Climate Injustice and Development: A capability perspective

Flavio Comim argues that climate injustice is a pervasive feature of current climate change problems. Injustice is manifested in terms of cost–benefit asymmetries and in the erosion of individuals' capabilities. To understand the overall impact of climate change on poverty and human development, it is relevant to contextualize this discussion within the general issue about the impact of ecosystem services on human well-being. Moreover, it is important to qualify what we understand by ‘climate justice’ and use this characterization to think about policy directions for better responses. Comim examines the division between distributive and procedural justice, putting forward a capability reading of ‘climate justice’ that focuses on the integration of these two dimensions of justice. Development (2008) 51, 344–349. doi:10.1057/dev.2008.36

Affective equality : who cares?

Human beings are not just economic actors, devoid of relationality; rather, they are interdependent and dependent with a deep capacity for moral feeling and attaching. The presumption that people are mere units of labour, movable from one country to another as production requires, is therefore an institutionalised form of affective injustice. As love, care and solidarity involve work, affective inequalities also occur when the burdens and benefits of these forms of work are unequally distributed. Affective inequality is an acutely gendered problem given the moral imperative on women to care, and an acute problem for all of humanity given that vulnerability and inter/dependency is endemic to the human condition.Not applicableEmbargo until Feb 2011 - AV 20/9/2010 ti,ke.kpw27/9/10 Released 11/3/11 - O