Participation, accountability and transparency as normative standards of legitimacy in large-scale Stratospheric Aerosol Injection governance systems

Climate change is already happening and major polluters’ political, economic and social inertia seems to impede a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) fast enough to avoid dangerous climate impacts. This has prompted a closer consideration of a range of Climate Engineering (CE) technologies that have recently emerged –as the Paris Agreement implicitly acknowledges and requires– as a third category of responses to climate change, alongside decreasing emissions (‘mitigation’) and lessening climate impacts (‘adaptation’). The article concentrates on large-scale stratospheric aerosol injection (LS-SAI). This is a CE technique belonging to the solar radiation management family able to alter the climate regionally or globally, that reduces the net incoming short-wave solar radiation reaching the Earth through transboundary projects injecting aerosols into the lower stratosphere. The main reason for this focus is the high leverage of LS-SAI, i.e., its capacity to have great influence over climate from relatively small technological and economic inputs. Unfortunately, LS-SAI technologies are also the most likely to create complex and entrenched political, ethical social and economic conflicts that could seriously hinder their research and deployment. In light of these considerations and since political (or normative) legitimacy is fundamental for gaining support and eventually fostering appropriate and stable LS-SAI projects, the general objective of the article is to analyse the features that LS-SAI governance systems –not yet existing, but necessarily supranational– should include in order to be normatively legitimate, i.e. to have the ‘right to rule’. In other words, the article scrutinizes the normative standards that can best grant political legitimacy to, and contextualize them in, LS-SAI governance systems. The most significant normative standards in climate governance are the three ‘epistemic qualities’ of international legitimacy put forward by Buchanan and Keohane: participation, accountability, and transparency. Their inclusion set, in fact, LS-SAI governance systems apart from illegitimate, opaque global bureaucracies and makes it possible to forge novel, stable and appropriate approaches to the supranational and polycentric governance of LS-SAI research and deployment. Buchanan and Keohane’s epistemic qualities, however, do not grant a right to rule per se, rather they should be understood as channels through which LS-SAI governance systems transmit ‘reliable information needed for grappling with normative disagreement and uncertainty concerning [their] proper functions’. More specifically, since the focus is on the three normative standards highlighted, the article carries out an analysis of input-oriented legitimacy in LS-SAI governance systems. In fact participation, accountability, and transparency are procedural components of input-legitimacy that make it possible for the right to rule to emerge mostly from fair procedures. All in all, if LS-SAI governance systems lack the three normative standards underlined, their normative legitimacy would be seriously undermined. Consequently, taking also into account existing global governance institutions as possible models, the article intends to figure out the relevant traits of supranational LS-SAI governance systems that include the three epistemic qualities of normative legitimacy pointed out.