Collective Self-Determination and International Climate Governance

• In Event: International Authority and Autonomy of Peoples

Abstract

A sustainable solution to climate change will likely require authoritative international institutions to regulate many matters (e.g., land use policy) that have hitherto been regarded as wholly the province of national jurisdictions. Global environmental institutions may also need to depart from fully consensual models of decision-making, and to attach significant costs to state behavior to incentivize compliance. How might such extensive climate governance be made legitimate? Is this broad international authority in tension with the notion, implicit in theories of collective self-determination, that each society’s internal affairs should be the exclusive concern of its citizenry?

This paper argues that supranational authority is morally required to define and enforce certain rules constitutive of a global society where all peoples can enjoy collective self-determination on equal terms. I agree that collective autonomy is valuable: political groups have claims to autonomously shape their institutions in accordance with their own commitments and priorities. But self-determination is not a right to do whatever a group wants. It is limited by a morally mandatory duty to respect the self-determination of others, and to cooperate to secure the preconditions of self-determination for all. Just as domestic governments are necessary to secure the background conditions for individual self-determination, I argue that supranational rules and governance institutions are necessary to constitute and administer a system of collectively autonomous communities that can coexist alongside one another.

This means there is no right against international regulation that aims to ensure that political communities’ decisions are compatible with continued self-determination for others. Yet choices to sustain a high-emitting economy, to engage in transboundary pollution, or to degrade resources that provide key ecosystem services, threaten others’ self-determination. I argue that such choices can therefore legitimately be regulated; they are not internal sovereign matters justifiably insulated against interference. Guaranteeing the joint autonomy of all peoples requires limiting peoples’ sovereignty in certain areas.

On this view, international climate governance will be legitimate and consistent with a proper respect for peoples’ self-determination, so long as it is (a) multilaterally authorized, and so long as (b) it is exercised only for certain specific purposes, namely, to sustain a system of collectively autonomous peoples that can coexist alongside one another. I argue that the legitimacy of international climate governance derives from the consent of representative states, modulo certain moralized qualifications to state consent. Unlike traditional state consent theorists, I do not hold that each and every state needs to agree to climate governance institutions for these international institutions to legitimately govern. When a group refuses to consent to climate governance only because they refuse to recognize and respect others’ claims to self-determination, the international community is permitted to override their non-consent. But legitimate climate governance does depend upon the consent of reasonable cooperator states, i.e., states that (a) adequately represent their own peoples, (b) respect the self-determination of other peoples, (c) recognize the threat that environmental catastrophe poses, and (d) are therefore willing to adhere to requirements of morally mandatory climate cooperation. I also argue that unwilling states can legitimate be coerced, through economic sanctions, to comply with international climate regulations even when they refuse to consent to them.

Author

• Anna Stilz, Princeton University