OUR RESEARCH PROJECT
Introduction
Aims and Objectives
Research Questions
Metrics
Fundamental rights-bearers
Principles of justice
The ‘Global Justice and the Environment’ project is a collaboration between Newcastle University and Oxford University and is sponsored by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project is led by Professor Simon Caney (Oxford University) and Dr. Derek Bell (Newcastle University). The project began in October 2004.
What is the project about?
Environmental issues, such as climate change, air pollution and wilderness preservation, raise important questions of global justice. For example, who should pay to protect future generations from the effects of climate change? Should there be a human right to clean air? Despite the importance of environmental issues, environmental justice has remained in the margins of philosophical discussions of global justice. In this project, we will develop and defend a theory of global justice that includes principles of environmental justice that take seriously the special features of environmental issues.
The aim of this project is to examine how environmental issues might be integrated into a theory of global justice.
The principal objectives are:
To identify and explore the special problems that environmental issues – considered
separately and collectively – pose for any theory of global justice.
To consider the ‘metrics’ of global environmental justice (i.e.,
what it is that people should have fair shares of) and how they might be reconciled
with competing metrics of global economic and social justice (e.g., welfare,
resources, primary goods).
To examine the implications of environmental issues for the question of what
entities can be rights-bearers (and duty-bearers) of global theories of justice
(i.e., is it individuals or states or peoples?).
To develop and defend principles of global environmental justice, which are
integrated into a more general theory of global justice.
To consider how duties to comply with, enforce and promote principles of global
environmental justice should be shared among individuals and institutions.
Contemporary theories of global justice have concentrated on economic and social issues. Despite their importance, environmental issues have not been integrated systematically into theories of global justice. This project will consider what global environmental justice requires and how it fits into a more general theory of global justice. Contemporary theories of global justice tend to conceive of the environment on the model of natural resources, such as oil or coal. This model does not reflect the complexity of many environmental issues (e.g., climate change, air pollution). The first objective of this project is to identify and explore those features of environmental issues that are ‘missed’ by the ‘natural resources’ model of the environment.
Among the important (overlapping and interrelated) clusters of issues that we will consider are: the scale of environmental issues and the environmental permeability of political borders; environmental goods as public goods; negative environmental goods (i.e., ‘bads’ and risks); commensurability and substitutability of environmental and other goods; the importance of space and place; connections between cultural identity and environment; temporal and intergenerational issues; dealing with complexity and uncertainty. Having identified potential problems for a theory of global justice, we will develop and consider principles of global environmental justice.
For analytical purposes, it is useful to distinguish four key elements of theories of justice corresponding to objectives 2-5.
Metrics. Contemporary discussions of distributive justice have paid much attention to the question of what should be distributed fairly. However, environmental issues raise new problems. For example: How should negative environmental goods (e.g., air pollution or the risks associated with industrial production) be included in a theory of justice? Are ideas such as ‘ecological space’ or ‘natural capital’ useful or do we need specific metrics for particular issues? If individuals or peoples disagree about the value of environmental goods (e.g., the relative value of the environmental and economic elements of ‘sustainable development’), how should those disagreements be resolved?
Fundamental rights-bearers. Theories of global justice disagree about the nature of recipients of justice (e.g., persons, states, peoples) and the fundamental structure of theories of global justice (e.g., cosmopolitan, society of states, society of peoples) Environmental issues introduce new considerations. For example: Does global ecological interdependence (e.g., climate change) support cosmopolitan arguments against state sovereignty? Does the public character of environmental goods (e.g., clean air) make an individualistic approach to global environmental justice inappropriate? Do the connections between environment and cultural identity suggest that peoples (e.g., indigenous peoples in the Amazonian rainforest) should have sovereignty over their own environments?
Principles of justice. A plausible theory of global justice should identify entitlements to environmental goods. For example: Are there any environmental human rights? Is ‘environmental equality’ a meaningful principle of global justice? Should the precautionary principle be a principle of global justice? In addition, we must also explain how principles of environmental justice are related to principles of economic and social justice. For example: Can principles of global environmental justice be derived or developed from more general theories or principles of justice (e.g., Rawls’s ‘original position’, global equality of opportunity, global difference principle, Pogge’s global resources dividend)? Are there freestanding principles of global environmental justice? How should the three pillars of ‘sustainable development’, namely, economic, social and environmental justice be prioritised or reconciled?