Responsibility for climate justice: Political not moral
| Author | Michael Christopher Sardo |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885120955148 |
| Published date | 01 January 2023 |
| Date | 01 January 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
Responsibility for
climate justice:
Political not moral
Michael Christopher Sardo
Occidental College, USA
Abstract
How should responsibility be theorized in the context of the global climate crisis? This
question is often framed through the language of distributive justice. Because of the
inequitable distribution of historical emissions, climate vulnerability, and adaptation
capacity, such considerations are necessary, but do not exhaust the question of respon-
sibility. This article argues that climate change is a structural injustice demanding a
theory of political responsibility. Agents bear responsibility not in virtue of their indi-
vidual causal contribution or capacity, but because they participate in and benefit from
the carbon-intensive structures, practices, and institutions that constitute the global
political and economic system. Agents take responsibility by engaging in collective
political action to transform these structures that generate both climate hazards and
unjust relationships of power. By incorporating distributive principles within a capacious
conception of political responsibility, this framework advances the theory and practice
of climate justice in two ways. First, adopting a relational rather than individualistic
criterion of responsibility better makes sense of how and why individuals bear respon-
sibility for a global and intergenerational injustice like climate change. Second, framing
climate justice in terms of political responsibility for unjust structural processes better
orients and motivates the political action necessary for structural transformation.
Keywords
Climate change, global justice, Iris Marion Young, political responsibility, structural
injustice
Corresponding author:
Michael Christopher Sardo, M-22, Politics Department, Occidental College, Los Angeles, California 90041-
3314, USA.
Email: msardo@oxy.edu
European Journal of Political Theory
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1474885120955148
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
2023, Vol. 22(1) 26–50
Political theorists, activists, and international organizations all agree that the
impacts of and responses to the global climate crisis raise challenging questions
of justice. As Lane (2016: 111) notes, ‘justice has been a major – perhaps the major
– focus of political theorists working on climate change’. Similarly, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasizes ‘ethical consid-
erations, and the principle of equity in particular’ (IPCC, 2018: 55). Not only is
climate change likely to ‘exacerbate poverty, particularly in countries and regions
where poverty levels are high’ (IPCC, 2018: 55), but it also exhibits a ‘triple
inequality’: despite being responsible for a significantly smaller share of accumu-
lated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the global South faces heightened vulner-
ability to climate hazards while possessing fewer material and social adaptation
resources (Roberts and Parks, 2007: 7).
However, while there is broad consensus that responses to climate change must
be just and equitable, debate continues over who bears responsibility for climate
justice and what it entails. On the one hand, because carbon emissions are embed-
ded in the political, economic, and physical structures that make up the world, any
individual’s causal responsibility for climate change is both mediated and marginal
at best. Individual mitigation or adaptation efforts are similarly mediated, mar-
ginal, and unlikely to have a significant effect, absent a broader structural trans-
formation. On the other, while the slogan ‘system change not climate change’
correctly identifies the scope of the challenge, without discrete political goals
and obligations it risks absolving individual responsibility within an anonymous
structure. In both cases, responsibility for climate justice is obscured.
In response, I argue for approaching climate justice as a question of political
responsibility, advancing two main claims. First, the climate crisis should be
understood as a structural injustice, of which mal-distributions are constitutive
but not exhaustive: the most vulnerable to climate hazards are also both dominat-
ed by and excluded from meaningful participation in global political and economic
structures built on fossil-fuel intensive practices of extraction, production, and
distribution that intensify climate change. Second, structural injustices, like climate
change, require a theory and ethic of political responsibility. In response to the
structural nature of both the harm and necessary responses to climate change, both
the criterion and object of responsibility must shift from individual to political
considerations. Individuals and groups bear political responsibility not because of
agent-based attributes – such as causal contribution or capacity – but by partici-
pating in and benefiting from the unjust structures that perpetuate climate injus-
tices. The object of political responsibility for climate change is the unjust structure
of the global political and economic order itself, rather than particular mitigation
or adaptation burdens, despite their necessity. Individuals and groups take polit-
ical responsibility, therefore, by engaging in collective political action to reform the
institutions, structures, and relationships of power to promote rather than inhibit
human flourishing.
In the course of this argument, I synthesize and advance two literatures. Firstly,
drawing on recent work on political responsibility that delinks responsibility from
27Sardo
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