Recognition Climate Justice and the Challenge of Pluralism

The last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2022) argues that, nowadays, there is more than one dimension of climate justice disputing hegemony in the political and academic paradigms. Indeed, the study highlights the existence of ‘different modes’ and 'different contexts' in which this conception is used, pointing out three analytically distinct dimensions that remain somewhat connected. These are identified as: the ‘(re)distributive dimension’ about the fair redistribution of economic burdens and benefits; the ‘procedural dimension’ about the fair design of the political processes, and finally, the ‘recognition dimension’ about a fair consideration of people’s diverse cultures and identities, with special attention given to minority perspectives. Because of this triad, the report argues that an appropriate normative conception of climate justice should be able to move within a 'multidimensional' paradigm. My article will be dedicated to the dimension of recognition in climate justice. First of all, I will reconstruct the state of art of this dimension (SCHLOSSBERG 2003, 2009; FIGUEROA 2003, 2006). More specifically, I will show how this dimension is deeply inspired by the notorious debate between redistribution-recognition introduced by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (2003) at a time when minorities pushed the grammar of social justice beyond the redistributive-economical struggles over class. As a case study, I will refer to the case of the social struggle of Brazilian indigenous people in the Amazon (KRENAK 2020, 2019; KOPENAWA & ALBERT, 2013; MENDES, 1992). Inspired by Fraser’s approach, the dimension of recognition argues that minorities not only use the idea of climate justice to address the institutional ‘maldistribution’ of resources but also the ‘misrecognition’ of their cultural identity. Here, misrecognition results from institutionalized cultural patterns that arbitrarily differentiate, subordinate, or make certain people invisible, mistreating them as equal valid claimants of justice due to their particular culture and identities. Secondly, although I agree that the works of Fraser, Schlossberg, and Figueroa are philosophical benchmarks for advancing the recognition dimension of climate justice today, providing normative tools to criticize the misrecognition of racial, gender, and ethnic minorities by background institutions, I do not believe that they take into account another fundamental issue for the recognition dimension: the question of pluralism. Since the scientific data already provides strong evidence that most of the human activity today is largely responsible for C02 emissions (particularly in industrialized societies), it is almost inevitable that people's cultures and identities should be transformed radically. However, I will argue that these cultural-identity changes cannot come at the expense of pluralism in liberal democracies.