Justice and legitimacy as drivers of political feasibility in climate mitigation

It is commonly assumed that policies for climate mitigation, in order to be politically feasible, must also be just and/or legitimate. Though frequently repeated by scholars and politicians alike, this assumption is rarely given any deeper consideration or critical attention. This strikes us as surprising, since it is not generally the case that just and/or legitimate policies are more feasible than unjust or illegitimate ones. This paper has two objectives. The first is to clarify what the claim that justice and/or legitimacy drives political feasibility in climate mitigation may entail. By highlighting various understandings of the concepts of justice and legitimacy (e.g. sociological vs normative, domestic vs global, particular or comprehensive), we show that this claim is ambiguous and stands in need of clarification. The second objective is to take a first step towards a critical assessment of this claim. Inquiring into what may ground expectations of a correlation between political feasibility and justice/legitimacy in the site of climate mitigation specifically, we generate a set of hypotheses that could serve as basis for future empirical studies on this topic.