Climate Justice Begins at Home: Conceptual, Pragmatic and Transformative Approaches to Climate Justice in Scotland

Abstract

In March 2012 the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed a motion ‘strongly endors[ing] the opportunity for Scotland to champion climate justice’. To date, discussions around climate justice within Scottish policy have largely focussed on international dimensions. Questions remain as to what climate justice means at home in Scotland. This article aims to engage with such questions. It begins with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of climate justice discourses and discusses the various ways that climate justice is framed and understood. We then introduce a categorisation of three broad approaches to climate justice which are being seen globally: conceptual, pragmatic and transformative. We discuss how climate justice has been pursued in practice to illustrate the different forms that can occur under a climate justice banner, and the implications of different understandings of the concept. Using the human rights based approach to climate change as an illustration of the malleable nature of climate justice, we categorise and critique the dominant approach to climate justice used in Scotland. We find that climate justice is a label which can be applied to a range of practices, with differing results. It is hoped that this article encourages further reflection and debate on the particular flavour of climate justice which has been chosen in Scotland and its implications.

Climate change, marginalised communities and considered debate within Scotland’s climate emergency

“…A danger of such complexity is that engagement may be closed down to existing networks, and/or to those already favourably disposed towards climate justice thinking. Previous Scotland-based scholarship has indeed identified the importance of fairness in process and in recognition of different identities and experiences as part of a just climate response, as much as the ultimate distribution of risks and benefits (Aitken et al, 2016).…”

Community benefits from offshore renewables: The relationship between different understandings of impact, community, and benefit

“…Sovacool (2014: 15)contends that ‘how we distribute the benefits and burdens of energy systems is pre-eminently a concern for any society that aspires to be fair’. Justice can be understood and pursued in a number of ways, for example, energy developments can have implications for procedural justice; distributive justice and; recognitional justice (Aitken et al., 2016a; Jenkins et al., 2016). Procedural justice is concerned with decision-making processes and recognises that distributional injustices can arise from unfair processes through which they were created.…”

A Novel Impact Assessment Methodology for Evaluating Distributional Impacts in Scottish Climate Change Adaptation Policy

“…While research has largely focused on international climate justice, particularly in relation to the consequences of climate change for the Global South, national and subnational responses also raise justice concerns, where the impacts of climate change and climate policies, and vulnerability to those impacts, varies not only between countries but also within countries. Climate justice in these intra-national contexts, and particularly in the Global North, is a relatively new area of policy research (Aitken et al 2015). To date, research has considered the fair distribution of international climate finance within countries (e.g., Barrett 2014), taken sectorial perspectives (e.g., Furman et al 2014;Popke et al 2014;Schaffrin 2013;Walker and Day 2012), or examined climate justice at the urban level (e.g., Bulkeley et al 2014).…”