governmental policy from the federal to the local level. As scientific expertise on the environment rapidly developed, Americans became more aware of the growing environmental crisis that surrounded them. Practical solutions for mitigating various aspects of the crisis—air pollution, water pollution, chemical waste dumping, strip mining, and later global warming—became politically popular, and the government responded by gradually erecting a vast regulatory apparatus to address the issue. Today, politicians regard environmental policy as one of the most pressing issues they face. The Obama administration has identified the renewable energy sector as a key driver of economic growth, and Congress is in the process of passing a bill to reduce global warming that will be one of the most important environmental policy acts in decades. The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy is a work that covers all aspects of environmental policy in America. Over the past half century, America has been the world's leading emitter of global warming gases. However, environmental policy is not simply a national issue. It is a global issue, and the explosive growth of Asian countries like China and India mean that policy will have to be coordinated at the international level. The book therefore focuses not only on the U.S., but on the increasing importance of global policies and issues on American regulatory efforts. This is a topic that only grows in importance in the coming years.
Discussions of collective political actors and normativity usually refer to the greater responsibility collectives (such as the EU) enjoy when acting upon the ills of the world either because such bodies are able to pool capabilities or because they enjoy the credibility of leading by example. Following a different line of argument, this article suggests that collective securitisation poses two hitherto unacknowledged normative issues. The first concerns the question whether just (morally permissible) collective securitisation requires unanimity, or second best, majority consensus on the need for, and the means of, securitisation by the constitutive member states of the collective. The second issue is related to individual states disaggregated from collective security actors. Specifically, ought those states culpable in threat creation be more liable for bearing the financial costs of collective securitisation?
'In this important book, Franziskus von Lucke provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich account of the relationship between security and climate change. Rejecting blanket claims, he explores the cases of the US, Germany and Mexico and points to distinctive dynamics within these contexts. The book constitutes an important addition to the literature and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars of security in international relations.'
—Associate Professor Matt McDonald, University of Queensland, Australia
'In 2019, a number of states have made climate emergency declarations. It is therefore more important than ever to understand what the securitization of the climate means. Who can securitize? What security measures are likely/legitimate? And will it succeed? This carefully researched book offers answers to all of these questions. Accessibly written this is a must-read for scholars and practitioners alike.'
—Dr Rita Floyd, University of Birmingham, UK
This book provides an in-depth analysis of the securitisation of climate change in the US, Germany and Mexico and offers a rethinking of securitisation theory. Resting on a Foucauldian governmentality approach, it discusses how different climate security discourses have transformed the political handling of climate change and affected policies, practices and institutions. Going beyond the literature’s predominant focus on the global level, it gives a fine-grained examination of the political and institutional changes in different national contexts. Drawing on the governmentalisation of security, the book develops a new understanding of securitisation that focuses on the role of power. In doing so, it provides new insights into the transformative potential of linking climate change to security but also highlights the political and normative pitfalls of securitisation.
Franziskus von Lucke is a Researcher in International Relations at the University of Tübingen, Germany. His research focuses on critical security studies, climate politics, and climate justice and he has worked extensively on the securitisation of climate change. His works have appeared in Geopolitics, the Journal of International Relations and Development and in the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen.
How is arbitrary rule – dominance – to be avoided when political differentiation is on the rise in the multilevel constellation that makes up the European Union? The EU is a power-wielding entity, that, due to its democratic deficits, is an instance of arbitrary rule, which differentiation only serves to exacerbate. This article discusses which political framework prevents dominance under conditions of asymmetric and complex interdependence, and economic integration in Europe. Under these conditions, the framework of international law is deficient, as the agreements with the associated non-members – the European Economic Area Agreement (EEA) and Switzerland – document. Here dominance appears to be self-incurred but nevertheless in breach with political freedom. Another is the framework suggested by Jürgen Habermas, of a pouvoir constituant mixte. Also, this framework raises the danger of arbitrary rule, as there is a risk that the autonomy of citizens would be pre-empted by the sovereignty of their states. The article holds the framework of a regional cosmopolitan federation – a rights-based polity with a distinct territorial reach – as more promising.
