Climate Finance Justice: Exploring How Capital and Climate Justice Shape Each Other
AAG Annual Meeting, New Orleans, 10-14 April 2018

Organizers: Chris Knudson (University of Arizona) and Lauren Gifford (University of Colorado Boulder)
Sponsors: Cultural & Political Ecology; Climate; Energy & Environment

This session explores the multiple and contested intersections between climate justice and finance. While there has been considerable work done in the activist and public policy spheres on what can be called ‘climate finance justice’, there needs to be more engagement from critical social scientists on the topic. This is especially so as mainstream climate policy approaches often seek greater equity through markets and economic modelling, such as through carbon taxes (Bumpus 2015), insurance (Johnson 2013), carbon offsets (Bumpus and Liverman 2008), payments for ecosystem services (McAfee and Shapiro 2010), adaptation funds (Grasso 2009), and loss and damage compensation (Roberts and Huq 2015). In all these attempted solutions, we must ask: What kind of justice do we see in climate finance? And how does climate justice influence flows and constructions of capital?

We can identify two major theoretically divergent approaches to climate justice. Thinkers in the first camp, based in philosophy and environmental ethics (Jamieson 2010 and Shue 1995), frame climate change as a result of historic and current carbon emissions. They are concerned with who is responsible for existing carbon emissions; how future emissions should be quantified and valued; and who pays for impacts, and why. In the second camp, there are scholars who approach justice from the perspective of social movements, interrogating the role of marginalization in the suffering of climate impacts (Roberts and Parks 2007; Bond 2012). They address how social movements have united and gained traction under the umbrella of global climate concerns to challenge existing social and environmental injustices. 

This diversity in approaches to climate finance and climate justice has resulted in a multifaceted landscape of adaptation and mitigation projects, alliances for and against them, and a set of arguments for every side. We invite papers that help better understand the complexities of climate finance justice. Possible themes for papers include the following:

How concepts of justice are translated into economic models and financial tools. Some radical activists and academics (Bond 2012; Dorsey 2007) view markets as inherently unjust and therefore incapable of addressing inequity. When using market-based or financial solutions, what dimensions of life are not adequately captured?

How particular forms of climate finance have justice implications. The details of how climate finance projects are enacted can make large differences for social justice. The details of a cap and trade program, for example, include where the cap is set, what percentage of credits are put up for auction, and how the revenue from the program will be used (Lohmann 2006). Additionally, we can consider the role of mechanisms like the Green Climate Fund as a means of raising and disbursing development aid.

How civil society is involved in climate finance. At all scales, civil society is challenging how and by whom climate finance is administered. For example, social movements are pushing for capital flows to be managed by grassroots organizations and not supra-national institutions like the World Bank (Lohmann 2008).

How the complexities of finance and bureaucracy obfuscate injustice. Much of climate finance involves terminology and mechanisms that can conceal the particular outcomes of a given policy. Tax incidence (Metcalf 2009), feed-in tariffs on solar power (Nelson, Simshauser, and Kelley 2011), and discounting (Quiggin 2008) all contain assumptions that can be challenged on climate justice grounds.

Please send abstracts of 250 words to Chris Knudson ([log in to unmask]) and Lauren Gifford ([log in to unmask]) by 22 October 2017. 

References
Bond, P. 2012. Emissions trading, new enclosures and eco-social contestations. Antipode 44(3): 684-701.
Bumpus, A.G. 2015. Firm responses to a carbon price: corporate decision making under British Columbia's carbon tax. Climate Policy 15(4): 475-493.
Bumpus, Adam G., and Diana M. Liverman. 2008. Accumulation by decarbonization and the governance of carbon offsets. Economic Geography 84(2): 127-155.
Dorsey, M.K. 2007. Climate knowledge and power: Tales of skeptic tanks, weather gods, and sagas for climate (in) justice. Capitalism Nature Socialism 18(2): 7-21.
Grasso, M., 2009. Justice in funding adaptation under the international climate change regime. Springer Science & Business Media.
Jamieson, D. 2010. Climate change, responsibility, and justice. Science and Engineering Ethics, 16: 431-45. 
Johnson, L. 2013. Index insurance and the articulation of risk-bearing subjects. Environment and Planning A 45(11): 2663-2681.
Lohmann, L. 2006. Carbon trading: A Critical conversation on climate change, privatization, and power. Development Dialogue 48, The Corner House, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/sites/thecornerhouse.org.uk/files/carbonDDlow.pdf 
Lohmann, L. 2008. Carbon trading, climate justice and the production of ignorance: ten examples. Development 51(3): 359-365.
McAfee, K. and Shapiro, E.N. 2010. Payments for ecosystem services in Mexico: nature, neoliberalism, social movements, and the state. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100(3): 579-599.
Metcalf, G.E., 2009. Designing a carbon tax to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 3(1): 63-83.
Nelson, T., Simshauser, P. and Kelley, S., 2011. Australian residential solar feed-in tariffs: Industry stimulus or regressive form of taxation?. Economic Analysis and Policy 41(2): 113-129.
Quiggin, J., 2008. Stern and his critics on discounting and climate change: an editorial essay. Climatic Change 89(3): 195-205.
Roberts, J. Timmons, and Bradley C. Parks. 2007. A climate of injustice: Global inequality, north-south politics, and climate policy. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Roberts, E. and Huq, S. 2015. Coming full circle: the history of loss and damage under the UNFCCC. International Journal of Global Warming, 8(2): 141-157.
Shue, H. 1995. Equity in an international agreement on climate change. Equity and Social Considerations Related to Climate Change: 385-392.