Anna Stilz: Climate displacement and territorial justice

Date: 29 June 2023
Time: 10:30-11:45

Plats: Institutet för framtidsstudier, Holländargatan 13 in Stockholm, or online

OBS! This seminar is part of a workshop and therefor takes place on a different weekday and time than usual.

Research seminar with Anna Stilz, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

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Abstract

By contributing to climate change, industrialized states are shrinking the supply, and changing the character, of the world’s habitable spaces. These changes drastically increase the threat of environmental displacement. Since climate change compromises the earth’s habitability, it raises the question of territorial justice. When is a distribution of the earth’s spaces just? What does the international community, and especially high-emitting states, owe to the victims of climate change in the three categories outlined above? When might people justifiably raise claims to settle in and/or govern new areas, or to be compensated by other communities for the reduced habitability of their land? And when should such claims be rejected, because the affected persons’ share of territory is already an equitable one? The paper presented at this seminar makes three contributions to our understanding of this problem:

• First, it elaborates a Kantian account of territorial justice that should structure our thinking about what is owed to people at risk of climate displacement.
• Second, it argues (against many policy practitioners) that a just response to the risk of climate displacement should focus on building institutions to finance people’s adaptation at home, supporting citizenship rather than requiring people to relocate.
• Third, the paper theorizes a just relocation framework for those cases (largely involving sea-level rise) where relocation may become inevitable.

The paper argues that we must attend to procedural injustices in who is selected for relocation and how relocation processes are designed, that relocation rights should apply to communities and not just individuals, and that relocated groups should be given the territorial resources required to reconstruct their cultural and political self-determination, allowing people to maintain their citizenship in a new place. 

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