Ethics and Global Environmental Policy: Cosmopolitan Conceptions of Climate Change

by Paul G. Harris (Editor)

Overview

This collection of provocative essays re-evaluates the world's failed policy responses to climate change, in the process demonstrating how cosmopolitan ethics can inform global environmental governance.

A cosmopolitan worldview points to climate-related policies that are less 'international' and more 'global'. From a cosmopolitan perspective, national borders should not delineate obligations and responsibilities associated with climate change. Human beings, rather than the narrow interests of nation-states, ought to be at the center of moral calculations and policy responses to climate change. In this volume, expert contributors examine questions of individual and global responsibility, burden sharing among people and states, international law and environmental justice, capitalism and voluntary action, pluralist cooperation and hegemony, and alternative approaches to climate action and diplomacy. The book helps to illuminate new principles for global environmental policy that can come from cosmopolitan conceptions of climate change.

Ethics and Global Environmental Policy should be read by scholars, students, policy makers, activists and analysts in the fields of climate change, international ethics, environmental policy, international environmental diplomacy, global environmental politics and environmental studies. Government officials, nongovernmental actors, and informed readers concerned about climate change and global justice will also find much to interest them in this book.

Contributors include: N. Dower, R. Felli, P.S. Golub, P.G. Harris, M.W. Howard, J. Kent, J.-P. Marechal, R. Paehlke, S. Vanderheiden

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857931603
Publisher:	Edward Elgar Publishing
Publication date:	09/29/2011
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Edited by Paul G. Harris, Chair Professor of Global and Environmental Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong and Senior Research Fellow, Earth System Governance global research alliance

Table of Contents

Contents:

Preface

1. Introduction: Cosmopolitanism and Climate Change Policy
Paul G. Harris

2. Climate Justice as Globalized Responsibility: Mitigation, Adaptation and Avoiding Harm to Others
Steve Vanderheiden

3. Climate Change and the Cosmopolitan Responsibility of Individuals: Policy Vanguards
Nigel Dower

4. Individual Responsibility and Voluntary Action on Climate Change: Activating Agency
Jennifer Kent

5. Cosmopolitan Solutions ‘From Below’: Climate Change, International Law and the Capitalist Challenge
Romain Felli

6. Sharing the Burdens of Climate Change: Environmental Justice and Qualified Cosmopolitanism
Michael W. Howard

7. Cosmopolitanism and Hegemony: The United States and Climate Change
Robert Paehlke

8. Overcoming the Planetary Prisoners’ Dilemma: Cosmopolitan Ethos and Pluralist Cooperation
Philip S. Golub and Jean-Paul Maréchal

9. Cosmopolitan Diplomacy and the Climate Change Regime: Moving Beyond International Doctrine
Paul G. Harris

Index

Editorial Reviews

’We've had 20 years of government-level conferences at Kyoto, Copenhagen and Cancun, but greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Taking a cosmopolitan approach to climate change in this excellent and timely book, Paul Harris and his contributors argue that citizen action is an essential complement to state action. The challenging, unsettling and absolutely vital argument of these high-quality essays is that distance makes no moral difference in our globalised world; individual high emitters have a duty to reduce their emissions, wherever they are.’

Andrew Dobson

We've had 20 years of government-level conferences at Kyoto, Copenhagen and Cancun, but greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Taking a cosmopolitan approach to climate change in this excellent and timely book, Paul Harris and his contributors argue that citizen action is an essential complement to state action. The challenging, unsettling and absolutely vital argument of these high-quality essays is that distance makes no moral difference in our globalised world; individual high emitters have a duty to reduce their emissions, wherever they are. —- Andrew Dobson, Keele, University, UK

From the Publisher