Recognitional Justice, Climate Engineering, and the Care Approach

ABSTRACT

Given the existing inequities in climate change, any proposed climate engineering strategy to solve the climate problem must meet a high threshold for justice. In contrast to an overly thin paradigm for justice that demands only a science-based assessment of potential temperature-related benefits and harms, we argue for the importance of attention to recognitional justice. Recognitional justice, we go on to claim, calls for a different type of assessment tool. Such an assessment would pay attention to neglected considerations such as relationships, context, power, vulnerability, narrative, and affect (amongst others). Here we develop a care-ethics related tool for assessing the justice (or injustice) of climate engineering with stratospheric aerosols, and suggest that qualitative social science methods may be required for its effective application. We illustrate the use of this tool with a case study involving interviews about stratospheric aerosol injection conducted in Kenya, the Solomon Islands, and the North American Arctic. Having shown through this case study the efficacy of the care approach for spotting recognitional injustice, we suggest that a care approach is not only sensitive to the considerations that count, it can also be powerfully normative.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate Engineering
• Recognitional Justice
• Care Approach
• Vulnerable Populations
• Social Science

Disruption to established weather patterns brought on by climate change has the potential to create enormous economic – as well as non-economic – burdens (IPCC, 2014a). These burdens fall disproportionately on individuals and populations least responsible for causing them and raise serious concerns about justice (IPCC, 2014b; Shue, 2014). With climate harms increasingly evident and highly likely to escalate, preventing as many of these harms from occurring as possible is a clear moral priority for people of good conscience.

The hope of avoiding some of these injustices through intentionally engineering the climate is one of the strongest reasons in favor of pursuing what would otherwise be an outrageous attempt at a technological fix (Horton & Keith, 2016). Although not a preferred option for dealing with the harms of climate change, a number of commentators have become convinced that hoping for a better option to materialize is nothing more than a ‘pious wish’ (Crutzen, 2006). Stacked up against the extensive array of concerns levelled against climate engineering (Burns & Strauss, 2013; Gardiner, 2013, 2010; Preston, 2012), the potential to alleviate significant injustices is one of the most compelling moral arguments to take climate engineering seriously.

For many forms of climate engineering, however, there remains a heated disagreement about whether the ‘cure’ might not be worse than the ‘disease.’ A considerable amount of uncertainty remains over the immediate and the long-range impacts of such dramatic interventions into the climate system. Concerns about disruption to precipitation patterns, impacts on vegetative productivity, harmful changes in land use, and the increased likelihood of extreme weather events all haunt the discussion (Barrett et al., 2014; Ferraro, Highwood, Charlton-Perez, & Meehl et al., 2014; Ito, 2017; MacMartin, Ben Kravitz, Long, & Rasch, 2016).

In addition to these biophysical worries, concerns about the nature of the politics that might be used to legitimize these schemes compound the overall sense of uncertainty (Cairns and Stirling 2014; Hulme, 2014; Macnaghten & Szerszynski, 2013). Other commentators have expressed apprehension about the ethical visions embedded in climate engineering, arguing that the technology seems destined to profoundly impact social and political relationships as well as changing our fundamental understanding of the relationship between humans and the surrounding world (Gardiner, 2010; Hamilton 2013; Jamieson, 1996).

The international dimensions of climate engineering justice are particularly fraught. Jane Flegal and Aarti Gupta are worried that as currently framed, justifications of climate engineering as a way for wealthy nations to help the vulnerable may turn out to disempower the very groups advocates claim to be concerned about (Flegal & Gupta, 2018). With these concerns in mind, it is clear that for any type of climate engineering deployment to be morally acceptable, not only must it be just, it must be just in the relevant ways.

Taking Flegal and Gupta’s concerns about disempowerment seriously, we argue below that an important type of justice is recognitional justice and that recognitional justice requires a different set of tools for its assessment. We argue that a ‘care approach’ can provide a useful corrective to the often incomplete approaches to justice. A care approach and the qualitative methods it demands can fill out important elements of justice revolving around recognition, thereby providing a fuller moral assessment of climate engineering than some of the current discussion displays.

To make this case, we begin by highlighting how recognitional justice is often glossed over by researchers advocating for climate engineering. We go on explain why the care approach is the right tool for identifying this type of justice (and injustice). We then illustrate how qualitative social science is the appropriate method for operationalizing the care tool, drawing on a case study to illustrate our claims. The conclusion we come to is that justice in climate engineering cannot be achieved unless it is first sanctioned by the care approach.

