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Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change
Abstract
Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature—which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights—would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means.
... For one, works focusing on the effectiveness of governance have difficulty accounting for the actions taken by ineffective governments to maintain legitimacy, especially those that are undemocratic and cannot appeal to democratic norms for legitimacy. Under such theories, nearly every ineffective government in world history (e.g., prior to democratic reforms that swept many parts of the world in the 19 th and 20 th centuries) was not legitimate (Mittiga 2022). While this is possibly the case (though we do not believe it to be so), such a framework limits our capacity to understand actions by political authorities to bolster their legitimacy in such settings. ...
... Before proceeding, it is worth pointing out one key difference between the Greif and Rubin (2022) framework and other frameworks proposed in the literature. Numerous works in the literature, dating back to Hobbes, view effectiveness as the path to legitimacy; the more effective an authority is at doing their job, the more legitimate they will be viewed in the eyes of their subjects (Lipset 1959;Mittiga 2022). In the Greif and Rubin (2022) framework, the focus is on shared beliefs. ...
Political legitimacy has long been recognized in the social sciences as an integral component of governance. It encourages obedience without the threat of force, thus lowering governing costs and improving the efficacy of policies. This chapter begins by overviewing the extensive literature on political legitimacy, classifying studies by whether they are based on the beliefs (regarding the legitimacy of the authority) or effectiveness (good governance is legitimate governance). Among the studies focusing on beliefs, most take legitimacy as an exogenous element of political authority. We develop a conceptual framework to study how beliefs regarding political legitimacy form endogenously and impact political power, institutions, and policies. We conclude with numerous examples from historical political economy that reveal the usefulness of this framework.
... Taiwan's environmental movement and climate actions are entangled with nationalism-which Jobin describes as "civic nationalism" (Jobin, 2021)-and Taiwan's case is an interesting case to contrast with other countries' climate nationalisms (Kashwan et al., 2022). As a young democracy that transitioned from an authoritarian regime, Taiwan offers insights into the debate on environmental authoritarianism (Mittiga, 2021). Taiwan's developmentalism legacy also speaks to emerging studies on eco-developmental states and green industrial policies (Esarey et al., 2020). ...
This focus review summarizes climate politics in Taiwan at the global, the national, and the local level. The article begins with an introduction to Taiwan's emission profile, major actors, and recent policy development. At the global level, Taiwan's unique international status has limited its responses to climate change as mostly gesture policies, but recently corporate climate actions bloomed due to pressures from the supply chains. At the national level, Taiwan's developmental state legacy has locked the country in a “high‐carbon regime” and struggled with the debate on nuclear power. Finally, at the local level, Taiwan seeks to facilitate climate actions with the principle of energy democracy, yet public participation still falls short and local land use conflicts will present enormous challenges. The article ends with a discussion on current knowledge gaps and invites future research to put Taiwan into comparative perspectives.
This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > National Climate Change Policy
... The kind of theory we need is a causal theory more than a normative theory. The latter type investigates questions relating to the priority of one norm over another-for example, when the benefits of environmental protection should take precedence over the benefits of liberal-democratic rights ( Mittiga 2022 )-whereas causal theory is concerned with the priority of cause over effect. Within this latter type of inquiry, it is common to analyze political institutions as causes and ecological conditions as effects, yielding a literature in which democracy's theoretically superior performance over autocracy has been met with only "mixed" or highly conditional empirical results (e.g., Bernauer 2013 ; Lagreid and Povitkina 2018 ;Kammerlander and Schulze 2020 ). ...
Through its potential to contribute to mass suffering, economic disruption, and social unrest, climate change poses a security threat to the constitutional identities of states (as democratic, autocratic, or hybrid regimes). This paper proposes a conceptual framework of mediated causality for climatic impacts on constitutional identity and engages in novel theory-building for one mediating vector of change: the post-fossil energy transition. Theories of the “oil curse” and of “carbon democracy” are compared and critiqued for their contributions to understanding the potential impacts of decarbonized energy systems on democracy. Two counterintuitive conclusions emerge. First, transitioning away from petroleum may not result in increased democratization, as the oil curse implies. Second, post-fossil energy systems are unlikely to become structurally decentralized, as advocates of “energy democracy” suppose, and may even need to remain centralized in order for popular mobilization around energy to help maintain or reinvigorate democratic rights.
