Responding to Climate Injustice: The IPCC and Participatory Democracy

• In Event: Responding to Structural Injustice

Abstract

The Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are considered the “gold standard” in providing scientific evidence of the causes and impacts of climate change, as well as possible solutions. While widely cited by scholars of climate ethics, these reports have received less attention from critical and democratic theorists. The Sixth Assessment Report (2021-2023) provides a chance for closer engagement, as, for the first time, it integrates social science research on structural constraints and provides a strong backing for participatory decision-making mechanisms. This essay examines the democratic theory of IPCC Assessment Report 6, focusing on the core principle of “climate-resilient development” and showing that it lends important legitimacy to the role of participatory democracy in contesting large-scale climate injustices. Nevertheless, the participatory mechanisms and “development pathways” laid out in the report remain underspecified. I argue that by paying closer attention to actual climate justice experiments over the last fifteen years, specifically the Transition Town movement and the Camp for Climate Action, we find that a combination of disruptive and prefigurative democratic practices can help address the development impediments of motivation and efficacy identified by the IPCC. These ends are unlikely to be achieved, however, without greater attention to Indigenous critiques of ongoing colonial domination.

Author

• Jonathan Masin-Peters, Harvard University