Recognitional Justice

To identify the type of injustice that has routinely been missed by climate engineering commentators, it helps to identify the approach to climate justice which tends to dominate. Flegal and Gupta find that the ethics of climate engineering (in its research stage) is typically assessed too narrowly around ‘distributional outcomes’ and ‘comparative risk assessment’ (Flegal & Gupta, 2018, p. 49–52).

One problem with this, as advocates of climate engineering themselves acknowledge, is that predicting risks and outcomes remains scientifically problematic due to the inherent uncertainty about climate outcomes at regional levels. A bigger problem is that, even if this uncertainty was not present, the focus on distributional outcomes has arguably bent the ethics discussion too far towards a narrow quantitative cost-benefit analyses of potential physical harms that might be forestalled by the use of stratospheric aerosols. In bending the ethics this way, considerable sources of injustice can be missed.

This narrowing of the ethics is particularly evident when scientific modelling is allowed to set the direction for the ethical conversation. Horton and Keith, for example, adopt the position that the ethical implications of different responses to climate harms ‘turn on the particular distribution of benefits and harms associated with each’ (Horton & Keith, 2016, p. 81). The emphasis on the distribution of benefits and harms leads to the consideration of justice being reduced to the question of ‘are temperatures and precipitation likely to be normalized by the climate engineering strategy?’

The focus on distributional outcomes is arguably characteristic of a larger trend within political justice in recent decades. According to some critics, the distributional paradigm has taken over the justice discussion (Fraser, 2007; Honneth, 2001; Schlosberg, 2007; Young, 2006). Thinking of justice only in terms of the distribution of benefits and harms has a number of shortcomings. One of them is that this approach makes justice appear to be too much about what benefits and burdens must to be shared and not enough about how societies and cultures are structured. What David Schlosberg identifies as problematic is, ‘…the sole emphasis on distribution without an examination of the underlying causes of maldistribution’ (Schlosberg, 2013, p. 14). Looking more carefully at that those structures opens up questions of power and vulnerability that are integral to a complete picture of justice.

Critics such as Schlossberg, Frazer, and Young insist that those who seek a just society must be concerned about much more than simply the distribution of physical harms. The narrow paradigm of thinking about justice in terms of physical (or economic) harms and benefits simply misses too much. By focusing only on how physical goods and harms stack up, it fails to see both how and why the interests of certain groups have been systematically neglected throughout history. It fails to identify the underlying causes of the disproportionate burden of climate harms borne by some populations. And it fails to spot a number of less tangible, but highly significant, forms of injustice.

Taking these other considerations seriously has led to a new focus on recognition as a key accompaniment, or even a precursor, to questions of just distribution. Recognition – and its absence, misrecognition – are not only requirements for distributional justice, but also key components of justice in themselves (Schlosberg, 2007). At the core of recognition is the straightforward idea of an individual or a group being adequately acknowledged. Adequate acknowledgment means respecting and noticing people for who they are and where they are. Kyle Powys Whyte says recognition means ‘fairly representing and considering the cultures, values, and situations of all affected parties’ (Whyte, 2011, p. 200).

Although recognition and misrecognition clearly have personal and psychological components to them, Fraser thinks it important to emphasize their social and political dimensions. She places a large part of the blame for failures of recognition on the institutionalization of subordination exhibited in ‘patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication’ displayed across society (Fraser, 1999, p. 7). Groups, in other words, can be victims of recognitional injustice. The social status of particular groups is routinely diminished not just by individuals but by civic arrangements and relations. Particular kinds of oppressive social arrangements, or ‘structural injustices’ as Young has called them (Young, 2006), repeatedly create misrecognition for disadvantaged groups and the individuals within them.

Highly pertinent for this social, structural, and historical perspective, is the notion of an ‘environmental heritage’ developed by Robert Figueroa. An environmental heritage of a group is a product of a distinct and particular past and it creates ‘an environmental identity in relation to the community viewed over time’ (Figueroa, 2006, p. 371–372). This heritage frames the decisions, values, and practices of a particular group. One of the conditions for adequate recognition is whether this environmental heritage is fully taken into account. David Schlosberg affirms this by calling for ‘recognition and preservation of diverse cultures, identities, economies, and ways of knowing.’ One of the biggest threats to recognition, according to Schlosberg, is a ‘growing global monoculture’ that attempts to erase the significance of different lifeways, practices, and knowledge systems (Schlosberg, 2007, p. 86).

