Editorial

This is the final issue for 2022. The first issue (volume 18, no. 1) was a special issue, Relational Theory: Feminist Approaches, Implications, and Applications, co-guest edited by Christine M. Koggel, Ami Harbin, and Jennifer J. Llewellyn. It began with an Introduction by the guest-editors followed by ten articles exploring insights and applications of relational theory. In the Editorial of the second issue (volume 18, no. 2) we welcomed Lori Keleher, who joined Eric Palmer and Christine Koggel in July 2021 and brought the editorial team up to its traditional strength of three co-editors. After introducing the research interests that Keleher brings to the journal, Issue 2 opened with an author meets critics symposium of Peter Hägel’s Billionaires in World Politics that began with an Introduction and included five contributions on the book. The second issue also included two articles from the journal’s standard refereed submissions stream.

Issue 3 contains five further refereed articles, but we begin by introducing a fourth co-editor to our editorial team. Des Gasper is Professor Emeritus of Human Development, Development Ethics and Public Policy at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands. ISS is a graduate school of international development studies within Erasmus University Rotterdam. Gasper was born in India and grew up in Britain. After his university studies in economics, international development, and public policy, at the universities of Cambridge and East Anglia, and some years in Britain and Botswana working in government and consultancy, he joined ISS in 1983 and continued there full-time through to retirement in 2019. In his first ten years with ISS, he mostly worked in and on Zimbabwe, including five years at the University of Zimbabwe. In later years his work included recurrent links in Bangladesh, India, Namibia, South Africa, and Thailand, as well as considerable lecturing elsewhere, such as in Canada, Colombia, Hungary, Japan, and the USA.

Gasper is a philosophically oriented generalist in policy studies and social studies. He brings to the journal an expertise in various areas of development ethics and global ethics, as well as competences in public policy analysis and discourse analysis, and experience in the areas of migration and climate change (https://www.eur.nl/people/des-gasper; https://iss.academia.edu/desgasper). His early work in development ethics centered on distributive justice, including with reference to land reform and international aid (e.g., ‘Ethics and the conduct of international development aid’, 1999, reprinted in Mervyn Frost (ed.), International Ethics, SAGE, 2011). In the 1990s and 2000s he worked on themes of human development and capabilities, including in studies of the contributions of Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Mahbub ul Haq. He has been a fellow of the Human Development and Capabilities Association (HDCA) since its formation in 2004, trying to connect and compare different lines of work (for example in ‘Human rights, human needs, human development, human security’, in the Ashgate Research Companion to Ethics and International Relations, ed. Patrick Hayden, Ashgate, 2009; 2^nd edition, 2016, Routledge).

On development ethics more broadly he has published a textbook (The Ethics of Development – From Economism to Human Development, Edinburgh University Press, 2004; SAGE India, 2005), a collection of key articles (Development Ethics, co-edited with Asuncion Lera St. Clair; Ashgate, 2010 and Routledge, 2017), a study of the work of Denis Goulet, and a number of textbook chapters and survey articles (e.g., ‘Development ethics – why? what? how? a formulation of the field’, Journal of Global Ethics, 8(1), 2012). Recently he edited with Lori Keleher a special issue of this journal, on Louis-Joseph Lebret, arguably the founder of modern development ethics (‘Lebret and the Projects of Économie Humaine, Integral Human Development, and Development Ethics’, vol. 17, Issue 2, 2021).

