Canned Heat

Ethics and Politics of Global Climate Change

Marcello Di Paola,Gianfranco Pellegrino

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317559665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

Climate change is a key challenge in the contemporary world. This volume studies climate change through many lenses: politics, law, ethics, philosophy, religion, and contemporary art and culture. The essays explore alternatives for sustainable development and highlight oft-overlooked issues, such as climate change refugees and food justice. Designed as four parts, the volume: first, offers an astute diagnosis of the political and moral intricacies of climate change; second, deals specifically with topics in the political theory of climate change governance; third, focuses on the moral theory of climate change; and, finally, analyzes the specific ramifications of the climate change problem.

With contributions from experts across the world, this will be especially useful to scholars and students of climate change studies, development studies, environmental studies, politics, and ethics and philosophy. It will also interest policy-makers, social activists, governmental and non-governmental agencies, and those in media and journalism.

Part I Basic Themes: Governance, Morality and the Role of Theory

1 Climate Change, Global Governance and Democracy: Some Questions

David Held*

DOI: 10.4324/9781315734002-1

* Parts of this article are adapted revisions from David Held and Angus F. Hervey, ‘Democracy, Climate Change and Global Governance’, 2009, http://www.policy-network.net/publications_detail.aspx?ID-3406 (accessed 22 April 2013).

The paradox of our times can be stated simply — the collective issues we must grapple with are of growing cross-border extensity and intensity and, yet, the means for addressing these are weak and incomplete. Complex global processes, from the ecological to the financial, connect the fate of communities to each other across the world, yet the problem-solving capacity of the global system is in many areas not effective, accountable, or fast enough to resolve current global challenges (Hale et al. 2013). While there are a variety of reasons for the existence of these problems, at the most basic level the persistence of the paradox remains a problem of governance. In our increasingly interconnected world, no solution to global problems can be achieved by any one nation-state acting alone. Global challenges call for collective and collaborative action — something that the nations of the world have not been good at, and which they need to be much better at if these pressing issues are to be adequately tackled. The abilities of states to address critical issues at the regional and global level are handicapped by a number of structural difficulties, domestic and international, which compound the problems of generating and implementing urgent policies with respect to global goods and bads.

In particular, insufficient progress has been made in creating a sustainable framework for the management of climate change. The failure to generate a sound and effective framework for managing global climate change is one of the most serious indications of the challenges facing the multilateral order. Against the backdrop of 9/11, former British chief scientist David King has warned that the threat posed by climate change is more serious than that of terrorism (2004: 177) and Sir Nicholas Stern has referred to it as ‘the greatest market failure the world has ever seen’ (2006: xviii). In the broad view of the scientific community, climate change has the capacity to wreak havoc on the world’s diverse species, biosystems and socio-economic fabric, and the process has clearly begun.

The Limits of Global Governance

While complex global processes connect the fate of communities to each other across the world, global governance capacity is under pressure, for two reasons. First, the multilateral order, founded after the Second World War, was designed in a different era and, above all, as a set of institutions to help prevent a Third World War and consider when, and under what circumstances, war might be legitimate. Climate change does not fit readily into these priorities. Second, the extensity and intensity of the challenge of globalization sharply increases the nature of the governance capacity required.

The difficulties faced by international agencies and organizations stem from many sources including the tension between universal values and state sovereignty, built into them from their beginning. Many global political and legal developments since 1945 do not just curtail sovereignty, but support it in many ways. From the United Nations (UN) Charter to the 1992 Rio Declaration on the Environment onwards, international agreements often serve to entrench the international power structure. The division of the globe into powerful nation-states, with distinctive sets of geopolitical interests, was embedded in the articles and statutes of leading international governmental organizations (Held 1995: chs 5 and 6). Thus, the sovereign rights and prerogatives of states are frequently affirmed alongside more universal principles.

Further, the reach of contemporary regional and international law rarely comes with a commitment to establish institutions with the resources and authority to make declared universal rules, values and objectives effective. The susceptibility of the UN to the agendas of the most powerful states, the partiality of many of its enforcement operations (or lack of them altogether), the underfunding of its organizations, the continued dependency of its programmes on financial support from a few major states, and the weaknesses of the policing of many environmental regimes (regional and global) are all indicative of the disjuncture between universal principles (and aspirations) and their partial and one-sided application. Three additional deep-rooted problems need highlighting (Held 2004: ch. 6).

First, a set of problems emerges as a result of the development of globalization itself, which generates public policy problems that span the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’, and the interstate order with its clear political boundaries and lines of responsibility. There is a fundamental lack of ownership of many problems at the global level. It is far from clear which global public issues are the responsibilities of which international agencies. There is no clear division of labour among the myriad international governmental agencies; functions often overlap, mandates frequently conflict and aims and objectives too get blurred. There are a number of competing and overlapping organizations and institutions, all of which have some stake in shaping different sectors of global public policy. The institutional fragmentation and competition leads not just to the problem of intersecting jurisdictions among agencies, but also to the problem of issues falling between agencies. This latter problem is especially manifest between the global level and national governments.