In sum, recognition is a key component of political justice that a narrow framing of justice in terms of physical harms and benefits neglects. On the one hand, recognition is necessary for diverse groups to participate equally in political processes and to be recipients of a fair distribution of benefits and harms. On the other hand, recognition is simply a component of justice in its own right. Ensuring recognition means working to understand the different starting assumptions, values, and knowledge practices brought to a particular situation. Gaining such an understanding requires careful attention to historical, cultural, and institutional factors. Put simply, it demands the ability to appreciate who people are, where they are coming from, and what they are saying about their situation.

A Care Based Assessment

As a relatively new component of political justice, recognition demands new frameworks for assessment. The previous emphasis on distributive elements of justice meant that policies were likely to be assessed primarily through a consequentialist lens. If a particular policy is in place, how do the resulting benefits and burdens stack up? Thinking about benefits and burdens in a certain way invariably points towards particular disciplines and approaches as being most relevant to their appraisal. Flegal and Gupta suggested that the cost-benefit frame ensures that ‘…concerns about equity are treated as empirical matters, requiring scientific assessment of feasibility, risks … distributive outcomes and optimizations’(Flegal & Gupta, 2018, p. 56). In the case of climate engineering, this means considering questions such as: What would be the temperature change? How would this change influence precipitation? What positive and negative impacts will it have on the economy? What additional risks of harm does it generate? The methods through which such questions are answered are scientific, not political or cultural. Flegal and Gupta point out that, as far as methods for assessing the justice of prospective climate engineering, ‘science is [considered] the institution most capable of steering [its] technological emergence’ (Flegal & Gupta, 2018, p. 54).

The scientific answers to questions about the distribution of the benefits and burdens are clearly important for considering the justice of any climate engineering strategy. Temperature and precipitation are important. These don’t, however, give much of a sense of whether a strategy will provide adequate recognition to a particular people. Recognitional justice requires a different type of lens through which to assess justice. Rather than relying on framings focusing on welfare-related benefits and harms, it requires a framing more sensitive to the kinds of things that recognition is all about.

It is our contention that a ‘care approach’ proves itself to be particularly appropriate for identifying recognition or misrecognition. This approach is not primarily about developing a caring attitude – though developing this attitude might help – it is about using particular lenses deemed important by care ethics theorists. For example, an interest in considering the historical circumstances that have disadvantaged certain groups, the requirement to carefully listen to marginalized voices, and the necessity of identifying the structural injustices that sustain subordination have all been hallmarks of the care approach (Held, 2006; Lindemann, 2006). Digging in a bit deeper, it is possible to identify several distinctive features of a care approach that make it a suitable lens for identifying crucial aspects of justice that have often been missed.¹

A care approach starts with a relational worldview, one that prioritizes relationships among people – and relationships between people and institutions – as much as it prioritizes people themselves. In matters of governance, a care approach will pay attention to shifts or ruptures in relationships brought about by a particular policy. It stresses the importance of sustaining and maintaining healthy relationships within social and ecological communities and is on the lookout for the creation of new relationships that might be harmful.

A care approach also recognizes that context matters. Different individuals, communities, settings, and situations have their own unique characteristics and challenges. Understanding the specifics of a situation is a shift away from generalized forms of assessment that assume uniformity or commonality across contexts. Failures of recognition will occur if it is assumed that ‘one size fits all.’ As Whyte observed, the cultures, values, and situations of people vary considerably. Taking these differences seriously is a feature of care.

Care-based approaches to ethics and politics are also sensitive to the presence of dependence in society, acknowledging that there are often asymmetries in capabilities between individuals and groups who interact with each other. The existence of dependence in a particular setting need not always be negative. Children, for example, can depend upon their parents in appropriate ways. Many of the personal and social relationships in which we participate do not start from positions of absolute equality.

A care approach will be on the lookout for how relationships of dependence might emerge from a particular policy decision. It will encourage questions about whether, for example, a particular proposal to address the climate problem will enable relationships to become more nurturing and enabling or whether it will lead them to become more dependent and limiting.