Gasper has tried to extend and amend in certain ways the types of development ethics built by Lebret, Goulet, Sen, Nussbaum, and associates. One line of work has involved use of investigative tools from discourse analysis, including for analyses of argumentation, word choice, metaphor, etc. (e.g., ‘Studying aid: some methods’, in J. Gould & H.S. Marcussen (eds.), Ethnographies of Aid – Exploring Development Texts and Encounters, International Development Studies, Roskilde University, Denmark, 2004; ‘Human development in India – comparing Sen and his competitors’, in New Frontiers of the Capability Approach, eds. F. Comim et al., Cambridge University Press, 2018). Another line of work has involved linking to research in psychology, political theory, and social policy around human needs and well-being (e.g., ‘Conceptualising human needs and wellbeing’, in Wellbeing in Developing Countries: New Approaches and Research Strategies, edited by I. Gough and J.A. MacGregor, Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Growing out of his interest in global distributive justice, Gasper has worked on various questions in global ethics, including: a way of understanding the variety of normative positions (‘Beyond the inter-national relations framework: an essay in descriptive global ethics’, Journal of Global Ethics, 1(1), 2005); editing a symposium of assessments of Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice (‘Cosmopolitanisms and the Frontiers of Justice’, Development and Change, 37(6), 2006, 1227-1334); and connecting to the framework of human (in)security analysis (‘Global ethics and human security’, in Globalization and Security: An Encyclopedia, eds. G. Honor Fagan & Ronaldo Munck, Praeger, 2009). He has been interested in work that tries to take global ethics beyond abstracted theory, in particular with reference to migration (e.g., Migration, Gender and Social Justice: Perspectives on Human Insecurity, co-edited with Thanh-Dam Truong, Jeff Handmaker, Sylvia Bergh; Springer, 2014, open-access) and to climate change and (un)sustainability (e.g., ‘Climate change – the need for a human rights agenda within a framework of shared human security’, Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences, 79(4), 2012). As a policy studies academic, he has been interested in institutions, persons, mechanisms, and processes that may promote or inhibit articulation and use of global ethics, with reference in particular to the system of international human rights, bodies within the United Nations system, the Sustainable Development Goals framework, and the potentials and obligations of universities—in papers such as ‘Progressive policy framing: Kofi Annan’s rhetorical strategy for The Global Forum on Migration and Development’, African Journal of Rhetoric, vol.3, 2011; ‘The university and sustainable human development’, in Human Development in Times of Crisis, eds. Hans-Uwe Otto et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; ‘Cultivating humanity? education and capabilities for a global ‘Great Transition”’, co-author Shanti George, in A.K. Giri (ed.) Beyond Cosmopolitanism – Towards Planetary Transformations, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018; and ‘The road to the Sustainable Development Goals: building global alliances and norms’, Journal of Global Ethics, 15(2), 2019.

In the past decade his work has centered on the longstanding United Nations theme of human (in)security, that links most of these interests (see, e.g., a survey chapter, ‘Human security’, in the Cambridge Handbook of the Capability Approach, eds. E. Chiappero-Martinetti et al., Cambridge University Press, 2020). He has tried to connect this framework to the agenda for global ethics and especially to climate change and migration (e.g.: ‘Future global ethics: environmental change, embedded ethics, evolving human identity’, Journal of Global Ethics, 10(2), 2014; and A. Bilgic, D. Gasper, C. Wilcock, ‘A necessary complement to human rights: a human security perspective on migration to Europe’: ISS Working Paper 660, https://repub.eur.nl/pub/128107, 2020). Currently he is looking at a new wave of interest in human (in)security themes, in the work of the United Nations Development Programme (‘Rethinking human development and/as human security for the Anthropocene – an analysis of the UNDP trilogy of reports 2020-2022’, International J. of Social Quality, 12(2), 2022).

Gasper has been associated with this journal from its foundation, as an advisory board member, referee, and contributor to five previous issues, including the very first. He looks forward to supporting it now as one of the core editorial team. His academic editing experience includes as editor or co-editor of twelve journal special issues or special sections and of four books. He has also been connected to the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) since the 1980s, contributing as newsletter co-editor in the late 1990s and early 2000s and as participant in several IDEA conferences, including at Aberdeen (Scotland, 1996), Chennai (India, 1997), Makerere (Uganda, 2006), San José (Costa Rica, 2014), Bordeaux (France, 2018) and Medellin (Colombia, 2022). With the range of experience that he brings to the journal, Koggel, Palmer, and Keleher are pleased to have him join the editorial team.

Two main themes can be said to cut across the five articles in this issue. The first theme, reflected in the first two articles, investigates duties in the broad sense of duties of collectives, groups, or cooperatives. The second theme, reflected in the final three articles, recommends the inclusion of the voices of the underrepresented and those ignored or not heard for achieving goals such as enhancing dialogue on global issues, addressing epistemic injustices so as to better inform policy making, and building values of solidarity and sympathy in communities. What follows outlines each of the articles.

The literature on humanitarian aid is usually focused on the duties of individuals and what they ought to provide by way of aid to those in need. In ‘Humanitarian nations’, Hupfer makes a case for thinking about humanitarian duties in terms of what donor nations ought to provide as aid to countries in need (recipients). Hupfer examines the two perspectives of donors and recipients in her account of humanitarian aid in the form of official development assistance or foreign aid between nations. She argues that in some cases donor nations may take the perspective that their humanitarian obligations rest with providing their fair share of resources and that in other cases recipient nations may have received enough when they have reached an efficiency threshold, a threshold characterized in terms of the Capabilities Approach. Clearly these are different standards, each the nexus of distinct discussions and justifications noted by Hupfer. While Hupfer allows that her account of humanitarian obligations as it applies to nations is exploratory and not exhaustive, she also claims that ‘a realistic theory of national humanitarianism must acknowledge these disparate humanitarian obligations of donor and recipient thresholds and build principles around the assumption that these two viewpoints may not conveniently overlap.’