Cambridge Core - Political Theory - The Morality of Security - by Rita Floyd
A challenge for the theorising of climate justice is that even when the agents whose actions are supposed to be regulated are cooperative and act in good faith, they may still disagree about how the burdens and benefits of dealing with climate change should be distributed. This article is a contribution to the formulation of a useful role for normative theorising in light of this bounded nature of climate justice. We outline a theory of pure procedural climate justice; its content, function in relation to international climate diplomacy, and justification. The theory is ‘pure' in the sense that it does not rely on an independent criterion of what are just outcomes in negotiations of climate responsibilities. Rather, it specifies procedural fairness norms, such as transparency, reciprocity and participation, which make the process of negotiation fair independently of which account of substantive climate justice happens to be correct. Such procedural fairness norms are justified in part by being expressions of an ideal of a reasonable negotiator, an ideal which itself commands respect. They are also justified as means to an effective coordinated response to dangerous climate change in virtue of their capacity to create trust, predictability and accountability.
With the 2015 Paris Agreement, global climate governance increasingly depends on domestic climate policy ambitions, also in large developing countries such as Brazil and India, which are prominent representatives for developing countries in the international climate negotiations. Although the environmental policy literature expects ministries of environment to be important drivers of domestic climate policy, studies find that the climate policy ambitions of the Brazilian and Indian environmental ministries differ considerably. With a long-term analytical approach building on historical institutionalism, this article analyses and compares the climate policy roles of the Brazilian and Indian ministries of environment. The comparative analysis finds that three factors in particular influence the environmental ministries' climate policy ambitions: first, the historical view of environmental policy as a domestic or an international issue; second, the ministry's formal role in international climate negotiations; and third, the subsequent development of institutional climate logics.
There is arguably no security crisis so great as the one that stems from climate change. For some time, the EU, rather than the US, has led the way in terms of far-ranging policies to reduce carbon emissions. But despite the fact that the EU has been able to bind itself to strong environmental norms internally, it has – up until COP21 – been a relatively weak norm entrepreneur externally when seeking to convince others, especially the US, to adopt stronger environmental policies. Why was the EU finally able to increase its influence in the lead up and at the 2015 UN summit in Paris? This article argues that while the EU’s climate diplomacy has underperformed in the past, it has been quick to adapt since the 2009 Copenhagen summit through effectively broadening its epistemic community of climate diplomats, and engaging in a process of political learning.
This chapter engages with the EU’s contribution to solidarist change in international society in two perspectives. The first part focuses on the internal dynamics of European integration, the second on the EU’s potential to induce external change in the global international society. The analyses provide two major findings: First, against the criticism that the EU would ultimately fail to pursue a transformative agenda, the EU indeed is a solidarising force in international society. Second, solidarising processes must take into account existing pluralist structures. Hence, any solidarist change does also require pluralist re-enactment to some extent.
In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.
Using policy cycle model as a heuristic, this article studies Indian, Brazilian, and South African engagement with Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) by (a) comparing NAMA policy process and (b) identifying factors driving or limiting the framework’s domestic application. India largely remained uninterested in NAMAs, Brazil aligned its domestic climate policy and NAMAs, while South Africa had a more nuanced engagement when formulating NAMAs. Four factors influenced these countries’ NAMA engagements: the level and necessity of international support, the availability of domestic policy provisions to tackle climate change, the domestic institutional capacity to coordinate interministerial functioning, and the role of individuals in the institutional apparatus. As an international climate policy framework, studying NAMA engagement provides learnings for nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement for designing the instrument, ensuring clarity on support provisions for ratcheting up ambitions, and enhancing institutional capacity, to expedite transition from policy formulation to implementation and beyond.
