Abstract
In this article I elaborate and defend a rights-based understanding of climate politics, that is, one that takes climate politics to concern the rights to access of natural resources as opposed to people’s economic incentives. The argument contains two parts. The first is negative: to demonstrate that the tragedy of the commons as a story of climate change is inadequate. The second is positive: to suggest a more satisfactory framework, which I call the tragedy of the few. In this view, climate politics is neither primarily mitigation nor economic incentive politics, but one of distributing rights to access natural resources in a fair and environmentally-friendly way. By changing both the narrative and underlying methodological assumptions, my goal is to enable us to accommodate the rights to access natural resources as a key moral issue in climate politics. I begin by sketching the main features of the tragedy of the commons and demonstrate its inadequacy. I then provide an account of the rights-based view of climate change that consists of two arguments. First, I demonstrate the normative side of the argument by highlighting the importance of environmental rights, and second, I outline the empirical side of the argument by discussing recent studies on the properties of natural resources and on the corporate agents who extract the resources that emit greenhouse gasses.
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Notes
There are different ways of theorising a good theory of state rights to territory. In this article, I follow Stilz’s argument that states’ rights are based on a system of property law (Stilz 2009; Stilz 2011). Alternative theories of states’ rights to territory are justified by reference to national or territorial self-determination that insists on (for different reasons) a significant link between a particular group and a particular place. For a good discussion on how states have control over resources, see the publications of the Online Symposium on Resource Rights (Kolers 2012; Moore 2012; Armstrong 2012; Simmons 2012). For a further contribution to the conversation, see Armstrong (2015).
The prisoner’s dilemma explains the occurrence of social coordination problems when (1) agents have complete information, e.g., they know the full structure of the game and the plausible outcomes, and (2) communication between the agents is forbidden or impossible. Consider the following example. Two persons are questioned separately about a joint crime. The attorney gives each prisoner two alternatives: to confess to the crime or not. If neither confesses, they will both receive 2 years’ punishment for some minor illegality [B, B]. If they both confess, they will be receive less than the most severe sentence [A, A] (see Parfit 1984, p. 56ff.; Ostrom 1990, pp. 3–28, 217). For both agents the initial preference ordering are [B, A], [B, B], [A, A], and [A, B]. The prisoner’s dilemma game illustrates that it is impossible for the agents to choose the decision with the best outcome if they are unable to take into account the decisions of the other players. The agent’s dominant strategy is to play ‘not-confess’, but the outcome of the game depends on the choice of agent II. Given that neither agent I nor II knows what the other agent plays, the initial preference ordering is unreliable and may be self-defeating.
Political regulation subsidised the modernisation of fishing fleets, which leads to a disproportionately efficient fishing industry. Regulations designed by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the European Union contribute to limiting the access to subtraction channels by subsidising the most effective and highly technological fishermen (Desombre and Samuel Barkin 2011, chapters 3 and 4).
Private goods are goods that can be traded on the market because they have excludable benefits and are rival in consumption (Kaul and Mendoza 2003, p. 79). This does not apply to public and common goods. Public goods, such as security, a well-functioning market, liberal democracy and peace, cannot be traded on the market. One reason for this is that public goods have non-excludable benefits and are non-rival in consumption in the sense that the security of one person does not reduce or in any way deprive another person of the opportunity to consume the benefits of security. By contrast, common-pool resources (CPR) are subtractable and rival, whereas peace cannot be over-consumed, common goods such as fish stocks, water, air and biocapacity can be over-consumed and eventually be depleted.
Moreover, Schlager et al. argue that the different sets of physical properties influence individual agents’ incentives and strategies. ‘The two characteristics of mobility and storage affect (1) the severity of [allocation and development problems], (2) the relative ease with which users can resolve those problems, and (3) the kinds of institutional arrangements they are likely to develop and implement’ (Schlager et al. 1994, pp. 296–297).
Much attention has been paid to political and civil aspects of human rights. Less attention has been paid to the environmental and subsistence aspects of human rights. Important exemptions are Shue’s Basic Rights (1980), Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s edited volume on The Quality of Life (Nussbaum and Sen 1993) and more recently Simon Caney’s ‘Climate Change, Human Rights and Moral Thresholds’ (2010).
Following Shue, rights are basic ‘if enjoyment of them is essential to the enjoyment of all other rights. This is what is distinctive about a basic right. When a right is genuinely basic, any attempt to enjoy any other right by scarifying the basic right would be quite literally self-defeating, cutting the ground from beneath. Therefore, if a right is basic, other non-basic rights may be sacrificed, if necessary, in order to secure the basic right’ (Shue 1980, p. 19).
Considerations of the territorial rights of nation-states are set aside here. For a recent contribution, see Stilz (2009).
I develop and defend a fact-sensitive political theory which combines factual and normative considerations elsewhere (Scavenius 2014).
This conclusion is compatible with the left-libertarian account of ‘joint ownership’ and ‘world ownership’ of natural resources. Steiner formulates the essential point as follows: ‘It is a necessary truth that no object can be made from nothing, and hence that all titles to manufactured or freely transferred objects must derive from titles to natural and previously unowned objects’ (Steiner 1977, p. 44). For discussions of the idea of left-libertarianism, see Cohen (1995, chapter 3). For a critical discussion, see Arneson (2010).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the participants at the ECPR workshop 2014 and Signe Blaabjerg Christoffersen and Irina Papazu for their comments on an earlier draft of this article, and Simon Caney, Eva Erman and Anders-Berg-Sørensen for their written comments.
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Scavenius, T. The Tragedy of the Few. Res Publica 22, 53–65 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9311-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9311-0