With its awareness of dependence, a care-based approach pays heed to the distribution of power and vulnerability within any network of relationships. Relationships can be empowering or disempowering. They can ameliorate or accentuate vulnerability. A care approach will scrutinize whether a particular policy proposal will improve or worsen the situation of vulnerable actors. It will investigate whether the new power dynamics created by the technology might lead to the degradation of autonomy. It will ask whether a disempowered culture will be unwillingly forced to reject their own ways of knowing and knowledge practices, something that will result in a loss of ‘espistemic self-determination’ (Werkheiser, 2017).

Unlike some ethical frameworks, a care approach recognizes that emotional reactions are a legitimate component of moral assessment. Responses to injustices can be appropriately informed (and motivated) by affective considerations. The affective component of a response to a policy proposal can sometimes say a lot about its fairness. Structural injustices wear people down. Affective responses can provide a clue about whether a policy meets the conditions of recognitional justice. A care approach recognizes emotional as well as physical harms.

Finally, a care approach embraces the useful role that narrative can play in the assessment of justice. Narratives are valuable tools for highlighting different understandings of the world and different experiences of stakeholders. Narrative is an important way for people to define and communicate their identity and to make sense of the challenges they face. Margaret Urban Walker claims that narrative illuminates ‘the location of human beings’ feelings, psychological states, needs, and understandings as nodes of a story (or of the intersection of stories) that has already begun, and will continue beyond a given juncture…’ (Walker, 2007, p. 18). Narratives are a suitable vehicle for revealing an environmental heritage at risk. Taking narratives seriously is an acknowledgment of the importance of people being able to tell (and to adequately control) their own story.

With its emphasis on relationships, context, dependence, power/vulnerability, affect, and narrative, a care approach draws attention to areas that traditional assessments of political justice have tended to bypass. By asking about more than the distribution of physical goods and harms, a care approach is highly alert to instances of misrecognition. Through its attention to narrative, it recognizes the importance of environmental heritage and how identity is created through communal practices over time. By being sensitive to power, dependency, and vulnerability it is responsive to structural injustices and the ways that subordination can be institutionalized. By focusing on relationships, a care approach is attentive to how injustices affect not just individuals but also groups and communities. By seeking out context, it is grounded in real world situations rather than abstracted ideals. A care lens pays close attention to the concrete details of how people actually live their lives. It respects what the sciences can tell us about benefits gained and physical harms averted. But it insists that these narrowly quantitative matters are not the only justice issues in play.

With a new framework for assessment in hand, it will help to consider next the methods through which this assessment lens can be operationalized. Whyte points out that recognitional justice by its nature demands different methods. These methods, he suggests, must include ‘the development of creative participatory processes…that aim as much as possible for the inclusion of …values and…particular situations into policy’ (Whyte, 2011, p. 204–205). To detect when the specter of misrecognition is approaching, qualitative research that probes the views, opinions, and concerns of those who are most vulnerable to harm is required. Marion Hourdequin expresses this need when thinking about how best to judge the losses associated with climate change.

If we are to truly recognize diverse forms of loss, it seems to me that there is no way around the time intensive work of actually listening to and trying to understand the perspectives of those who will be affected. This, inevitably, requires not just quantification but qualitative work – understanding the narratives, the world views, the conceptual frameworks of those living in particular places.²

Recognitional justice insists that quantification of biophysical and economic impacts is not enough. It demands sitting down with those who are, or may be, affected by different policies to appreciate potential impacts from their perspective. These impacts include social, political, and cultural impacts. Only when these impacts are adequately understood do they stand any chance of being included meaningfully in the policy process.

Recognition and Climate Engineering: A Case Study

In the light of the potential for uneven impacts from climate engineering, social scientists, ethicists, humanitarian and environmental organizations, and members of the public have all advocated for the inclusion of more geographically and culturally diverse perspectives in future research and decision-making (Preston, 2012; Suarez and van Aalst, 2017; Whyte, 2012). Suarez et al., for example, have argued, ‘There is a moral imperative to facilitate involving the most vulnerable in decision-making about [climate engineering] … to help inform a more inclusive and nuanced conversation about what can go wrong – and what must go right’ (Suarez, Banerjee, & de Suarez, 2018). The following section draws on qualitative research designed to listen attentively to the concerns that vulnerable populations might have about climate engineering. The results provide a startling illustration of how appropriate the care lens can be for revealing the presence (or absence) of recognitional justice.

