Abstract
We are in the middle of a planetary crisis that urgently requires stronger modes of earth system governance. At the same time, calls for justice are becoming increasingly pronounced in sustainability research: there can be no effective planetary stewardship without planetary justice. Rapid planetary-scale processes have reinforced and further created vast injustices at international, national, and subnational levels. Often, the burden has fallen most severely on the poor and marginalized communities. Yet the literature on planetary justice tends to stay at the level of ideal conceptions and abstract normative arguments of justice theory, without an explicit concern for the needs of the poor. In this Perspective, we focus discussions of planetary justice on the needs of the poorest. We discuss whether the dominant approaches to planetary stewardship and earth system governance are apt at realizing a pro-poor vision of justice and what alternative approaches might be needed.
Highlights
Global disasters, from catastrophic fires in Australia to the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforce a broadly shared view that we face a planetary crisis that urgently requires stronger modes of planetary stewardship and earth system governance
While social greens often underemphasize the need for institutional reforms, including at the global political level, institutionalists remain focused on questions of institutional design with the primary aim of securing institutional and environmental effectiveness, rather than planetary justice (Kashwan, 2017b)
What would be some of the practical elements of a pro-poor strategy in planetary stewardship and earth system governance? While it is not possible to be exhaustive in this Perspective article, we sketch five possible ways forward
Summary
From catastrophic fires in Australia to the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforce a broadly shared view that we face a planetary crisis that urgently requires stronger modes of planetary stewardship and earth system governance. Some political theorists offer an even more radical reading of the emerging landscape of planetary stewardship, arguing that a global Leviathan of some sort is likely to take shape in response to the emergent planetary crisis (Wainwright and Mann, 2018) All this comes down, in short, to an increasing call for more effective planetary stewardship and transformative change towards stronger earth system governance, from local to global levels. Sustainability scholars have addressed questions of distributive, representative, procedural, or intergenerational justice, including recent calls for new conceptualizations of “planetary justice” (e.g., Biermann and Kalfagianni, 2020). Often this literature stays at the level of ideal conceptions and abstract arguments drawing on normative theories of justice. While a pro-poor focus within planetary stewardship and planetary justice is relevant for the poor in all countries, it is pertinent, we argue, for countries in the Global South that are home to the so-called “bottom billion” (Collier, 2007; for a recent critique, see Ravallion, 2020)
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