‘Power concedes nothing without a demand’: the structural injustice of climate change

ABSTRACT

Stephen Gardiner’s A Perfect Moral Storm offers an in-depth analysis of the ethical facets of climate change. In this paper, I contend that he nonetheless overlooks an important structural layer to climate vulnerabilities and injustices because he analyzes them implicitly interactional. I argue that climate change should rather be understood as a form of structural injustice as outlined by Iris M. Young. In this reading, the unjust socio-economic structural processes that give rise to climate change, the production and consumption of fossil fuel energy, are at their core marked by (i) oppressive and dominating power relations that position agents (ii) intersecting with other structural constraints. Crucially, (iii) these structural processes arose historically, persist over time, and entrench the burden on those suffering in the future. This viewpoint improves our understanding of how the climate crisis unfolds over time in a way that augments Gardiner’s analysis. The structural approach can advance the climate justice debate both theoretically and practically.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• structural injustice
• Iris Marion Young
• perfect moral storm

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Joseph Conrad, Jamie Draper, Darrel Moellendorf, Rebecca Richards, Hanna Schübel, Henry Shue, Amadeus Ulrich, and Jonathan Wolff for their generous and excellent feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I’d also like to thank the members of the Political Theory Colloquium at Goethe University Frankfurt, convened by Darrel Moellendorf and Rainer Forst, for many productive and critical comments that helped me improve the paper in several ways. Further, I'm grateful to Ella Gierss for her editorial help. Finally, the two anonymous reviewers of CRISPP have given me immensely constructive comments and suggestions for which I am very thankful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. By 'intentionality' I mean ‘knowingly wanting to cause the outcome of my action’ to differentiate it from recklessness or negligence. I submit, simpliciter, that an agent contributing to structural injustice can intend to do x, however, many agents most likely do not intend the harmful consequence of x.

2. My analysis here draws on the work of Catherine Lu (2011, 2017).

3. Lu calls these forms of interactional wrongs within structural injustices ‘structured wrongs”, see Lu (2017, pp. 118–119). I take this form of injustice to mean that some agents still act intentionally wrong within an unjust structural process.

4. Young refers here to Gidden’s concept of structuration, i.e. the idea of structures being both constraining to and reproduced by agents. In what follows, I use structures and structural processes and background conditions synonymously. .

5. Sankaran (2021) has argued that Young’s structural injustice account, especially the case of Sandy, a single mother struggling to find an apartment, does not depend on someone benefitting from the structural processes. However, as I have tried to show here, the benefits may be indirect and unintended but some social groups still benefit in their ability to self-determination and self-development. Young’s understanding of processes where agents are positioned, I contend, renders some more privileged or powerful than others.

6. Especially in Responsibility for Justice, Young does not explicitly theorize power, as I do not develop a full conception of power here, but I rely on Young’s brief discussion of the concept in Justice and the Politics of Difference. There, it is understood as a relational dynamic happening in action. Combined with the discussion of structural processes that are reproduced through actions, I contend that we should not conclude that structures oppress or dominate but agents, see the debate between Hayward (2018) and Forst (2018). Individuals unintentionally contributing to structural injustice, therefore, do not exercise power but reproduce an unjust power relation.

7. The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Crenshaw (1991).

8. Healy et al. (2019) explicate how the supply chain for fossil fuel energy harms indigenous people and poor neighborhoods more severely than others.

9. In this paper, I side-step the questions of responsibility. However, this relation between powerful agents and less powerful agents within structural processes gives rise to differentiated responsibilities on Young’s social connection model of responsibility, see Eckersley (2016), Larrère (2018), Sardo (2020), Boscov-Ellen (2020)on this point.

10. Henry Shue offers an intriguing depiction of the political dynamics that tend to favor fossil fuel interests in which he shows that tackling climate change means tackling the power of fossil fuel companies, see Shue (2021).

11. Many states in the Global North now produce emission-intensive products in the Global South, thereby externalizing their emissions. This has become known under the heading of ‘carbon colonialism’, see, for instance, Lyons & Westoby (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lukas Sparenborg

Lukas Sparenborg is a Research Associate and Doctoral Candidate at the Chair for International Political Theory and Philosophy and the Research Centre “Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on climate and intergenerational justice, as well as theories of structural injustice and responsibility.