Unpacking Climate Justice

The moral argument for climate justice – the proposition that those who have benefited most from carbon-intensive development should bear greatest costs for the transition to cleaner and greener forms of economic activity – has rapidly gone from the radical fringes to mainstream orthodoxy in policy work in many contexts. At the international level, there is widespread acknowledgment of the uneven burdens of climate change, and their interaction with global inequalities. At the national level, governments increasingly seek to connect climate action to regional development strategies and infrastructure investment, cognisant of the geographical and demographic winners and losers from transition within domestic economies. At the local level, municipal authorities commonly speak of the need for ‘just transitions’ in local economic profile and urban planning. At all these levels, there are prominent calls for more inclusive and participatory approaches that can surface and address justice concerns as the challenges of climate change are confronted. Climate policy is now, more often than not, framed and connected explicitly to concerns about justice. In this section, we turn to critical and interpretive approaches to policy analysis to interrogate and unpack climate justice policy in action. The theoretical perspectives and methodological tools associated with critical and interpretive policy analysis allow us to peer beneath the veneer of apparent commitment to climate justice across many governing contexts. What is (un)just about contemporary climate policies? For whom? In what ways? Critical and interpretive researchers have long been at the forefront of problematizing and puzzling with the governance challenges of climate change (eg Hendriks and Grin 2013; Dryzek 2022; Wagenaar and Prainsack 2021). These approaches are also intrinsically entwined with concerns about surfacing and addressing intersectional inequalities, and their multifaceted impacts on complex policy issues (eg Soss et al. 2011; Acosta et al. 2021). Scholars in these interconnected traditions are therefore especially well-positioned to unpack the subtleties around climate justice (eg Jagroe 2016; Lidskog and Standring 2023: Carrick et al. 2021).