Legitimate Expectations and Just Climate Transition

If some of the most severe risks associated with anthropogenic climate change are to be avoided swift and radical social, economic, cultural and political transitions are necessary. These transitions include but are not limited to radical mitigation efforts. However, whenever such rapid and far-reaching change is required, we should carefully consider how such change is going to affect issues of justice, not just in terms of distributing the burdens associated with climate transitions (which is part of what is commonly called climate justice), but also with regard to wider issues of social and global justice (and possibly even intergenerational justice). In this paper, I will look at the issue of domestic energy transitions and investigate in which way or form our normative concern for avoiding climate risks and for protecting legitimate expectations to carry on with one’s projects and ways of living need to be balanced, as well as how this balancing act can and possibly should impact existing inequalities in the social distribution of risk, vulnerability and mitigation burdens. The first part of my paper will look to existing definitions of legitimate expectations (e.g. Buchanan 1975; Meyer and Sanklecha 2014) and explain why I take them to be problematic. I will then propose a different account of legitimate expectations, before turning my attention to the question of whether legitimate expectations should constrain our response to dangerous climate change. As my analysis will show, most legitimate expectations - while normatively certainly relevant - are not weighty enough to justify a lowering of individual or collective mitigation burdens. Instead, it seems that in those cases in which legitimate expectations initially appear particularly important, it is actually other normative concerns that justify an alternative response. Therefore, when it comes to the distribution of mitigation burdens in the context of just climate transitions, legitimate expectations pay a much smaller role than often assumed. I will end with a set of rough responses to some existing pressing policy questions, such as whether compensation is owed to employees in industries displaced by climate transitions. References: Buchanan, Allen (1975): ‘Distributive justice and legitimate expectations’. Philosophical Studies 28: 419–425. Meyer, Lukas and Pranay Sanklecha (2014): ‘How legitimate expectations matter in climate justice’. Politics, Philosophy & Economics 13 (4): 369-393.