... 51 As Mittiga has argued, in emerging crisis situations, social standards of what is broadly accepted as legitimate may change. 52 In this scenario, politically legitimated climate emergency claims would usher in more dramatic decarbonization in ways that would maintain the legitimacy-stability nexus as well as the ecological conditions for the stability of political order in the longer run. However, the larger point emerging from the above two scenarios is that sooner or later, as Christoff has put it, all states will become 'climate states' because responding to climate change 'will become our collective overriding preoccupation, for better or worse'. ...
Conventional accounts of the relationship between international order and justice treat order as necessarily prior to justice because it is a precondition for the management of conflict and for collective debates about justice. This contribution takes the climate change challenge as an opportunity to challenge and enlarge this account from the perspective of critical political ecology. This approach highlights the more fundamental socio-ecological conditions that are necessary for the stability and possibility of political order itself. It also directs more systematic attention to how orders themselves disorder the climate in ways that also constitute climate injustices. Structurally generated injustices of this kind cannot be addressed solely at the level of a single regime (via the Paris Agreement). They also require a transformation of the constitutive norms and practices of the international liberal economic order in which the climate regime is embedded so that the order serves the objectives and principles of the regime. However, this is unlikely, and the contribution reflects on the implications for the legitimacy and functional viability of states and the international order in a heating world.
... Recently, the question of whether 'authoritarian environmentalism' can be considered to be an alternative to 'democratic environmentalism' has raised scholarly attention. 60 One argument is that an authoritarian approach is needed to take drastic measures and respond to the crisis more effectively. 61 A closer empirical survey of China's implementation of climate policy will certainly enrich a theoretical discussion that has severe, irreversible and large-scale socio-political impacts. ...
... This finding challenges the existing mainstream political economy community's research on the causal relationship between policy quality and state capacity. Current scholars generally agree that in authoritarian (mostly developing) countries, COVID-19 improvements in health policy quality strengthen state capacity (109,110). However, in developing countries with relative political instability, our on forming and implementing policies that support the di usion of health care services throughout society ( , ). ...
The design and implementation of public health policy may shape state innovation capacity with governance effectiveness, political stability, and government integrity. Previous studies, however, failed to incorporate these relationships simultaneously. This study aims to combine two distinct scholarships to examine whether the quality of policies in the public health sector contributes to state innovation capacity. We extracted data from the WHO international health regulatory dataset covering the WHO Member States between 2010 and 2017 to investigate the relationship ( N = 145). Our fixed-effects models and regression discontinuity design (RDD) suggest a positive impact of public health policy quality on state innovation capacity. There are several contributions to the study of the relationship between public health and innovation in this study. Firstly, it fills a theoretical void concerning the relationship between policy development and implementation in the public health sector and country-specific innovations. Second, it provides an empirical quantitative analysis of policy quality in the public health sector. Third, this study contributes evidence that public health plays an important role in fostering state innovation beyond urbanization, investment in science and technology, and foreign trade. Furthermore, our quasi-experimental evidence found that this mechanism may be significant only between the more politically stable countries and the most politically stable countries. These contributions have empirical implications for governments across the world that seek to balance public health and innovation capacity in the context of the post-pandemic era.
... Nothing in our analysis suggests that policy makers should do nothing or do not have roles to play in dealing with public health crises. Second, our model provides a unique understanding of how strongly policy makers around the world should respond to COVID-19 (Bansak et al., 2021;Mittiga, 2022). Insofar as scholars speak of policy makers doing too much or too little, a benchmark is essential for making meaningful comparisons. ...
This paper provides a framework for understanding optimal lockdowns and makes three contributions. First, it theoretically analyzes lockdown policies and argues that policy makers systematically enact too strict lockdowns because their incentives are misaligned with achieving desired ends and they cannot adapt to changing circumstances. Second, it provides a benchmark to determine how strongly policy makers in different locations should respond to COVID-19. Finally, it provides a framework for understanding how, when, and why lockdown policy is expected to change.
... Previous studies that investigated the environmental performance of democracies have found no evidence that regime type affects concern about environmental problems (Povitkina 2018;Ward 2008). Other studies have even argued that responding to the emergency of climate change may require embracing authoritarian forms of governance and that government censorship could be utilized to suppress climate change denialism (Mittiga 2021). ...
Do illiberal regimes suppress public discourse on environmental problems? We advance theory on environmental information control and test whether civil liberties have influenced the diffusion of climate change concern across 118 countries. Using a spatial model of synthetic panel data from 611,909 individuals, we find each unit change in the 7-point civil liberty index to impact climate change concern by 5 [95% CI: ±2] percentage points in the short term, a result that is robust to unobservable confounding and consistent across thousands of plausible model specifications. We find the effect to be even stronger for affluent countries, but much smaller for low-income countries and highly educated cohorts. A spatial system of seemingly unrelated regressions suggests that news coverage and protest activities could be pathways for civil liberties to influence public opinion. Our study has implications for the merits of democratic governance of climate change and for comparative public opinion formation.
