Work-in-Progress Seminar Spring 2025
March, 7: Megan Blomfield (University of Sheffield): Climate Change adaptation in UK protected landscapes: alternative approaches and questions of value
In this perspective piece we consider the challenge of climate adaptation in UK protected landscapes, using the Peak District National Park as an example. We suggest that there is currently a discrepancy between, on the one hand, increasing recognition that conservation policies and objectives must be radically transformed in light of projected climate impacts and, on the other, continued efforts to preserve present, inherited conditions in UK protected landscapes. We identify some alternative management models that could help to resolve this discrepancy, noting some of their commonalities and implementation challenges. We argue that the successful adoption of such alternatives requires us to engage with difficult questions about which values protected landscapes should seek to realise, and what to do when those values come into conflict.
April, 4: Philipp Dapprich (Potsdam University): Degrowth is not what economic planning needs
Matthias Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth have recently argued that the degrowth literature needs to engage with the literature on economic planning. I am confident that this will be greatly beneficial to those working within the degrowth paradigm, as a deliberate contraction of economic activity, if it is not supposed to lead to complete disaster, would certainly require some form of economic planning. In this paper, I want to turn the question around and ask whether those of us working on economic planning also stand to benefit from taking on board key ideas from the degrowth literature. Should models of planning such as participatory planning or cybersocialism perhaps be adapted to include a deliberate shrinking of production output, material throughput, or energy usage? I will argue that the degrowth paradigm has little to contribute to how economic planning can respond to ecological challenges, as key degrowth demands are either confused or trivial. Approaches developed within the planning tradition, such as constrained optimization, offer much better tools for planning to meet ecological targets while avoiding an unnecessary focus on “degrowth”. Within this paper, I will primarily focus on climate change driven by the combustion of fossil fuels, which represents the most significant environmental challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. However, much of what I have to say can also be applied to other ecological issues, such as biodiversity loss as a result of habitat destruction.
May, 2: Jonathan Kwan (NYU Abu Dhabi): Confucian Eco-Democracy or Eco-Meritocracy?
I argue that once the ecological dimensions of Confucianism are theorized in tandem with its political commitments, democracy will be better justified than meritocracy (rule by the virtuous) on Confucian grounds. I develop a Confucian eco-democratic view that conceptualizes the demos not as an aggregate of atomistic individuals living at one point in time but as an intergenerational community constituted by (1) relationships to members in the past and future, (2) relationships to a place and its environment, and (3) social norms, traditions, and rituals (li 禮) that motivate practices of ecological stewardship. This eco-cultural intergenerational conception of the demos grounds duties of ecological sustainability as constitutively a part of (rather than in tension with or limiting) the democratic project. I respond to the Confucian eco-meritocratic objection that the Confucian political community can be conceived of as intergenerational without seeing it specifically as the demos of a democracy. Virtuous rulers, on this view, may be better than democracy at protecting the environment and servicing the Confucian political community. I defend two arguments in favor of preferring eco-democracy over eco-meritocracy on Confucian grounds: an (ecological) virtue-based argument and an epistemological argument. Once virtue is seen not merely as a moral interpersonal matter that could be adequately cultivated in non-political contexts but as a matter of virtuously relating to the complex wide-ranging ecosystems, then cultivating such ecological virtue will inevitably require democratic participation in joint political activities of environmental concern. Second, the Confucian relational epistemological picture—which emphasizes (1) epistemic humility over anthropocentric hubris, (2) harmonizing many different perspectives, (3) robust collective epistemic norms, and (4) particularist skepticism of simply applying general rules from above—gives reason to favor democratic participation from all corners of society over top-down meritocratic rule when deciding how to structure collective relationships to the environment.
June, 6: Virginia de Biasio (KCL): Injustices in Climate Policy: Assessing Responses to Environmental Risks
As climate change is set to worsen in the coming decades (IPCC, 2023), there is an urgent need to manage the environmental risks associated with it. Due to its nature and geographical incidence, climate change inevitably places higher levels of burdens onto specific individuals and communities, exacerbating existing levels of disadvantage and inability to adapt to changed environmental conditions (Schlosberg, 2007; Gardiner et al., 2010). Members of specific communities (e.g. resource-dependent communities, Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities) are often more vulnerable to environmental issues and likely to bear some among the highest costs. Instead of mitigating such an unfair distribution of risks, many policies currently promoted in democratic states to tackle climate change place additional unjustified burdens on particularly vulnerable individuals and communities. Climate policies often create so-called “risk-classes” (Curran, 2017), namely groups of individuals who are more exposed to risks as a result of policy interventions precisely aimed at managing them. This situation strains existing models of democratic risk-sharing associated with the welfare state and threatens to undermine the very foundation of democratic solidarity. This paper investigates this situation and addresses the following questions: What can we learn from current climate policies that place unjustifiable burdens on specific individual and communities? How should climate policies be drafted to respect relations of equality among citizens?
I begin by exploring three paradigmatic cases of climate mitigation, relocation, and extreme weather events: (1) the installation of windmills in the Fosen region in Norway, a region traditionally used by the Saami (Mósesdóttir, 2024); (2) the planned “managed retreat” of the population of Fairbourne in the UK, a community threatened by sea-level rise (Hilson and Arnall, 2024); (3) the management of hurricanes and floodings in the US coasts and the unequal risk exposure of vulnerable communities (Mazumder et al., 2022). I take relational egalitarianism as the background framework to discuss the normative desirability of climate policies, and I evaluate when climate policy is not justifiable to citizens of a democratic state who stand in relations of equality to each other (Anderson, 1999). I argue that allocating higher risk exposure and burdens onto specific individuals and communities is in some cases unjustifiable. Although allocating equal levels of climate risks among all citizens of a democracy is practically unfeasible, the aim should be to reach an unequal exposure to risks and harms that nevertheless respects the equal moral standing of citizens. Throughout the analysis, I adopt a capabilities-based view to evaluate the differential vulnerability of individuals and communities to climate change and their resilience (Holland, 2008; Murphy and Gardoni, 2012; Shepherd and Dissart, 2022). I apply the concept of capabilities and environmental conversion factors to assess individuals’ vulnerability to climate risks and their resilience to environmental hazards. Among other negative consequences, exposure to climate risks violates the necessary condition of living in a healthy and functioning environment (Holland, 2012; Capisani, 2021) and the ability to sustain stability in life plans (Oberdiek, 2017). As a result of this analysis, I define a threshold below which exposure to climate risks and environmental harms placed on specific individuals – who bear little or non-responsibility for causing the issue, but whose wellbeing is negatively affected – is unjustifiable.
Following the previous diagnostic analysis, the paper’s second aim is normative. I proceed to sketch a solution to the identified injustices and propose some normative guidelines for the implementation of fairer climate policies that would strengthen democratic solidarity and address social cleavages rather than enhance them. As mentioned above, although allocating equal levels of exposure to risks among all individuals is practically unfeasible, when a policy unjustifiably exposes specific individuals and communities to weightier environmental risks, it constitutes an injustice. A fair policy should first ensure that the affected individuals do not fall below a threshold of acceptable exposure. In addition, policies should strive to be equality-promoting, thus contributing to offsetting existing situations of disadvantage and inability to adapt. Although ultimately context-dependent, this second requirement might imply widening the affected communities’ participation in actual decision-making or providing potential veto powers over particularly damaging policies to structurally disadvantaged communities.