Ecosystem Services and Distributive Justice: Considering Access Rights to Ecosystem Services in Theories of Distributive Justice

Abstract

As the increasing loss of ecosystem services severely affects life perspectives of today's poor and future populations, governing access to, and use of, ecosystem services in an intragenerational and intergenerational just way is an urgent issue. The author argues that theories of distributive justice should consider the distribution of access rights to ecosystem services. Three specific demands that a theory of distributive justice should fulfill to adequately cope with the distribution of access rights to ecosystem services, and show that Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice” (1971) can be consistently extended to meet the identified demands.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Stefan Baumgärtner, Christian Becker, Klara Stumpf and two anonymous referees, as well as the participants of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the International Society for Environmental Ethics and the participants of the Interdisciplinary Study Days. Biodiversity—Concept and Value for critical discussion and valuable comments. Financial support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grants 01UN1011A/B is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

¹ David Schlosberg (2007) has illustrated that—while political theorists have focused on ‘justice as distribution’—activists in the environmental justice movement claim distributive justice combined with individual and social recognition, as well as participation. Still, the author focuses on the aspect of distribution in this paper.

² The MEA (2003, p. 57) divides ecosystem services into four categories: provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services. Cultural ecosystem services include among others spiritual, religious, educational and aesthetic values, sense of place and recreation.

³ Even if the assembly members would—behind the veil of ignorance—know that certain ecosystem services are vital for realizing the basic capabilities of many, but not all contract partners, they would probably decide upon distributing such ecosystem services as if these would be primary goods. As the veil of ignorance excludes all knowledge of likelihoods, only the distribution according to the difference principle would ensure them against the eventuality of lacking a good life because of the absence of certain ecosystem services.

⁴ Thomas Pogge (1989, p. 247) has argued that the same principles of justice would be decided in the global original position as in the domestic original position. There seems to be no reason, why different principles of justice should be decided in a ‘cross-generational and global’ original position.