In recent years, global environmental politics and its study have increasingly engaged with normative questions, including global justice. Justice and equity norms have been on the agenda of international environmental politics ever since the latter’s emergence in the 1970s, but gained much prominence in the context of more recent debates about global climate change, the conservation of the world’s natural resources (e.g. forests, fisheries or biological diversity) or the international trade in hazardous wastes. Core questions include: Who should contribute how much to the avoidance of future environmental harm? Who ought to pay the costs incurred by the need to adapt to a changing natural environment? Which obligations do current generations have towards future ones in preserving the integrity of the natural environment?
So far, two strands of literature seem to address global environmental issues from different angles. First, there is a broad range of philosophically informed writings that focus on what an appropriate conception of global (environmental) justice would entail and seek to derive broad principles of global environmental justice. Second, the more empirically minded writings have thus far primarily been concerned with how (global) justice norms emerge and develop and how they affect policy-making at different scales.
The workshop is guided by the notion that it is useful to bridge this gap and to engage political and legal philosophy and empirical social science research – most notably from political science, geography and sociology – in a more encompassing and multi-faceted debate. The kind of questions we are interested in include (but are not limited to) questions such as:
- What are the practically relevant differences und conflicts between different concepts of global environmental justice discussed in the literature? Would different theories of justice lead us to fundamentally different assessments of real-world institutions? Or are the differences mainly a matter of degree?
- How can we recognize and ‘measure’ global environmental (in)justice?
- How and why do different kinds of international or transnational environmental regimes differ in their distributive consequences at different scales? And what does that mean for global environmental justice?
- How is global environmental justice conceptually and empirically related to the broader field of global justice? And where and how are global environmental justice concerns in conflict with other values such as ecosystem preservation, the conservation of biodiversity, self-determination, institutional effectiveness, or (legitimate) self-interest?
We welcome papers from different disciplinary backgrounds, including political philosophy, political science, geography, sociology and law. The substantive focus may be on climate change, but given the fast-growing literature on this particular topic we would also greatly welcome papers that address other environmental issues.
Abstracts of proposed papers should be up to 500 words; they can be submitted to
The deadline for submitting abstracts is Friday, 07 September 2012.
The workshop will be jointly hosted by the Research Group on Changing Norms of Global Governance and the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) at the Universität Bremen. Reimbursement of travel costs will be available for a limited number of participants.
Deadline for abstract submissions: 07 September 2012
Notification of selected papers: 15 October 2012
Papers due: 8 April 2013
Workshop date: 26/27 April 2013
Dr. Mathias Thaler
Centro de Estudos Sociais Universidade de Coimbra
Colégio de S. Jerónimo
Phone: +351 239 855 596