The rise of right-wing populism (RWP) poses a challenge for the climate agenda, as leaders and supporters tend to be climate sceptics and hostile to policy prescribing action on climate change. However, there is a surprising dearth of research that investigates the nature and causes of this association. Two kinds of explanation are considered, drawing on the literature on populism. One is termed ‘structuralist’, drawing on accounts of the roots of populism in economic and political marginalisation amongst those ‘left behind’ by globalisation and technological change. A second focuses on the ideological content of RWP, especially its antagonism between ‘the people’ and a cosmopolitan elite, with climate change and policy occupying a symbolic place in this contrast. It is argued that there are limits to the structuralist approach, and that an ideologically based explanation is more compelling. An agenda for future research on RWP and climate science and policy is proposed.
Cooperation between environmentalists, scientists, and governmental actors was a crucial driver behind Brazil's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the forest sector from 2004 onward. The same climate coalition's advocacy work to reduce emissions in the energy sector, Brazil's second-most emitting sector, has been unsuccessful. Why has climate-policy development been so different in the two sectors? Building on the advocacy coalition framework, this paper analyzes the climate coalition's role, systematically comparing how the coalition has worked to influence policy development in the two key sectors for Brazilian GHG emissions between 2003 and 2015. The paper finds that strong climate-coalition unity, unambiguous scientific knowledge, economic growth, and international pressure functioned as a constellation of factors that enhanced the climate coalition's ability to take advantage of a climate-policy window and frame deforestation as a core climate concern. The same constellation of factors was missing in the energy sector.
In the last decade of the multilateral climate negotiations, particularly in the negotiations leading up to the 2015 Paris Agreement, India questioned the need to negotiate a new legally binding instrument. Although other developing countries were also initially reluctant to negotiate a new legally binding instrument, over time their opposition fell away, and in the end, India alone remained opposed to the negotiation of a new legally binding instrument to fortify the climate change regime. Instead, India endorsed and privileged other softer forms of law, thus both triggering innovation and experimentation in law-making as well as blurring the boundaries between law, soft law, and non-law. This article examines India’s position in the last decade of the climate negotiations in relation to “legal bindingness”, exploring in particular possible reasons for India’s wariness on issues relating to “legal bindingness”.
This book considers the environmental policies that the EU employs outside its borders. Using a systematic and coherent approach to cover a range of EU activities, environmental issues, and geographical areas, it charts the EU’s attempts to shape environmental governance beyond its borders. Key questions addressed include: What environmental norms, rules and policies does the EU seek to promote outside its territory? What types of activities does the EU engage in to pursue these objectives? How successful is the EU in achieving its external environmental policy objectives? What factors explain the degree to which the EU attains its goals? The book will be of interest to students and academics as well as practitioners in governments (both inside and outside of the EU), the EU institutions, think tanks, and research institutes.
A central concept raised by the climate justice movement is climate debt. Here, the claims and warrants of the movement support for climate debt is identified through an argumentation analysis of their central manifestos. It is found that the climate debt claim is understood as primarily restorative, in the sense that the environmental space of the developing countries must be returned, “decolonized.” The damage caused by climate change also gives rise to a compensatory adaptation debt. The result is compared with an earlier study on ecological debt. Both concepts are framed within an unjust power relation between North and South, but there are differences. Ecological debt is mainly analyzed in terms of an unjust economic exploitation, which is congenial with its use as an argument for cancellation of Southern external debts; climate debt is rather seen as a violation of communal rights and territories, an argument for climate justice.
What would constitute a definitively "green" state? In this important new book, Robyn Eckersley explores what it might take to create a green democratic state as an alternative to the classical liberal democratic state, the indiscriminate growth-dependent welfare state, and the neoliberal market-focused state—seeking, she writes, "to navigate between undisciplined political imagination and pessimistic resignation to the status quo." In recent years, most environmental scholars and environmentalists have characterized the sovereign state as ineffectual and have criticized nations for perpetuating ecological destruction. Going consciously against the grain of much current thinking, this book argues that the state is still the preeminent political institution for addressing environmental problems. States remain the gatekeepers of the global order, and greening the state is a necessary step, Eckersley argues, toward greening domestic and international policy and law.