The research findings presented here are based on in-depth interviews conducted in the Solomon Islands, Kenya, and Alaska (with Alaska Natives) about the prospect of stratospheric aerosol injection. The interviews were designed to better understand the hopes and fears of those who have been cast as the potential beneficiaries of climate engineering.³ Applying a care lens to the data reveals the critical importance of recognition for vulnerable populations and the effectiveness of the care approach at sniffing out misrecogntion. The method employed a listening posture in conducting and analyzing the interviews. Here we do not attempt to speak for interviewees but rather present their concerns in their own words.

All of the interviewees grounded their perspectives on climate engineering within their experience of climate change. In many cases, significant climate harms were already being felt. These harms included disruptions to agriculture, damage to traditional cultural practices, and threats to public health. Nearly all interviewees indicated some desperation for solutions to the tangible harms of climate warming. They expressed what might be characterized as a deeply reluctant willingness to consider climate engineering (Carr & Preston, 2017). A large majority of interviewees indicated that, all other things being equal, climate engineering would not be their preferred response. Nevertheless, given the lack of global political will for effective mitigation and the severity of the impacts already being felt, many of the interviewees were at least willing to consider some of these controversial techniques (Carr & Yung, 2018).

This reluctant willingness to consider climate engineering, however, came with a number of caveats about the possible injustices that might accompany it. It is here that the care approach starts to shine. For instance, interviewees expressed deep concerns about how climate engineering might create imbalances of power. One interviewee said, ‘I’m just afraid that something this powerful could be used as the way to affect different parts of the world without their approval.’ Another respondent had similar worries: ‘And where would the power be in terms of who decides what to do? In the past, countries with not as much wealth and the indigenous populations always get put on the back burner and don’t get to decide these things. Would that be the same case?’ Interviewees across all three research sites came to climate engineering sensitized by centuries of exploitation.

Concerns about power were often accompanied by comments about vulnerability. Many interviewees worried that climate engineering would exacerbate rather than ease their vulnerability.

Who has the resources to invest in doing it and then as a result, who gets to make the decision about who’s going to feel the worst impacts? Generally it’s the poor people, the brown people and black people on the planet who will not have the resources to pony up for this kind of work.

The sense of disempowerment expressed here linked quickly to concerns about the creation of new relationships of dependency. In the quote above, worries about dependency were expressed in terms of race and ethnicity. A different interviewee framed similar concerns in the context of political and economic relationships between countries:

I think my question is, for climate engineering, countries that are for it might be going to do it, but within developing countries like Solomon Islands, there’s no money to do the different things they’re talking about. If we have support from your country to help us, maybe it will work. We do not have money to do things like that.

Many interviewees were also acutely attuned to the historical relationships between the nations likely to be developing the technologies and those whom they were supposed to help. They expressed concerns about how climate engineering could follow a storyline already experienced too many times. In the words of one interviewee, ‘As a Native person … there has been too much horrible stuff done to us in the name of science to trust it. To us personally, to us as a culture, to us as peoples, to us as inhabitants of the environment.’ Similar concerns about historical circumstances were expressed by others: ‘I fundamentally struggle with the concept of humans messing around even more than they already have. Because we’ve borne the brunt of too many of these scientific experimentations – from physical and medicinal aspects, to landscape and natural parts of it.’

In the light of this past, considerable skepticism remained about who, in the end, would see the most benefit from climate engineering. Vulnerable populations were concerned that the technology would amount to another excuse for the rich nations take control of poorer countries’ weather, echoing centuries of colonial exploitation. Interviewees were cautious about ways in which well-meaning outsiders could end up doing them harm. ‘Regardless of what happens with climate engineering, we’ll be taking the brunt of the problem again.’

The types of self-determination under threat were not just perceived to be political and economic, but also epistemic. Interviewees zeroed in on how a technology like climate engineering threatened to ignore distinctive ways of knowing and the importance of narrative to traditional knowledge. One interviewee spoke at length about the importance of narrative to indigenous science and cosmologies, comparing that approach with typical western scientific approaches to technologies such as climate engineering.