This paper develops follows recent efforts in this journal to critique the concept of energy democracy by highlighting conceptual challenges of incorporating the ‘bad behavior’ of the nonliberal Other, where the bastion of ‘bad behavior’ is thought to be found in “Africa”. This article highlights liberal democratic assumptions of energy democracy through a review of relevant literature emerging from political theory, postcolonial studies and indigenous studies to develop a critique of energy democracy. Doing so requires using different vocabularies for analyzing the plurality of democratic practice and experience around the world that exceed liberal democratic norms. The authors draw on two existing concepts, “sociotechnical imaginaries” (STIMs) and “credibility economies” to investigate the collective governance strategies of subaltern energy polities, which may include nonhuman beings, authoritarian politics, or corruption and violence. We develop this analysis by comparing two African nation-states–Morocco and Tanzania–to show how the states and subaltern groups do (or do not) develop STIMs related to solar power. While international governance organizations often portray Morocco as authoritarian and Tanzania as corrupt, each state differently experienced colonization and decolonization, and practices different relationships with domestic subaltern groups. Whereas low-income citizens and indigenous groups seek integration into the Moroccan state’s STIM, the Maasai in Tanzania chart their own STIM separate from the state and international development groups. The intent is not to promote democratic relativism but rather to ask scholars and international energy-access practitioners to suspend their democratic disbelief when studying energy matters in so-called nonliberal contexts.
This article examines the construction of climate change as a security threat under authoritarian political structures. Based on 55 Vietnamese government policies, strategies, laws, and action plans and building on the theoretical framework of authoritarian environmentalism, the article demonstrates that climate change is increasingly being taken seriously by the Vietnamese policymakers and that security framings play a significant role in this debate. Although the authoritarian state in Vietnam appears to be relatively independent of public preferences and is argued to rely primarily on top-down, non-participatory environmental management, it nonetheless strives to construct narratives that support its public legitimacy. Through the use of various frames such as natural resource security, water resource security, food security, and energy security, Vietnamese discourse presumes that climate change policies should bring economic benefits, which in turn provides the basis for the public security agenda and ultimately serves regime security, strengthening the legitimacy and resilience of the Communist Party of Vietnam. These findings indicate that development and security discourses in the area of climate policy actively interact and perpetuate each other, highlighting an important feature of emerging state environmentalism in Vietnam.
We defend a scalar theory of the relationship between material scarcity and justice. As scarcity increases beyond a specified threshold, we argue that deontological egalitarian constraints should be gradually relaxed and consequentialist considerations should increasingly determine distributions. We construct this theory by taking a bottom-up approach that is guided by principles of medical triage. Armed with this theory, we consider the range of conditions under which justice (of any form) applies. We argue that there are compelling reasons for thinking that justice applies under a far broader range of conditions than is standardly supposed, including those that could sensibly be labelled as conditions of extreme rather than moderate scarcity.
Emergency Powers of International Organizations explores emergency politics of international organizations (IOs). It studies cases in which, based on justifications of exceptional necessity, IOs expand their authority, increase executive discretion, and interfere with the rights of their rule-addressees. This ''IO exceptionalism'' is observable in crisis responses of a diverse set of institutions including the United Nations Security Council, the European Union, and the World Health Organization.
Through six in-depth case studies, the book analyzes the institutional dynamics unfolding in the wake of the assumption of emergency powers by IOs. Sometimes, the exceptional competencies become normalized in the IOs' authority structures (the ''ratchet effect"). In other cases, IO emergency powers provoke a backlash that eventually reverses or contains the expansions of authority (the "rollback effect"). To explain these variable outcomes, this book draws on sociological institutionalism to develop a proportionality theory of IO emergency powers. It contends that ratchets and rollbacks are a function of actors' ability to justify or contest emergency powers as (dis)proportionate. The claim that the distribution of rhetorical power is decisive for the institutional outcome is tested against alternative rational institutionalist explanations that focus on institutional design and the distribution of institutional power among states. The proportionality theory holds across the cases studied in this book and clearly outcompetes the alternative accounts. Against the background of the empirical analysis, the book moreover provides a critical normative reflection on the (anti) constitutional effects of IO exceptionalism and highlights a potential connection between authoritarian traits in global governance and the system's current legitimacy crisis.
