Justice through polycentricity? A critical examination of climate justice framings in Pakistani climate policymaking

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which the existence of a polycentric climate governance regime in Pakistan has enabled diverse framings of climate justice to emerge and be operationalised within policymaking. A twopart analysis is conducted through systematic coding and textual analysis of interview transcripts and policy documents. Firstly, an analysis based on climate justice framings reveals that, whilst national governmental actors predominantly adopt an international framing of climate justice, non-state actors have increasingly adopted vulnerability, human rights and transformational framings of justice, thereby supporting the theory that polycentricity is widening the space for voicing diverse framings. Secondly, a polycentric governance-based analysis reveals that several institutional barriers limit the ability of non-state actors to operationalise these framings, particularly capacity and resource constraints, limits of scale and scope, changing legislation and the unequivocal power held by the state. Hence, Pakistan's overarching climate change strategy prioritises justice between countries, while obscuring domestic inequalities, poverty and vulnerability, which are only addressed by non-state actors through isolated activities rather than in a coordinated manner within national policy. This finding suggests that polycentric governance can diversify climate discourse, but also that the intergovernmental climate regime may reinforce the nation state's international framings of justice at the expense of domestic justice concerns.

Mitigation and Development Pathways in the Near to Mid-term

“…Several sub-national regions like California and Scotland have set zero emission targets (Höhne et al 2019), supported by short-and medium-term interim goals (Scottish Government 2020b; State of California 2018). Sharing of effort across global and sub-global scales has not been quantified, though one study suggests that non-state actors have increasingly adopted more diverse framings, including vulnerability, human rights and transformational framings of justice (Shawoo and McDermott 2020).…”

Empirical research on polycentric governance: Critical gaps and a framework for studying long‐term change

“…Given the mixed and contradictory findings about PG performance, we dig deeper to explore whether the literature provides more nuanced evidence about why some PG cases exhibit the positive features described in Table 2, while other cases exhibit the negative features. Few studies explicitly tested these theoretical features from the literature: only thirty‐three studies provided explicit hypotheses or propositions, and even fewer hypothesized about the positive and negative features of PG summarized in Table 2 (exceptions include Carlisle & Gruby, 2018; Fisher & Leifeld, 2019; Gallemore, 2017; Kellner et al., 2019; McCord et al., 2017; Newig et al., 2016; Pahl‐Wostl & Knieper, 2014; Shawoo & McDermott, 2020; Wit & Freitas, 2019a, 2019b). Below, we synthesize findings about the positive and negative features of PG in the cases studied.…”