Western science looks at one thing very closely. And indigenous science often looks at thousands of things in a different way. It’s not that deep quantitative longitudinal thing. It’s personal experience, it’s relationships, it’s listening to stories, it’s talking to people. But you are looking at a thousand different things. You’re not looking at one thing very closely, you’re taking a broad sweep of a thousand things.

This same interviewee went on to speak about how difficult it can be to integrate indigenous science, with its basis in experience, relationship, and storytelling, into Western science.

Storytelling, and what does that mean exactly? How is that actually a transmission of knowledge and creation of knowledge? How do you incorporate that into Western science? Does Western science want that? Even if you’ve got a scientist on board with you, how do you communicate that to funding agencies? How do you tell the NSF, ‘Wait, story is important!’

Clearly there was a significant worry that distinctive ways of knowing expressed in unique cultural narratives would be silenced by the epistemology embedded in climate engineering.

For example, one interviewee broadened the point about different ways of knowing by adding a discussion of different practices and traditions that highlight the importance of environmental heritage.

Don’t forget we are living on one planet and we have our own ways of life. When you come in from the university with the concept of climate engineering, you’re coming in with knowledge that scientists have put in place. But don’t forget our traditional life, our traditional skills, our traditional taboos, things that we value. They work for us in the Solomon Islands, because this is our local environment. This is where we have been living, our forefathers shared this information to I don’t know how many generations. It’s good to value these things as well.

Closely related to these comments about distinctive practices and ways of knowing were concerns about whether climate engineering could pay sufficient attention to context, given the varying needs of people living in radically different circumstances. For instance, one interviewee spoke at length about important differences between weather patterns in the temperate climatic zones (where the majority of climate engineering research is taking place) and the tropical and subtropical climatic zones (where most of the world’s subsistence farming occurs). This respondent drew attention to the relevance of local micro-climates:

The higher yield agricultural areas, especially the highlands both east and west of the Rift Valley, they have got a local system, and especially to the west of the Rift valley, they have one long growing season. So the variety of maize they grow, the variety of other crops they grow, is long-maturing, because they have got enough rainfall and the rainfall system is long. It means sometimes when I want the rains in the short rainfall season areas, it’s actually when they don’t want the rains in the long rainfall area because they want a dry season so that the crops can dry up for harvesting.

The need for self-determination sought by this individual was contingent on important contextual details about the types of technologies and tools that might be deployed and about the particular geographical and climatic situation in which he and others lived.

This sense of a loss of control of one’s destiny coupled with the prospect of additional harms created the frequent expression of anxiety. In the words of one interviewee, ‘It’s scary as hell to be dependent on some other person to dictate the weather or climate change.’ Fear, unease, and a sense of vulnerability to the whims of the richer nations were broadly expressed across the populations interviewed. One interviewee even expressed the need for members of vulnerable populations to make space for a ‘primal scream’ when contemplating the injustices of climate change and potential implications of climate engineering. The emotional response of pessimism and despair that this sense of vulnerability and dependency created weighed on several respondents.

Recognizing the emotional stakes, one respondent suggested that one of the ways to reduce this sense of injustice would be to ensure local self-determination within a climate engineering strategy:

I want something that I can actually take home and actually get engaged in it and practice it. The only thing I can ask a climate engineer is, what are some of the tools, technologies, and ideas that you can give me that I can actually go and implement at very minimal costs, so the communities, the people I interact with on a daily basis can easily adopt it, and get the process going?

Even though they might have been reluctantly accepting that something had to be done, many of those interviewed struggled to get over the sense of emotional unease that the whole prospect created. ‘My initial reaction is, I just don’t have trust. I don’t have trust for the process. It just makes me very leery.’

Taken together, what is striking about the responses is how pertinent are many of the themes prioritized by a care approach. Concerns about the expression of power were revealed by interviewees already sensitized to centuries of exploitation. Nation-to-nation and people-to-people relationships were a key orienting lens. The emotional responses of pessimism and despair that this sense of vulnerability and dependency created were clearly in evidence. The need for self-determination sought by the respondent in Kenya was contingent on important contextual details about the types of technologies and tools that might be deployed and about the particular geographical and climatic situation in which Kenyans lived. The importance of narrative to expressing distinctive ways of knowing that might conflict with the epistemology embedded in climate engineering was highlighted in the responses of others.

