Integrating Development and Climate Change Ethics

Overview of Selected Themesand notes on next steps

Nancy Tuana, Director Rock Ethics Institute

Coupling Development and Climate

• Very poor people do less ecological harm, but also more ecological harm per unit of income, than the rest of us. Pro-poor policies and institutional arrangements entail ecological benefits. (Pogge)

• Making development more sustainable is an important strategy—integrate climate change policy into sustainable development policy (Munasinghe)

Human Rights Approach

• Move from a comparative approach to justice—justice as equality (Sachs)

– Leveling inequality• Tension with path to sustainable development

– Desire to develop to get on same level (histories of humiliation) (Sachs)

• To a noncomparative or conditional approach to justice—justice as dignity (Sachs)

– human rights (a core theme of many presentations)

– Attention to poverty—a problem at once bigger and smaller than one thinks (Pogge)

Existential Rights

• Link between sustainable development and human rights– Right to live a decent and gracious life (Sachs)– Cultivate feelings of a global moral community (Gasper)– Questioning visions of self-fulfillment through

unsustainable consumption (St. Clair)– A stronger concern with felt experience, an emphasis on

the human species as a whole, and on our shared security, insecurity, and vulnerability (Gasper)• Solastalgia (Tschakert)

Tragedy of the Commons

• The tragedy of improvement and the fact that so many are fenced outside access to food, clean water, health (Westra)

• Connections between environmental degradation and degradation of the conditions of human well-being (Westra)

Human Security

• Human security formulation a more adequate response than a human rights response in isolation (Gasper)

• Attention to being and to well-being– Not a substitute for human rights, but an

augmentation (Gasper)

• Continuum between development and adaptation

• Understand Triple Crisis (Munasinghe)

– Economic crisis– Poverty crisis – Climate crisis/chaos

Frameworks of Power• Annex 1 and Developing Countries• The vulnerable and the powerful (Sachs)

– Greater share of income and power often sought/obtained at the expense of the most vulnerable (Sachs)

• North and South – Does a Human Rights approach involve a bridge

between such divisions of power (St. Clair)

• Overcome the nation state logic• Moral imperative to stop producing poverty (Pogge)

Policy Impacts• Move away from “fair share” to “avoid harm”– Equality in tension with human rights– Human rights urges action now by all, not how to

measure how much and by whom, or not until others act (Sachs/Pogge)

• Human rights as moral claims on global institutional arrangements (Pogge)

– everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights can be fully realized (Pogge)

Ethical Analysis

• One role for ethical theorizing is articulating the goods internally, signaling them externally, and identifying parameters and constraints (Gardiner)

• Development ethics: examine, unpack, and reform conceptions such as progress, wealth, well-being and capabilities (St. Clair, Gasper)

Ethical Analysis

• MDG and use of ppps (purchasing power parities) and where you set the poverty line (Pogge)

• CBA—what counts (market), how it is counted (discounting), what is ignored (intragenerational justice), centrality of a long term growth-management intellectual framework, link between climate policy/CBA not sustainable for it ignores the production and perpetuation of poverty (Nelson)– Sustaineconomics (Munasinghe)

– Greenhouse Development Rights (Baer)

– Feminist economics (Nelson)

• Epistemologies of Ignorance (Tuana)

– Insistence of CBA for climate change but not for economic stimulus or invasion of Iraq (Nelson)

– Willful production of ignorance and doubt regarding climate change (Tuana)

Ethical Analysis

• Use ethics and activism to move in more productive directions and help to develop more systematic policy reform to go towards Making Development More Sustainable (many)

• Apply to actual arguments in a timely fashion and in a manner that has a chance of effecting dominant discourses (Brown)

– Clarify ethical issues decision makers need to consider (Brown)

– work from a deeply interdisciplinary lens (St. Clair)

Framing the Research• Focus on expert knowledge and integrated

research between philosophy, sociology of knowledge, and STS (St. Clair)

• Include overlooked knowledges– Gender (Alston, Nelson, Sachs)

– Indigenous • Avoid methodological terrorism (St. Clair)

• Integrating ethics into integrated research (St. Clair)

– ethical questions must be intrinsic part of building a new science for climate change (St. Clair)

Models for Sustainable Development

• Focus on diverse notions of prosperity (Gardiner)

• Brazil/China (Munasinghe)

