Mershon Center Speaker Series
Brooke Ackerly
"Climate Change Justice and Responsibility: Theorizing From the Coast of Climate Change"
Abstract
The problem of global climate change governance is not just one of governing the commons or one of distributing environmental benefits and burdens, it is one of global governance. By global governance, I mean more than a problem of non-governmental private governance and international governmental institutions. Global governance recognizes that international institutions (legal and corporate), global foundations, corporations, and corporate compacts affects what states are able to do internally and that national and local politics affect what states are able to do internationally. This is not a new idea, but it is a very important idea for climate change justice. In the fields of human rights, security and political economy, (across disciplines) feminists have been arguing that the connections across the local, national, regional, and international are all part of the global. In some circles the term “glocal” helps remind us of the role of the local in the global, but we don’t need jargon to make that point. We can observe it. In this paper, with research in southwestern Bangladesh, I offer a grounded normative theory of climate change justice as a problem of global governance, which has surprising implications for taking responsibility for climate change globally.
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