The unavoidability of justice – and order – in international climate politics: From Kyoto to Paris and beyond

Abstract

This article reviews the role that normative claims about climate justice have played in international climate politics and traces how international society's approach to equity questions has changed between the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Agreement (2015). In an anarchic international environment, international society can be expected to prioritize order over justice, and the interest of the most powerful states over those of the most vulnerable states. Interestingly, the UN climate regime managed to establish an unusually strong version of distributive justice as part of its core regulatory instrument, the Kyoto Protocol, but this has been weakened and remodeled in the switch to the bottom-up logic of the Paris Agreement. As a consequence, the global justice debate has seen the weakening of established substantive principles of climate justice and the rise of a new procedural focus on how to subject national climate policy ambition to international scrutiny. Henry Shue's admonition that the question of the fair sharing of burdens cannot be evaded remains relevant today, but the transition towards the Paris Agreement clearly shows the limitations of any effort to realize strong claims of distributive climate justice in international society.

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