This open access volume is the first comprehensive assessment of the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region. It comprises important scientific research on the social, economic, and environmental pillars of sustainable mountain development and will serve as a basis for evidence-based decision-making to safeguard the environment and advance people’s well-being. The compiled content is based on the collective knowledge of over 300 leading researchers, experts and policymakers, brought together by the Hindu Kush Himalayan Monitoring and Assessment Programme (HIMAP) under the coordination of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). This assessment was conducted between 2013 and 2017 as the first of a series of monitoring and assessment reports, under the guidance of the HIMAP Steering Committee: Eklabya Sharma (ICIMOD), Atiq Raman (Bangladesh), Yuba Raj Khatiwada (Nepal), Linxiu Zhang (China), Surendra Pratap Singh (India), Tandong Yao (China) and David Molden (ICIMOD and Chair of the HIMAP SC).
This First HKH Assessment Report consists of 16 chapters, which comprehensively assess the current state of knowledge of the HKH region, increase the understanding of various drivers of change and their impacts, address critical data gaps and develop a set of evidence-based and actionable policy solutions and recommendations. These are linked to nine mountain priorities for the mountains and people of the HKH consistent with the Sustainable Development Goals.
This book is a must-read for policy makers, academics and students interested in this important region and an essentially important resource for contributors to global assessments such as the IPCC reports.
Exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a major global health concern. Quantitative estimates of attributable mortality are based on disease-specific hazard ratio models that incorporate risk information from multiple PM2.5 sources (outdoor and indoor air pollution from use of solid fuels and secondhand and active smoking), requiring assumptions about equivalent exposure and toxicity. We relax these contentious assumptions by constructing a PM2.5-mortality hazard ratio function based only on cohort studies of outdoor air pollution that covers the global exposure range. We modeled the shape of the association between PM2.5 and nonaccidental mortality using data from 41 cohorts from 16 countries-the Global Exposure Mortality Model (GEMM). We then constructed GEMMs for five specific causes of death examined by the global burden of disease (GBD). The GEMM predicts 8.9 million [95% confidence interval (CI): 7.5-10.3] deaths in 2015, a figure 30% larger than that predicted by the sum of deaths among the five specific causes (6.9; 95% CI: 4.9-8.5) and 120% larger than the risk function used in the GBD (4.0; 95% CI: 3.3-4.8). Differences between the GEMM and GBD risk functions are larger for a 20% reduction in concentrations, with the GEMM predicting 220% higher excess deaths. These results suggest that PM2.5 exposure may be related to additional causes of death than the five considered by the GBD and that incorporation of risk information from other, nonoutdoor, particle sources leads to underestimation of disease burden, especially at higher concentrations.
Previous research has shown that democracies exhibit stronger commitments to mitigate climate change and, generally, emit less carbon dioxide than non-democratic regimes. However, there remains much unexplained variation in how democratic regimes perform in this regard. Here it is argued that the benefits of democracy for climate change mitigation are limited in the presence of widespread corruption that reduces the capacity of democratic governments to reach climate targets and reduce CO2 emissions. Using a sample of 144 countries over 1970–2011, the previously established relationship between the amount of countries’ CO2 emissions and their level of democracy is revisited. It is empirically tested whether this relationship is instead moderated by the levels of corruption. The results indicate that more democracy is only associated with lower CO2 emissions in low-corruption contexts. If corruption is high, democracies do not seem to do better than authoritarian regimes.
The rapid economic development of Singapore has been attributed to its plan-rational technocratic elite, according to the developmental state model. However, few studies have addressed the impacts of the country’s deeply entrenched developmental state tradition on its environment and environmental governance. This article establishes the nexus between these two by examining Singapore’s transition into a garden city. It demonstrates how the Singaporean government has maintained a top-down, nonparticipatory approach to policy making in line with the postulations of authoritarian environmentalism and how this mode of governance is related to the developmental state legacy. While Singapore’s environmental policy resulted in its international reputation as a model green city with a remarkable expansion of green spaces and infrastructure, these outputs signify the results of the developmental state’s deliberate planning and management based on a utilitarian view toward nature rather than on the outcomes of an organic and comprehensive transition to a green society.