• Study strategies for building resilience (Tschakert)

• Community empowerment (Tschakert)

Solutions

• Gathering diverse interests for reform. Make common cause with the rich and powerful– Hypothesis: even the rich and mighty, interested

in protecting their advantage, have an interest in the reduction of economic inequality…in the long run, they must expect more damage from manipulation efforts by other strong players than gain from their own such efforts. (Pogge)

• Capacity building

Solutions

• More nuanced views of well being may help– Capabilities as a proto-type (Gardiner)

– Studies on what in fact makes a person better off (Gardiner)

– Multiple realizability and Multi-level pluralism: recognizes large number of capabilities, allows for variability, yet mutual respect (Gardiner)

– Shifts in how we realize the good vs. cutting back on excess…allows that this may be done in more or less culturally sensitive ways (Gardiner)

Solutions• Include the experiences and knowledges of all

people, including women and indigenous peoples (Alston, Nelson, Sachs)

• Participatory research• Dynamic response capacity through anticipatory

learning (Tschakert)

• Response-ability• Social movement research• An ecological model—ecosystem sustainability

(Lemons)

Solutions

• Attend to how to motivate people, groups, and institutions (Gardiner)

– Empower individuals through price and information– Change personal habits to make sustainable the

norm (smoking)– Adapt the material and physical contexts to make

sustainable producers while empowering sustainable consumers

– Working with media to encourage

Who will motivate the motivators?

• Focus on human – Attention to basic needs– Concern for others through sympathy, attention to

interconnectedness, stress on fragility and vulnerability

– That we are embodied subjects, with a body, gender, emotions, identity, and life cycle

– Are of and in the world and are what we are through those interconnections• More than human security

Solutions

• For “green” technologies: offer a reward with payments proportional to the ecological harm their invention averts, on the condition that one sells the invention wherever needed at a price no higher than the lowest feasible marginal cost of production. (Pogge)

Solutions

• The key is to solve the problems together and to work with multiple stakeholders

• Take small steps…don’t be paralyzed• Feel with others and let the challenges that

we face unite us(Munasinghe)

• We don’t know our aim with certainty or full clarity, but we can still more forward with small steps rather than doing nothing and just theorizing

(Munasinghe)

Additional Themes

• Climate refugees—and the questions of justice, what and from whom

• Victim’s rights—the right of compensation, adequate sharing, consent, empowerment

Next Steps

• Focus on policy texts and/or major literature sources they have been based on (e.g. Nordhaus)

• Function of philosophy and ethics in the debates (what the ethical issues are and how they might be thought about)– Not applied ethics as usual

• How interdisciplinarity can function

Next Steps• Perhaps put papers from conference online (with

permissions)• Request/invite more submissions to climateethics.org• Potential special journal issue(s) from the conference

– Asun will send titles of potential journals

• COP 16– Day long side-event on the model of Development Days– Potential links through CROP to Mexico City event

• Blog on intersection of development/climate ethics• International Development Ethics Association

• International Development Ethics Association– Identify other participants for this group and for

climateethics.org– Planning conference for June 2011—headline

theme “gender justice and ???” a potential way to continue the development/climate ethics dialogue

– 2012—exploring a workshop with partners in South Asia

– Human Development-Capabilities Association link

Next Steps• Don will keep up a listserve• CROP—conference in Cuba (in Spanish)• St. Clair will investigate hosting blog on

Development/Climate Ethics (IDEA/CROP)• WUN—critical global studies St. Clair/Gender and

Climate Change Sachs and Tuana (will provide a contact at Penn State)

• Paul—journal on Sustainable policy• Two simple bibliographies CE/DE • Curricular resources • Wikipedia –glossary Paul C.

Next Steps• June 2011 Bergen International School—a course• Connect with people who tweet• Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences• UNESCO—climate ethics program• IPCC—chapter on ethics • Activism—investigate what other institutions do so

we know where to collaborate– John Lemons—nonviolent civil disobedience – Activist group out of Brazil– A good alternative to violent activists and encourage youth

Next Steps

• Clear—cap and dividend bill, Senator Cantwell• Proposed trading bills• Mexico—ethical issues raised by the various

trading regimes • Connections between climate change and

increasing militarization • Tensions mounting—constructive paths – Ecological terrorism

• Projects and links to webpages