Needs, politics, and the climate crisis

The climate crisis poses a singular challenge to contemporary political systems. Responding to the unique features of that challenge, many political theorists - such as Henry Shue, Ian Gough, and Elizabeth Cripps - have turned to the concept of needs (or an analogous version of the concept of capabilities). The appeal of needs in this context follows from their apparent features - including their intuitive moral urgency and gravity; seeming independence from our cultural and political differences; and intergenerational permanence - and the way in which those features help to address the distinctive practical and normative problems posed by climate change. Moreover, needs have deep conceptual linkages to several frameworks that already possess considerable currency in the contemporary debates surrounding the climate crisis, including global and intergenerational justice, sustainability, and human rights. These needs-based approaches to climate change have tended to adopt a particular conception of needs: one that roots their importance in features of the human condition that are purported to be immutable and universal, and thus to transcend all possible contestation and forms of difference. This paper argues, however, that that conception has failed to adequately address the political nature of our needs. To do so, it distinguishes three notionally sequential political moments, showing how each of those moments problematises any attempt to determine the normative importance of needs in an evaluative space construed as lying outside of the political. There is, firstly, the politics behind needs. Because contemporary approaches focus on the needs required to survive and thrive in a given social world, they obscure questions about how that world has emerged, continues to pertain, and might be challenged and changed. Secondly, there is the politics in enacting or interpreting needs. As I show, any set of needs that is supposed to apply both cross-culturally and intergenerationally must be specified at a highly abstract level; but consequently, any attempt to deploy such needs as normative standards in concrete contexts inevitably has to navigate interminable political conflicts over exactly when, how, and in what form they appear. Finally, there is the politics following needs. Whilst contemporary theorists have tended to present needs in the form of tidily detached lists of ‘basic needs’, I argue that we must consider the broader constellation of social, economic, and political systems that arise from, and are intertwined with, those needs; systems which (paradoxically) are not necessarily very good at meeting the needs they themselves posit. Exploring those three moments, this paper shows that the failure to adequately address the politics of needs is deeply problematic: by treating needs as extra-political ‘givens’, we ossify aspects of the prevailing social and economic order in ways that rule out radical but necessary change; by neglecting the political processes surrounding needs, we discount important questions about how those processes are and should be conducted; and by disregarding ongoing conflict over needs, we endanger international cooperation over climate change. Needs-based approaches to the climate crisis must, therefore, find better ways to deal with the politics of needs.