In ‘Cooperative duties of efficiency and efficacy,’ Niels de Haan considers responsibilities that collective agents such as institutions, international organizations, and corporations may have to coordinate action for the sake of efficiency and efficacy. In addressing global moral problems or addressing aspects or parts of such problems, agents incur duties that call for cooperation in reasoning about which problems or parts to address and who should do what in determining how best to act collectively. Because global moral problems change over time and across regions, duties of justice emerge from the process of reasoning together about group agents’ cooperative duties of efficiency and efficacy. Moral agents thereby have duties to cooperate with one another if this increases their combined efficiency and/or efficacy in addressing ongoing collective moral problems. For De Haan, global justice is not only about just distribution or remedying past injustices or harms. Global justice is also about ‘striving towards what is the best institutional approach while addressing relevant issues concerning global justice in non-ideal theory.’

In the third article, ‘Oceanic cosmopolitanism: the complexity of waiting for future climate refugees’, Odin Lysaker explores the existential, legal, and natural aspects of a ‘waiting framework’ – of waiting as climate change accelerates the rise of sea levels in small, low-lying, and vulnerable island states, forcing inhabitants to flee their homes. Lysaker argues that rising sea levels will increase the number of refugees, yet these people do not have refugee status in laws and policies that fail to include the effects of natural disasters brought about by climate change. Lysaker provides a complex account of the negative implications of existential, legal, and natural impacts of waiting and suggests an ‘oceanic cosmopolitanism’ that includes the voices and experiences of ‘Indigenous Island’ residents in the global discourse on climate refugees. Lysaker introduces ‘oceanic cosmopolitanism’ to foster mutual and symmetric communicative action and practices that can raise awareness, strengthen adaptation capacities and migration preparedness, and better inform an understanding of the interplay between climate change and climate refugees.

In ‘Telling a story in a deliberation: addressing epistemic injustice and the exclusion of Indigenous groups in public decision-making’, Katarina Pitasse Fragoso argues that storytelling in the form of personal and collective narratives can decrease epistemic injustice in public decision-making that affects Indigenous communities. Fragoso begins by questioning the assumption that deliberation in public settings is or needs to be based solely on narrowly rational or argumentative modes of communication. She uses feminist insights on how narrowly rational modes of communication can generate epistemic injustices that leave some people without voice and representation in the deliberation of policies that affect them. Fragoso examines storytelling in the form of first-person or collective narratives as an alternative mode of communication that can work to include the voices of those excluded in deliberative processes. She applies these insights to argue that Indigenous forms of storytelling can play important normative and institutional roles in public deliberation by bridging the hermeneutical and testimonial gaps for those who are less heard. Fragoso ends with a case study that analyzes a local conflict involving an Indigenous tribe and a neighboring community in Brazil, explores the underlying testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, and shows storytelling in this public forum could have overcome epistemic injustice and led to better public policies.

An ideal of social harmony based on a relational understanding of the self and of sympathy for others in one’s community is often at the base of communitarian ethical theory. In ‘Circumscribing the space for disruptive emotions within an African communitarian framework’, Mary Carman considers whether ‘reactive attitudes’ – including expressions of anger and resentment that are viewed as ‘disruptive’ to harmony – can also be conducive to community. Carman sketches a helpful history of African philosophical discussions of reason and emotion and builds on Bernard Matolino’s account of ‘communitarian emotion’ in his ‘Emotion as a feature of Aristotelian eudaimoneia and African communitarianism’ (2015). Matolino’s suggestion that attunement to others is a form of human function that supports community allows Carman to argue that ‘emotion can be aligned with the capacity of reason’ and may ‘have epistemic value in directing our attention to certain evaluative features of the world around us.’ Carman argues that reactive attitudes can serve these roles, not just instrumentally, but ‘as constitutive parts of our interpersonal relationships.’ Rather than viewing these reactive attitudes and emotions as disruptive of community, Carman argues that, because they are partially constitutive of the ‘interpersonal relationships where one recognises the moral status of both oneself and of others as interconnected,’ reactive attitudes can ‘facilitate human possibilities, within a context where the community is indispensable.’