Interconnected Justice: Accounting Cross-Border Effects of Non-State Climate Actions

The 2015 Paris Agreement enshrined the importance of a just transition that leaves no one behind. Climate change and biodiversity loss are deeply entwined with existing global patterns of social inequality, both in terms of impact distribution and crisis exacerbation. A global just transition should seek to lower emissions, ensure adaptation and resilience for all, and pursue system transformation to redress and restore existing social inequalities. In terms of international climate governance, the Paris Agreement was also significant in transposing and diversifying the responsibility to deliver the transition, from states to a range of non-state actors. Amongst them, financial institutions and multilateral corporations have often played large and complicated roles in uneven global development. Following Paris and the related shifts in economic and social governance norms, non-state actors are increasingly proclaiming to contribute to redressing this unevenness. Our paper socialises a new concept of “interconnected justice” that calls for a widened purview of how justice pursued in the transition to a low-carbon, climate resilient world. Transition activities in one locale ought to account for their (in)justice effects in another (often upstream) location. We conduct narrative analysis of industry grey literatures, elite interviews, and a systematic literature review to substantiate our analysis. To date, the scope of just transition interventions has been place-based and rightfully so; measures to ensure social equity in the transition should consider the contextual characteristics of affected communities. However, upholding multiple interpretations of justice and showing due considerations of the interconnected character of the transition itself are important for enhancing the credibility and integrity of non-state actors’ climate actions, especially those that purport to promote justice. Without this exercise in systemic thinking, there can be risks of burden shifting to other geographies that entrench existing systemic inequalities.