As the above quotes collectively demonstrate, interviewees were at pains to emphasize recognitional concerns in addition to concerns about the distribution of physical harms and benefits. They were certainly interested in whether climate engineering might help distribute physical climate harms and benefits more justly, but they were also concerned about social, political, and cultural harms getting downplayed by those who view climate engineering only through the lens of physical benefits and burdens. Injustices that respondents worried a great deal about included the ways in which traditions, practices, and ways of knowing might be ignored or made impossible. They included relationships of power, dependence, and vulnerability that might be established. They also involved the likelihood of not being equal participants in decisions that would impact them. These worries provide compelling evidence that adequate recognition is not only a necessary condition for just procedural and distributive conditions. It is also a key component of justice in itself. Using the lens provided by the care approach promises to key a careful listener into these critical prerequisites for justice.

Making Policy with the Care Approach

If the care approach is helpfully tuned in to considerations of recognitional justice, can this attentiveness contribute to good policy-making? One of the concerns often raised about the care approach in other areas of ethics is that it is insufficiently normative. The approach asks policy makers to be sensitive to power and dependence, for example, but it does little to determine how much power or how much dependence is too much. It says that emotions are important but it does not provide clear procedures for what to do when emotions conflict. It values relationships but does not give clear enough guidance on when relationships need to be curtailed. If these are accurate criticisms of care ethics, then one might reasonably ask where normativity is going to originate from if recognitional justice is to be served.

The care themes articulated above certainly focus more on bringing attention to particular areas of concern than they do on providing definitive answers about what is just or unjust. It should be clear, however, that when attention is focused on the right areas, injustices are more likely to be identified. A series of targeted questions about relationship, context, power, etc. can provide answers to help assess whether a particular climate policy is likely to be morally acceptable.⁴

On relationship it should be asked: How might social and ecological relationships shift if this climate engineering strategy is introduced? How have interconnections within and between communities been considered in the development of this strategy? Is the development or deployment of this climate engineering technology likely to create significant ruptures in relationships? Can it create new types of beneficial relationships? Is the developer of the technology oblivious to the relationships it will create and destroy?

On context one might inquire: What are the important particularities of this context? What is the unique history, ecology and culture of this place? What specific actors or groups will be most affected by the proposed climate engineering technology? Does the proposed technology, for example, give sufficient attention to the microclimates and agricultural practices of the affected regions? Does it pay enough attention to the historical details or does it risk re-inscribing elements of an undesirable colonial past?

On dependence one might wonder: Where are the current relations of dependence in this situation (e.g. people dependent on each other, on companies, on infrastructure, on ecological processes etc.), and how might these change due to the use of this particular climate engineering technology? What is the character of the relations of dependence in play (e.g. are they experienced as nurturing and empowering or extractive and destructive by those involved)? Does the development and use of this technology exacerbate dependencies or lessen them? Are the economic dependencies created desirable or not? Are they entered into willingly?

On power and vulnerability one might question: How does the development, deployment and use of this technology affect the distribution of power? Are any actors/groups favored or granted more power than others? How will the technology affect the level of control the impacted actors have over their own future? Would the interest of indigenous populations be put on the back-burner again? Who are the most vulnerable actors – both human and non-human – and what measures are in place to prevent their abuse? Will this technology lead to the concentration of power or its redistribution?

On affect one might investigate: Does the development, introduction, or use of this technology evoke strong emotions among those impacted? Are these emotional reactions positive or negative? Is it the case that those who will experience the technology find the prospect ‘scary as hell’? Can the technology settle the mind of someone who initially states ‘I just don’t have trust.’ Is affect being granted a legitimate role in the decision-making processes or are the affective dimensions of this technological change being excluded from consideration?

On narrative one might seek to find out: What are the narratives being told by those promoting and by those who will be subjected to this climate engineering technology? What worldviews, values, assumptions and beliefs are being expressed in these different narratives? What alternative visions, strategies, and technologies do the different stories reveal as available and important for the assessment process? Are the different ways of knowing displayed by a stakeholder who implores ‘Wait, story is important!’ being recognized? Are culturally significant narratives being suppressed, dismissed or excluded?

