Global climate change may result in a wide array of social and environmental harms, and this prospect has given rise to an international treaty, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Scientific uncertainties, nation state politics, and economic resistance had to be addressed before this landmark environmental agreement could be realized. However, questions remain about the foundations and core commitments of this agreement. Ellul's characterology of technique is applied to the task of building a critique of the current international (...) response to climate change and is allied to the proposition that ecological justice should guide the social response to climate change. It is argued that contemporary international efforts are directed at producing a “rational climate,” rather than a climate for ecological justice. (shrink)

To date, the concept of ecological justice, when applied to international climate change policy, has largely focused on the North-South dichotomy and has yet to be extended to Central and Eastern European countries. This article argues that current formulations of climate change policy cannot address potential issues of ecological injustice to Central and Eastern European countries. Several Central and Eastern European countries recently joined the European Union, but ecological justice discourse in the EU is shown to be underdeveloped. Although the (...) analysis argues that equal per capita emissions is a socially and ecologically useful starting point for EU climate policy, it is further argued that bringing pertinent regional concerns into the discussion can enhance efforts to realize just outcomes to the climate problem. (shrink)

«Je propose ici de comprendre cette nouvelle constellation du monde global comme la dialectique entre le tous et le personne pour expliquer ce que je désignerai, de façon métaphorique, le retour de la piraterie dans cette nouvelle ère de la globalisation.» - Daniel Innerarity.

This article aims to identify the discursive strategies of political actors and the media in their re-constructions of climate change. The analytical framework employed in this research project builds on the tradition of critical discourse analysis and has both diachronic and synchronic axes. On the one hand, by tracing the biography of the greenhouse effect as a public issue, the article will look at continuities and discontinuities in its representation and at the historically constitutive power of discourse. On the other (...) hand, the systematic comparison of representations of the problem in three British ‘quality’ newspapers – The Guardian, The Independent, and The Times – at given moments shows that there are alternatives and therefore enhances a critical examination of discursive strategies. (shrink)

Politics in the international climate regime is a balancing act between intra- and intergenerational justice; as it has to account for both the needs of developing countries and those of future generations. Following a constructivist approach; this paper argues that international climate politics are heavily dependent upon the way climate change and the appropriate behavior required to prevent it are constructed collectively. The article shows how the diffusion of norms and changing images of climate change have shifted the interests of (...) the actors under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. As a result; adaptation became more and more widely accepted as a necessary step in international climate politics in advancing the strategy of climate change avoidance. This also represents a shift from a focus on intergenerational justice as the main normative goal of the convention; to a broader aim of sustainable development that comprises both inter- and intragenerational justice. (shrink)