Policies for Hope: Climate Change, Loss & Damage and Migration

The definition of L&D is often unclear and adequate responses to L&D are still to be found. Such philosophical inquiry is especially relevant in the case of climate migrants who suffer severe L&D as climate change makes their homeland uninhabitable and forces them to leave. The goal of this contribution is to provide some elements for a normative account of L&D in the case of climate migrants. A full normative account should identify 1) the harms inflicted on the climate migrants in which to ground a claim for L&D, 2) adequate (i.e. both just and feasible) policies to address those harms, and 3) agents responsible for the implementation of these policies and motivated to do so. In this paper, I will focus on items 1) and 2). My main claim is that compensation policies should be articulated with what I term “policies for hope” aimed at addressing cultural devastation as a major type of L&D. The first step of the paper identifies climate migration as the result of harms that can ground claims for L&D policies. I will examine the normative significance of how climate-induced migration violates basic human rights, cultural rights and the collective right to self-determination. A second step assesses potential responses to the different challenges presented by the different types of rights violations. As it is the most intuitive and debated solution, compensatory justice will be discussed in priority. However, even though it seems fit to address material aspects of L&D, it faces major objections with regard to cultural devastation. The alternative narrative for justice, the narrative of policies for hope will be shown to not only being a psychological disposition but also a practical orientation and a moral and political virtue.