This sample list of questions is not definitive nor exclusive. Other questions may be more appropriate with of each of the various climate strategies. Nevertheless, answers to these sorts of questions have the potential to be highly instructive about potential injustices within a particular policy pathway. They might reveal, for example, whether a given climate strategy will shatter valuable relationships, concentrate power, cause negative affective reactions, impose new narratives from the outside, and increase dependence. On the other hand, they might indicate whether a strategy is sensitive to context, ensures a fairer distribution of power, decreases vulnerability, and allows a community to continue to determine its own story. The answers to these questions will reveal whether or not recognitional justice is likely to be served by a given deployment of climate engineering.

Progress will only be made on answering these questions by listening to local accounts, taking first person perspectives seriously, and by not imposing overly narrow understandings of justice from the outside. Getting satisfactory answers will require the funding of significant ethics and social science research developed in concert with the populations of concern. It will also require the governments funding climate engineering research to take ethics oversight seriously, as happened, for example in the case of the UK’s Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project (Stilgoe, 2015).

There might still be reason to hesitate about the care approach. One of the appeals of the narrower, distributional paradigm is that physical and economic goods and bads are much more readily quantifiable. Quantification can mostly be completed by cost-benefit analyses employing methods developed by economists over more than half a century (Hicks, 1943).

One might suggest in response that, while quantifiability is appealing when considering the just distribution of economic and material goods, it can be very difficult to achieve in other equally significant domains of justice. Insisting on quantification when discussing justice marks an attempt to be falsely definitive. One might define too narrowly the relevant concerns in play and fail to allow the sphere of justice and injustice to be adequately opened up. If considering the just distribution of benefits and harms is straightforwardly consequentialist and quasi-economic, recognitional justice is more care-based and qualitative. Due to its qualitative nature, the care approach may provide the kind of ‘plural and conditional’ policy advice that is most appropriate for this domain (Stirling, 2010).

The Challenges of Recognition

What should be clear by now is that it is not enough to consider only the potential benefits and harms of climate engineering in terms of welfare (physical, economic or otherwise). What Flegal and Gupta call an ‘expert driven, outcome-oriented, and risk-based understanding of equity’ (Flegal & Gupta, 2018, 56) tells only part of the justice story. When Horton and Keith cite multi-model studies (Kravitz et al., 2014) that consider the impacts on temperature and precipitation of stratospheric aerosol deployment they provide important information but offer an incomplete picture of the moral terrain. Other dimensions of justice must also be included if climate engineering is to be politically legitimate. Climate change is a complex and multi-dimensional problem and recognitional justice is an important element of the ethical territory. Avoiding misrecognition is likely to require qualitative methods that acknowledge the complexities of justice across geographical, temporal, and cultural boundaries.

Our suspicion is that ethicists and policy-makers will require better tools to detect all of the subtle forms of injustice that attend climate change and the various attempts to fix it. Some of these tools are relatively new to the justice discussion and are likely to take concentrated and sustained work to become fully operational. Nevertheless, given the ‘crucible of inequality’ (Cuomo, 2011) in which climate change was created, decision-makers must make exceptional effort to avoid compounding past injustices as they seek desirable solutions to what is unprecedented crisis.

The care approach looks like an effective tool to have in the toolbox when setting out on such a path.

Acknowledegments

This publication has not been formally reviewed by either the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) or the EPA. The views expressed in this document are solely those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the FWS or EPA. Neither FWS nor EPA endorse any products or commercial services mentioned in this publication. Thanks also to the participants in the workshop on Geoengineering, Political Legitimacy, and Justice at the University of Washington, Nov 2–3, 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was supported by the US National Science Foundation [Grant Number SES 0958095]; and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)[Assistance Agreement No. FP 917316].

Notes

1. See Preston and Wickson (2016) for an account of the care approach applied to biotechnology assessment.

2. Marion Hourdequin, ‘Recognizing Climate Losses’ (draft). Presented at 2nd Buffalo Workshop on Adaptation: Loss, Damage, and Harm, May 8–9th, 2015.

3. The data collection was conducted by W. Carr while a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Montana. Between 2012 and 2014 he conducted interviews with 33 Solomon Islanders, 29 Alaska Natives, and 38 Kenyans. For a more detailed description of the research methods involved see (Carr & Yung, 2018). The fieldwork was funded by the National Science Foundation (SES-0958095) and an Environmental Protection Agency STAR Grant (Assistance Agreement No. FP917316).

4. These questions are adapted from (Wickson et al., 2017).