Are established economic, social and political practices capable of dealing with the combined crises of climate change and the global economic system? Will falling back on the wisdoms that contributed to the crisis help us to find ways forward or simply reconfigure risk in another guise? This volume argues that the combination of global environmental change and global economic restructuring require a rethinking of the priorities, processes and underlying values that shape contemporary development aspirations and policy. This volume brings together leading scholars to address these questions from several disciplinary perspectives: environmental sociology, human geography, international development, systems thinking, political sciences, philosophy, economics and policy/ management science. The book is divided into four parts that examine contemporary development discourses and practices. It bridges geographical and disciplinary divides, and includes chapters on innovative governance that confront unsustainable economic and environmental relations in both developing and developed contexts. It emphasises the ways in which dominant development paths have necessarily forced a separation of individuals from nature, but also from society and even from 'self '. These three levels of alienation each form a thread that runs through the book. There are different levels and opportunities for a transition towards resilience, raising questions surrounding identity, governance and ecological management. This places resilience at the heart of the contemporary crisis of capitalism, and speaks to the relationship between the increasingly global forms of economic development and the difficulties in framing solutions to the environmental problems that carbon-based development brings in its wake. Existing social science can help in not only identifying the challenges but also potential pathways for making change locally and in wider political, economic and cultural systems, but it must do so by identifying transitions out of carbon dependency and the kinds of political challenges they imply for reflexive individuals and alternative community approaches to human security and well-being. Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism contains contributions from leading scholars to produce a rich and cohesive set of arguments, from a range of theoretical and empirical viewpoints. It analyses the problem of resilience under existing circumstances, but also goes beyond this to seek ways in which resilience can provide a better pathway and template for a more sustainable future. This volume will be of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Human Geography, Environmental Policy and Politics.
We review the emerging literature on climate and conflict. We consider multiple types of human conflict, including both interpersonal conflict, such as assault and murder, and intergroup conflict, including riots and civil war. We discuss key methodological issues in estimating causal relationships and largely focus on natural experiments that exploit variation in climate over time. Using a hierarchical meta-analysis that allows us to both estimate the mean effect and quantify the degree of variability across 55 studies, we find that deviations from moderate temperatures and precipitation patterns systematically increase conflict risk. Contemporaneous temperature has the largest average impact, with each 1σ increase in temperature increasing interpersonal conflict by 2.4% and intergroup conflict by 11.3%. We conclude by highlighting research priorities, including a better understanding of the mechanisms linking climate to conflict, societies' ability to adapt to climatic changes, and the likely impacts of future global warming.
Minimalists about human rights hold that a state can have political legitimacy if it protects a basic list of rights and democratic rights do not have to be on that list. In this paper, I consider two arguments from Benhabib against the minimalist view. The first is that a political community cannot be said to have self-determination, which minimalists take to be the value at the heart of legitimacy, without democracy. The second is that even the human rights protections minimalists take to legitimize institutions cannot be had without democracy. These rights can only be adequately interpreted and specified for any social context if the interpretations and specifications result from democratic processes. Here, I bring out some important problems with these arguments and so conclude that they do not represent a robust case for rejecting minimalism.
Global warming is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of droughts in the twenty-first century, but the relative contributions from changes in moisture supply (precipitation) versus evaporative demand (potential evapotranspiration; PET) have not been comprehensively assessed. Using output from a suite of general circulation model (GCM) simulations from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, projected twenty-first century drying and wetting trends are investigated using two offline indices of surface moisture balance: the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI). PDSI and SPEI projections using precipitation and Penman-Monteith based PET changes from the GCMs generally agree, showing robust cross-model drying in western North America, Central America, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, and the Amazon and robust wetting occurring in the Northern Hemisphere high latitudes and east Africa (PDSI only). The SPEI is more sensitive to PET changes than the PDSI, especially in arid regions such as the Sahara and Middle East. Regional drying and wetting patterns largely mirror the spatially heterogeneous response of precipitation in the models, although drying in the PDSI and SPEI calculations extends beyond the regions of reduced precipitation. This expansion of drying areas is attributed to globally widespread increases in PET, caused by increases in surface net radiation and the vapor pressure deficit. Increased PET not only intensifies drying in areas where precipitation is already reduced, it also drives areas into drought that would otherwise experience little drying or even wetting from precipitation trends alone. This PET amplification effect is largest in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, and is especially pronounced in western North America, Europe, and southeast China. Compared to PDSI projections using precipitation changes only, the projections incorporating both precipitation and PET changes increase the percentage of global land area projected to experience at least moderate drying (PDSI standard deviation of ≤-1) by the end of the twenty-first century from 12 to 30 %. PET induced moderate drying is even more severe in the SPEI projections (SPEI standard deviation of ≤-1; 11 to 44 %), although this is likely less meaningful because much of the PET induced drying in the SPEI occurs in the aforementioned arid regions. Integrated accounting of both the supply and demand sides of the surface moisture balance is therefore critical for characterizing the full range of projected drought risks tied to increasing greenhouse gases and associated warming of the climate system.
