How should responsibility be theorized in the context of the global climate crisis? This question is often framed through the language of distributive justice. Because of the inequitable distribution of historical emissions, climate vulnerability, and adaptation capacity, such considerations are necessary, but do not exhaust the question of responsibility. This article argues that climate change is a structural injustice demanding a theory of political responsibility. Agents bear responsibility not in virtue of their individual causal contribution or capacity, but because they (...) participate in and benefit from the carbon-intensive structures, practices, and institutions that constitute the global political and economic system. Agents take responsibility by engaging in collective political action to transform these structures that generate both climate hazards and unjust relationships of power. By incorporating distributive principles within a capacious conception of political responsibility, this framework advances the theory and practice of climate justice in two ways. First, adopting a relational rather than individualistic criterion of responsibility better makes sense of how and why individuals bear responsibility for a global and intergenerational injustice like climate change. Second, framing climate justice in terms of political responsibility for unjust structural processes better orients and motivates the political action necessary for structural transformation. (shrink)

Climate change goals and actions are often discussed with reference to their feasibility. However, in the climate change literature, there is no agreed upon understanding of what feasibility means. In this paper, insights from political philosophy are used to address this problem in a two-fold way. First, different uses of the term feasibility in the climate change context are critically analyzed, surfacing problematic uses that can have severe consequences for what goals or actions are considered. Second, the ‘conditional probability account (...) of feasibility’ is presented as a positive account of how feasibility should be understood in the climate change context, and applied to the case of managed retreat as an approach for adaptation to sea level rise. Together, the critical analysis and the positive proposal furthers a necessary discussion on feasibility in the context of climate change. (shrink)

How should responsibility be theorized in the context of the global climate crisis? This question is often framed through the language of distributive justice. Because of the inequitable distributi...

ABSTRACTThis paper puts forward a normative framework to differentiate between the climate-related responsibilities of different countries in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement. It offers reasons for applying the chief moral principles of ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘capacity’ to climate finance instead of climate change mitigation targets. This will provide a normative basis to realize the goal of climate change mitigation while allowing for developing and newly industrialized countries to develop economically and offer an account of the distributive principles that can (...) regulate climate finance. This is a real-world interpretation of the 1992 UNFCCC principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ that takes into account the progress accomplished at the COP21 in Paris and offers a solution to the still unsolved problem of differentiated responsibilities. This paper offers an application of this proposal to the Green Climate Fund. (shrink)