Background and Aims:Developed
countries like the UK benefit from the use of more natural resources and
environmental services than is either ecologically sustainable or arguably,
especially in light of global inequalities, their du
e share. From the perspective of developing countries,
we can be accused of running an ‘ecological debt’. Such accusations may scarcely be heeded at present, but as
global competition for available natural resources and environmental services
intensifies, and some of the largest Newly Industrialising Countries become
serious power rivals, concerns about the injustice of current usage are liable
to be compounded by security concerns.
Therefore prudence combines with ethics to commend preparing to address
them.
Allegations
of ecological debt can be understood as claims that there is an unjust distribution
of rights in the planet’s various natural resources and environmental services.
The allocation of rights is certainly haphazard: international law accommodates
an array of property and sovereignty rights which have arisen historically as
products of unregulated exploitation, wars, colonialism, power politics, ad hoc
negotiations, and, in the best of cases, multilateral treaty agreements. Meanwhile, as international
institutions create new rights - for example, carbon emissions rights or
intellectual property rights in genetic resources - old rights, and
particularly rights of territorial sovereignty, are being significantly
modified. How just these regimes
are, individually and in the aggregate, is the central question for assessing
allegations of ecological debt.
|
Publications from the project
‘International Political Theory and the Global Environment: Some Critical Questions for Liberal Cosmopolitans', Journal
of Social Philosophy, 40.2 (2009): 276-295.
'On
the Nature of Our Debt to the Global Poor’, Journal
of Social Philosophy, 39.1 (2008): 1-19.
‘Human Rights Versus Emissions Rights: climate justice
and the equitable
distribution of ecological space’, Ethics
and International Affairs 21.4 (2007): 431-450.
‘Ecological
Citizenship: justice, rights, and the virtue of resourcefulness’, Environmental
Politics 15.3 (2006): 435-446.
‘Ecological
Citizenship:
a rejoinder to Dobson’, Environmental
Politics 15.3 (2006): 452-3.
‘Global
Justice and the Distribution of Natural Resources’, Political Studies
54.2 (2006): 349-369.
‘Thomas
Pogge’s
Global Resources Dividend: a critique and an alternative’, Journal of Moral
Philosophy, 2.3
(2005): 299-314.
|
|
|