The burning of fossil fuels – especially coal, petrol, and diesel – is a major source of airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5), and a key contributor to the global burden of mortality and disease. Previous risk assessments have examined the health response to total PM2.5, not just PM2.5 from fossil fuel combustion, and have used a concentration-response function with limited support from the literature and data at both high and low concentrations. This assessment examines mortality associated with PM2.5 from only fossil fuel combustion, making use of a recent meta-analysis of newer studies with a wider range of exposure. We also estimated mortality due to lower respiratory infections (LRI) among children under the age of five in the Americas and Europe, regions for which we have reliable data on the relative risk of this health outcome from PM2.5 exposure. We used the chemical transport model GEOS-Chem to estimate global exposure levels to fossil-fuel related PM2.5 in 2012. Relative risks of mortality were modeled using functions that link long-term exposure to PM2.5 and mortality, incorporating nonlinearity in the concentration response. We estimate a global total of 10.2 (95% CI: -47.1 to 17.0) million premature deaths annually attributable to the fossil-fuel component of PM2.5. The greatest mortality impact is estimated over regions with substantial fossil fuel related PM2.5, notably China (3.9 million), India (2.5 million) and parts of eastern US, Europe and Southeast Asia. The estimate for China predates substantial decline in fossil fuel emissions and decreases to 2.4 million premature deaths due to 43.7% reduction in fossil fuel PM2.5 from 2012 to 2018 bringing the global total to 8.7 (95% CI: -1.8 to 14.0) million premature deaths. We also estimated excess annual deaths due to LRI in children (0-4 years old) of 876 in North America, 747 in South America, and 605 in Europe. This study demonstrates that the fossil fuel component of PM2.5 contributes a large mortality burden. The steeper concentration-response function slope at lower concentrations leads to larger estimates than previously found in Europe and North America, and the slower drop-off in slope at higher concentrations results in larger estimates in Asia. Fossil fuel combustion can be more readily controlled than other sources and precursors of PM2.5 such as dust or wildfire smoke, so this is a clear message to policymakers and stakeholders to further incentivize a shift to clean sources of energy.
The aim of this chapter is to provide an epistemological argument for why public reasons matter for political legitimacy. A key feature of the public reason conception of legitimacy is that political decisions must be justified to the citizens. They must be justified in terms of reasons that are either shared qua reasons or that, while not shared qua reasons, support the same political decision. Call the relevant reasons public reasons. Critics of the public reason conception, by contrast, argue that political legitimacy requires justification simpliciter—political decisions must be justified in terms of the reasons that apply. Call the relevant reasons objective reasons. The debate between defenders and critics of a public reason conception of political legitimacy thus focuses on whether objective reasons or public reasons are the right basis for the justification of political decisions. I will grant to critics of a public reason conception that there are objective reasons and allow that such reasons can affect the legitimacy of political decisions. But I will show, focusing on the epistemic circumstances of political decision-making, that it does not follow that the justification of those decisions is necessarily in terms of those reasons.
In times of climate change and public debt, a concern for intergenerational justice should lead us to have a closer look at theories of intergenerational justice. It should also press us to come up with institutional design proposals to change the decision-making world that surrounds us. This book focuses on institutional proposals aimed at taking the interests of future generations more seriously. It does so from the perspective of applied political philosophy, being explicit about the underlying normative choices and open to the latest developments in the social sciences. It provides citizens, activists, firms, charities, public authorities, policy-analysts, students, and academics with the body of knowledge necessary to understand what out institutional options are and what they entail if we are concerned about today’s excessive short-termism. After two introductory chapters, four general chapters provide analytical tools needed to look at any type of future-sensitive institutional proposal. This part includes chapters on theories of intergenerational justice, on approaches to measuring intergenerational transfers, on whether claiming to represent future generations or invoking violations of generational sovereignty can make sense. The rest of the book includes eighteen chapters, each of them focusing on a specific proposal. Eight proposals are about future-focused institutions, i.e. bodies for which rendering policy more future-oriented is the main or exclusive purpose. The other ten chapters consider various ways in which institutions that are not specialized in future-oriented policy can nevertheless become more future-sensitive.
