Climate Justice in an Unjust World - Learning from Transitional Justice

The list of injustices linked to the climate crisis is long. The effects of global warming directly and/or indirectly threaten just about every fundamental right people care about. Moreover, there is a clear mismatch between those agents (be they individuals, corporations, or states) most responsible for the crisis and those most likely to be worst affected by it. These vulnerabilities of the least advantaged are furthermore often the result of other injustices such as those relating to the effects of colonialism and/or an unjust global economic order. Theories of climate justice aimed at identifying what justice would require with regard to the climate crisis thus can hardly be conceived in isolation from other theories of global justice. Given reasonable disagreement about the priorities of each agent regarding each relevant sphere of justice, this is an extremely complex task. According to many, it is also a pointless task. Few – if any – of the relevant agents who could do anything effective about the crisis are willing to take on any obligations that they deem too inconvenient – no matter how well they might be justified on a moral basis. There thus is a rich literature on non-ideal climate justice engaging with proposals as to who might be asked to pick up some of the slack, what kind of institutions might result in less unjust outcomes, and how the relevant agents could be motivated, nudged, or compelled into doing more. This paper aims to contribute to the latter debates by proposing that climate justice can learn a lot from transitional justice. Transitional justice here is understood as a framework for dealing with situations characterised by Ceva and Murphy 2022 as such: there is pervasive structural inequality, normalised collective and political wrongdoing, serious existential uncertainty, and fundamental uncertainty about authority. While these conditions are usually seen to characterise (civil) wars or the aftermath of extremely unjust regimes, one can well argue that the climate crisis displays them, too. So maybe, we could learn something from the literatures about both the justice and the efficacy of different transitional justice mechanisms. These measures are designed to bring parties to the table that are not well disposed (to put it too mildly), have strong reasons to distrust each other, and certainly are reluctant to give more than they absolutely have to. More non-ideal conditions for justice can hardly be imagined. Nonetheless, there have been successes and we can hope to learn from them. As this is a normative paper, my focus will be less on the efficacy on different measures and more on justifying minimal standards of justice that even such pragmatic approaches must respect. In particular, this paper will touch on questions of accountabiltiy, reconciliation, democracy, truth, and interactive justice.