Towards ‘climate justice’? A critical reflection on legal subjectivity and climate injustice

Warning signals, patterned hierarchies, directions for future law and policy

Bibliographic Data

ID12936985
AuthorsAnna Grear (0000-0003-2993-1370, Cardiff University, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume5
Issue0
Pages103-133
Publication date2014-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Human Rights and the Environment (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1759-7188 • E-ISSN: 1759-7196
PublisherEdward Elgar Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4337/jhre.2014.02.08
OpenAlexW1998443483
LanguageEN
Citations received15

The recent high-level emergence of ‘climate justice’ in the normative and policy discourse addressing the social and legal aspects of climate change is welcome. However, certain dangers of co-option face the concept as it gains institutional traction. Drawing on a critical theoretical reading of the patterns of climate injustice and their relationship with liberal legal subjectivity (and with the related themes of the politics of dis/embodiment, corporate juridical privilege, (neo)colonialism and the highly uneven structure of globalized world order), this article argues that ‘climate justice’ is more likely to sustain the necessary resistive critical energies if informed by critical legal reflection on historical and contemporary patterns of climate injustice, particularly as they emerge in relation to the privileged trope of liberal legal subjectivity and the juridical privileging of the corporate form. Future policy directions indicated by the analysis are briefly introduced

Climate change · Climate justice · Economic Justice · Environmental ethics · Environmental justice · Epistemology · Injustice · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Climate Change and Geoengineering · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Environmental law and policy · Law

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