A growing body of research illuminates the role that changes in climate have had on violent conflict and social instability in the recent past. Across a diversity of contexts, high temperatures and irregular rainfall have been causally linked to a range of conflict outcomes. These findings can be paired with climate model output to generate projections of the impact future climate change may have on conflicts such as crime and civil war. However, there are large degrees of uncertainty in such projections, arising from (i) the statistical uncertainty involved in regression analysis, (ii) divergent climate model predictions, and (iii) the unknown ability of human societies to adapt to future climate change. In this article, we review the empirical evidence of the climate-conflict relationship, provide insight into the likely extent and feasibility of adaptation to climate change as it pertains to human conflict, and discuss new methods that can be used to provide projections that capture these three sources of uncertainty.
By statute, the Department of Defense (DOD) is required, by Section 118, Title 10, U.S. Code, to submit to Congress a report based on its most recent Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) process, no later than the President submits his budget request for Fiscal Year 2015. The "2014 QDR" review process took place against the backdrop of key changes in the global strategic context, recent evolutions in U.S. strategic priorities, and a tighter fiscal context. The 2014 process also drew on a series of recent reviews and guidance documents-a 2011 DOD "comprehensive review" initially launched by Secretary of Defense Gates and continued by Secretary of Defense Panetta; the January 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance document (DSG), and the 2013 review process known as the Strategic Choices and Management Review (SCMR). Statute prescribes that DOD, in each QDR process, "delineate a national defense strategy;" determine the force structure, modernization plans, and infrastructure required to implement that strategy; and craft an associated budget plan. Statute also spells out 16 items-as well as any other matter the Secretary considers appropriate-that the QDR report must address. More broadly, a QDR process, and its associated report, may play any number of helpful roles: refining and updating defense strategic thinking; forging a shared vision within DOD of both priorities, and roles and missions; helping ensure a common view across the Executive Branch, of the role of DOD, in cooperation with other Departments and agencies, in support of broader national security strategy; facilitating Congressional oversight; communicating a sense of defense strategy to the American people, the taxpayers; and signaling intent abroad, to reassure Allies and partners and deter or dissuade potential foes. In evaluating the 2014 QDR report and current defense strategy more broadly, Congress may choose to consider a number of issues: · the role of the United States on the world stage; · changes and trajectories in the global security environment; · DOD's mission and geographic priorities; · the extent and nature for U.S. global military presence; · the extent and nature of U.S. international military partnerships; · the strategic rationale for deterrence; · the force planning construct (FPC), a shorthand statement of the number and type of missions the force is expected to be able to accomplish simultaneously, which is used to shape and size the force; · the division of labor among Military Services and components in executing the strategy; and · the nature and extent of the risks that defense strategy assumes. Congress may also wish to consider the extent of DOD's compliance with the statutory mandate for the QDR, the appropriateness of the mandate itself; and DOD's tools and approaches for crafting strategy in general.
What is the ethical basis of democracy? And what reasons do we have to go along with democratic decisions even when we disagree with them? And when do we have reason to say that we may justly ignore democratic decisions? These questions must be answered if we are to have answers to some of the most important questions facing our global community, which include whether there is a human right to democracy and whether we must attempt to spread democracy throughout the globe. This book provides a philosophical account of the moral foundations of democracy and of liberalism. It shows how democracy and basic liberal rights are grounded in the principle of public equality, which tells us that in the establishment of law and policy we must treat persons as equals in ways that they can see as being treated as equals. The principle of public equality is shown to be the fundamental principle of social justice. This account enables us to understand the nature and roles of adversarial politics and public deliberation in political life. It gives an account of the grounds of the authority of democracy. It also shows when the authority of democracy runs out. It shows how the violations of democratic and liberal rights are beyond the legitimate authority of democracy and how the creation of persistent minorities in a democratic society, and the failure to ensure a basic minimum for all persons, weaken the legitimate authority of democracy.
In an emergency, statesmen concentrate power and suspend citizens' rights. These emergency powers are ubiquitous in the crisis government of liberal democracies, but their nature and justification is poorly understood. Based on a pluralist conception of political ethics and political power, this book shows how we can avoid the dangers and confusions inherent in the norm/exception approach that dominates both historical and contemporary debate. The book shows how liberal values need never - indeed must never - be suspended, even in times of urgency. Only then can accountability remain a live possibility. But at the same time, emergency powers can sometimes be justified with reference to extra-liberal norms that also operate in times of normalcy. By emphasizing the continuity between times of normalcy and emergency, the book illuminates the norms of crisis government, broadening our understanding of liberal democratic government and of political ethics in the process.