The Green State seeks to connect the moral and practical concerns of the environmental movement with contemporary theories about the state, democracy, and justice. Eckersley's proposed "critical political ecology" expands the boundaries of the moral community to include the natural environment in which the human community is embedded. This is the first book to make the vision of a "good" green state explicit, to explore the obstacles to its achievement, and to suggest practical constitutional and multilateral arrangements that could help transform the liberal democratic state into a postliberal green democratic state. Rethinking the state in light of the principles of ecological democracy ultimately casts it in a new role: that of an ecological steward and facilitator of transboundary democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously protecting its territory.
What drives the development of climate policy? Brazil, China, and India have all changed their climate policies since 2000, and single-case analyses of climate policymaking have found that all three countries have had climate coalitions working to promote climate policies. To what extent have such advocacy coalitions been able to influence national policies for climate-change mitigation, and what can explain this? Employing a new approach that combines the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) with insights from comparative environmental politics and the literature on policy windows, this paper identifies why external parameters like political economy and institutional structures are crucial for explaining the climate advocacy coalitions’ ability to seize policy windows and influence policy development. We find that the coalitions adjust their policy strategies to the influence-opportunity structures in each political context—resulting in confrontation in Brazil, cooperation in China, and a complementary role in India.
This article is a collective response to ‘Planet Politics’ by Anthony Burke et al., which was published in this journal in 2016, and billed as a ‘Manifesto from the End of IR’. We dispute this claim on the basis that rather than breaking from the discipline, the Manifesto provides a problematic global governance agenda which is dangerously authoritarian and deeply depoliticising. We substantiate this analysis in the claim that Burke et al. reproduce an already failed and discredited liberal cosmopolitan framework through the advocacy of managerialism rather than transformation; the top-down coercive approach of international law; and use of abstract modernist political categories. In the closing sections of the article, we discuss the possibility of different approaches, which, taking the Anthropocene as both an epistemological and ontological break with modernist assumptions, could take us beyond IR’s disciplinary confines.
In recent years climate change has emerged as an issue of central political importance while the EU has become a major player in international climate change politics. How can a ‘leaderless Europe’ offer leadership in international climate change politics - even in the wake of the UK’s Brexit decision? This book, which has been written by leading experts, offers a critical analysis of the EU leadership role in international climate change politics. It focuses on the main EU institutions, core EU member states and central societal actors (businesses and environmental NGOs). It also contains an external perspective of the EU’s climate change leadership role with chapters on China, India and the USA as well as Norway. Four core themes addressed in the book are: leadership, multilevel and polycentric governance, policy instruments, and the green and low carbon economy. Fundamentally, it asks why we have EU institutional actors, why certain member states and particular societal actors tried to take on a leadership role in climate change politics and how, if at all, have they managed to achieve this? This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in EU studies and politics, international relations, comparative politics and environmental politics. © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Rüdiger K.W. Wurzel, James Connelly and Duncan Liefferink.
Based on three recently published books on climate justice, this article reviews the field of climate ethics in light of developments of international climate politics. The central problem addressed is how idealised normative theories can be relevant to the political process of negotiating a just distribution of the costs and benefits of mitigating climate change. I distinguish three possible responses, that is, three kinds of non-ideal theories of climate justice: focused on (1) the injustice of some agents not doing their part; (2) the policy process and aiming to be realistic; and (3) grievances related to the transition to a clean-energy economy. The methodological discussion underpinning each response is innovative and should be of interest more generally, even though it is still underdeveloped. The practical upshot, however, is unclear: even non-ideal climate justice may be too disconnected from the fast-moving and messy climate circus.
The 2015 Paris Agreement, a product of a deeply discordant political context rife with fundamental and seemingly irresolvable differences between Parties, is an unusual Agreement. It contains a mix of hard, soft and non-obligations, the boundaries between which are blurred, but each of which plays a distinct and valuable role. This article identifies various defining elements of legal character and tabulates the core provisions of the Paris Agreement across a spectrum from those that conform most closely to hard obligations to those that are best characterized as 'non-obligations'. It explores political drivers for the carefully calibrated mix of hard, soft and non-obligations in the Paris Agreement, as well as the dynamic interplay between them, and their critical importance in delivering an agreement acceptable to all.