A second set of difficulties relates to the inertia found in the system of international agencies — the inability of these agencies to mount collective problem-solving solutions, faced with uncertainty about lines of responsibility and frequent disagreements over objectives, means and costs. This often leads to a situation where the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of taking action. The failure to act decisively in the face of urgent global problems not only compounds the costs of dealing with these problems in the long-run, but it can also reinforce a widespread perception that these agencies are not only ineffective but unaccountable and unjust as well.

A third set relates to a democratic deficit, itself linked to two interconnected problems — the power imbalances among states as well as those between state and non-state actors in the shaping and making of global public policy (Held 2004). Multilateral bodies need to be fully representative of the states involved in them but they rarely are — having a seat at the negotiating table at a major international governmental organization or a conference does not ensure effective representation. For, even if there is parity of formal representation (a condition often lacking), it is generally the case that developed countries have large delegations equipped with extensive negotiating and technical expertise, while poorer developing countries frequently depend on one-person delegations; they even have to rely on sharing a delegate.

Underlying these institutional difficulties is the breakdown of symmetry and congruence between decision-makers and decision-takers (Held 1995: part I), which would mean that those who are significantly affected by a global good or bad should have a say in its provision or regulation — that is, the span of a good’s benefits and costs should be matched by the span of the jurisdiction in which decisions are taken about that good (Held 2004: 97–101). Yet, all too often, there is a collapse — between decision-makers and decision-takers, between decision-makers and stakeholders, and between the inputs and outputs of the decision-making process.

The Limits of Democratic Politics

The urgent challenge of climate change also poses a critical test for modern democracy. While at the level of global governance there has been a failure to generate an effective international framework for managing climate change, state level solutions are usually weak and struggle to transcend the normal push and pull of partisan politics. Modern liberal democracies suffer from a number of structural characteristics that weaken their capacity to tackle global collective action problems in general and climate change in particular. These are:

Short-termism

The electoral cycle tends to focus policy debate on short-term political gains and satisfying the median voter. The short duration of electoral cycles ensures that politicians are concerned with their own re-election, which may compromise hard policy decisions that require a great deal of political capital. It is extremely difficult for governments to impose large-scale changes on an electorate, whose votes they depend on, in order to tackle a problem whose impact will largely be felt by future generations.

Self-referring Decision-making

Democratic theory and politics builds on a notion of accountability linked to domestic constituencies. It assumes a symmetry and congruence between decision-makers and decision-takers within the boundaries of the nation-state. Any breakdown of equivalence between these parties tends not to be heavily weighed. Democratic ‘princes’ and ‘princesses’ owe their support to that most virtuous source of power — their people. The externalities or border spillover effects of the decisions they take are not their primary concern.

Interest Group Concentration

In democracies, greater interest group pluralism reduces the provision of public goods because politicians are forced to adopt policies that cater to the narrow interests of small, well-organized groups (Olson 1982). The democratic process rewards these groups and, consequently, it leads to their proliferation. In addition, strong competition among such groups leads to gridlock in public decision-making, delaying both the implementation and effectiveness of public goods provision (Midlarsky 1998).

Weak Multilateralism

Governments accountable to democratic publics often seek to avoid compliance with binding multilateral decisions if this weakens their relationship to their electorate (although there is a notable exception that occurs when strong democratic governments are able to control the multilateral game).

Concerns such as these have generated scepticism about the compatibility of democratic forms of governance with the need for drastic and urgent changes in policy required to combat climate change. The implication is that democracies are unable to meet the scale of the challenge posed by the phenomenon and that more coercive forms of government may be necessary. Such thinking finds its historical precedent in the work of the ‘eco-authoritarians’ of the 1970s, who argued that it might be difficult for democracies to constrain economic activity and population growth that results in pressures on the environment. They suggested that some aspects of democratic rule would have to be sacrificed to achieve sustainable future outcomes, since authoritarian regimes are not required to pay as much attention to citizens’ rights in order to establish effective policy in key areas (Hardin 1968; Heilbroner 1974; Ophuls 1977).

Democracy versus Autocracy

This type of argument has, however, been challenged by a body of theory arguing that there are a number of reasons why democracies, despite structural limitations, are more likely than authoritarian regimes to protect environmental quality (Holden 2002). Democracies have better access to information, with fewer restrictions on media, and greater transparency in decision-making procedures. They encourage the advance of science, which is responsible for our awareness about climate change and other forms of environmental threat in the first place (Giddens 2008: 74). Scientists and other experts are free to engage in research, exchange new evidence and travel to and obtain information from other countries. These factors make it more likely that environmental issues will be identified and placed on the political agenda as well as tackled according to appropriate measures of risk.

Moreover, concerned citizens can influence political outcomes not only through the ballot box, but through pressure groups, social movements and the free media — channels that are closed in autocracies. The presence of civil society also serves to inform the public, act as a watchdog on public agencies, and directly lobby government (Payne 1995). There are many examples of cases where environmental interest groups have been able to overwhelm business, purs...