Imagine living in the future in a world already damaged by humankind, a world where resources are insufficient to meet everyones basic needs and where a chaotic climate makes life precarious. Then imagine looking back into the past, back to our own time and assessing the ethics of the early twenty-first century. Ethics for a Broken World imagines how the future might judge us and how living in a time of global environmental degradation might utterly reshape the politics and ethics of the future. The book is presented as a series of “history of philosophy lectures given in the future, studying the classic texts from a past age of affluence, our own time. The central ethical questions of our time are shown to look very different from the perspective of a ruined world. The aim of Ethics for a Broken World is to look at our present with the benefit of hindsight to reimagine contemporary philosophy in an historical context and to highlight the contingency of our own moral and political ideals.
Climate change and justice are so closely associated that many people take it for granted that a global climate treaty should--indeed, must--directly address both issues together. But, in fact, this would be a serious mistake, one that, by dooming effective international limits on greenhouse gases, would actually make the world's poor and developing nations far worse off. This is the provocative and original argument of Climate Change Justice. Eric Posner and David Weisbach strongly favor both a climate change agreement and efforts to improve economic justice. But they make a powerful case that the best--and possibly only--way to get an effective climate treaty is to exclude measures designed to redistribute wealth or address historical wrongs against underdeveloped countries. In clear language, Climate Change Justice proposes four basic principles for designing the only kind of climate treaty that will work--a forward-looking agreement that requires every country to make greenhouse--gas reductions but still makes every country better off in its own view. This kind of treaty has the best chance of actually controlling climate change and improving the welfare of people around the world.
The impacts that governments and institutions have on environmental policy-making constitute a core concern in environmental politics. Authoritarian environmentalism (AE) presents a model of top-down, non-participatory environmental policy-making. The model, however, remains underspecified with its premises untested and its application confined to non-democratic countries. This study addresses these gaps through a case study of South Korea’s Four Major Rivers Restoration Project. The study illustrates how various path-dependent legacies from the era of the authoritarian developmental state shaped the policy context in which policymakers in democratic Korea adopted AE as its approach to environmental governance. More broadly, this case demonstrates how the relationship between a type of regime and its mode of policy-making and policy outcomes is tenuous, suggesting that environmental politics should move beyond the examination of formal institutional features to incorporate various state development trajectories to unravel the nature of their environmental politics and policy-making.
The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option. In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism. Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now. Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.
Ecologically-motivated authoritarianism flourished initially during the 1970s but largely disappeared after the decline of socialism in the late-1980s. Today, 'eco-authoritarianism' is beginning to reassert itself, this time modelled not after the Soviet Union but modern-day China.
The new eco-authoritarians denounce central planning but still suggest that governments should be granted powers that free them from subordination to citizens' rights or democratic procedures. I argue that current eco-authoritarian views do not present us with an attractive alternative to
market liberal democracy even if we take a highly pessimistic view of our shared prospects under the latter sort of regime.
Climate change presents a large, complex and seemingly intractable set of problems that are unprecedented in their scope and severity. Given that climate governance is generated and experienced internationally, effective global governance is imperative; yet current modes of governance have failed to deliver. Hayley Stevenson and John Dryzek argue that effective collective action depends crucially on questions of democratic legitimacy. Spanning topics of multilateral diplomacy, networked governance, representation, accountability, protest and participation, this book charts the failures and successes of global climate governance to offer fresh proposals for a deliberative system which would enable meaningful communication, inclusion of all affected interests, accountability and effectiveness in dealing with climate change; one of the most vexing issues of our time.
The environmental crisis has generated a variety of theories for its amelioration. The author of this article criticizes one of these theories, which he calls "neo-Hobbesian." He finds it fundamentally flawed in part because it misunderstands Hobbes and in part because its use of collective choice theory is incomplete. He concludes that the neo-Hobbesians fail to make their case and that "more benign solutions" to the problem are available.
While there is much justifiable attention to the ecological implications of global climate change, the political implications are just as important for human well‐being and social justice. We posit a basic framework by which to understand the range of political possibilities, in light of the response of global elites to climate warming and the challenges it poses to hegemonic institutional and conceptual modes of governance and accumulation. The framework also suggests some possible means through which these responses might be thwarted, and political stakes in that construction of a new hegemony—which, to avoid suggesting we know or can yet determine the form it will take, we call “climate X”.