Social justice in the context of climate policy: systematizing the variety of inequality dimensions, social impacts, and justice principles

ABSTRACT

Several streams of research have discussed important aspects of social inequalities and justice in the context of climate, energy, and environmental issues. However, there is often a narrow focus on specific aspects, bearing the risk that tensions and trade-offs for policy are easily overlooked, and sometimes involving a loose, implicit, inconsistent, or uncritical use of the term justice. I argue to clearly separate the empirical analysis of inequalities from their normative assessment, and to adequately consider the large variety of potentially relevant inequalities as well as the variety of justice principles. In support of such an approach, this article suggests categorizations of (1) basic dimensions of social inequality in the context of climate and environment; (2) different social impacts of climate and environmental policies; and (3) different justice principles. The overall aim is to have typologies and an organizing framework at hand that help to systematically identify a broad range of inequalities which can then be discussed against different justice principles. This shall allow a better detection of intersectionality and policy trade-offs as well as broader-based normative judgments in research and in policy assessments (evaluations).

Key policy insights

• To consider social justice in the context of climate policy, it is key to acknowledge the large variety of inequalities along different dimensions and impact categories, including intersectionality and trade-offs.

• Many claims about (in)justice of a specific policy or a transition do not reflect this variety.

• Policy impact assessments and evaluations should make a clearer distinction between social change processes and human impacts. Moreover, they should focus on net impacts that account for all relevant drivers, adaptation reactions and feedback loops.

• The empirical analysis of inequalities should be separated from the normative discussion of their (in)justice implications. For a normative discussion, the wide variety of different justice principles should be acknowledged.

KEYWORDS:

• Distributional effects
• equality
• equity
• policy evaluation/feedback
• social impacts
• social justice

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the UBA funding of the empirical literature review and the fruitful discussions with the project team and the project supervisors at UBA, as well as for the valuable comments on earlier versions of this article from the reviewers and journal editor.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Keywords for impact categories (English translation of German keywords): ‘employment [effects]’, ‘income [effects]’, ‘revenues’, ‘[household] expenditure’, ‘assets’, ‘health’, ‘care work’, ‘everyday life [effects]’, ‘leisure’, ‘feelings’, ‘recognition’, ‘social status’, ‘participation’. Keywords for policy areas (English translation of German keywords): ‘environmental policy’, ‘climate policy’, ‘energy policy’, ‘energy transition’, ‘transport policy’, ‘mobility transition’, ‘urban development’, ‘resource efficiency’, ‘circular economy’, ‘nature conservation’, ‘biodiversity policy’, ‘agriculture policy’, ‘agriculture transition’, ‘chemical policy’.

2 Openness and inclusion in innovation processes is an issue addressed in studies on sustainability innovations and transitions (e.g. Smith and Seyfang, 2013).

3 ‘Desert’ can be seen as a sub-form of the proportionality principle; Miller (1999) uses the term ‘proportionality to desert’. Since desert may either refer to merit or to deserved punishment, it appears advisable to differentiate and use more precise terms such as ‘merit’ and ‘moral responsibility’. ‘Equity’ is rather an umbrella term for which different justice principles can be applied (e.g. Young, 1994), and which is often used as a synonym for justice (e.g. Müller, 2001). Some authors who use the term ‘equity’ refer to the same concept as other authors using the term ‘proportionality’ (e.g. Ringius et al., 2002 mention proportionality as ‘a defining characteristic of equity’). ‘Priority’ means that certain claim holders should be prioritised. While it is usually understood as prioriti­sing the worst off (e.g. Page, 2008; Stumpf et al., 2016, both referring to Parfit (1997)), this should be made more explicit by using clear concepts (principles) such as ‘equal outcome’ or ‘basic needs’.

4 Rawls (1971) speaks about ‘inviolable minima’, Shue (1999) about ‘adequate minimum’, Brock (2009) about the ‘minimum floor principle’ with a ‘minimum set of protections and entitlements’, Caney (2010b) about human rights as ‘moral thresholds’, Bennett et al. (2019) about ‘minimum thresholds of basic human rights’, Stumpf et al. (2015) about a ‘sufficiency threshold’. Social thresholds or foundations are also key to the concept of ‘Doughnut Economics’ (Raworth, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

Part of this work was supported by German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) [grant number 3719 16 106 0].