Three problems of intergenerational justice

Intergenerational justice raises profound questions about the appropriate scope, pattern and currency of distribution. In this short article, I evaluate three arguments for restricting justice to dealings amongst contemporaries and argue that each can be overcome without abandoning the central tenets of liberal egalitarianism

Intergenerational justice and climate change

Global climate change has important implications for the way in which benefits and burdens will be distributed amongst present and future generations. As a result it raises important questions of intergenerational justice. It is shown that there is at least one serious problem for those who wish to approach these questions by utilizing familiar principles of justice. This is that such theories often pre-suppose harm-based accounts of injustice which are incompatible with the fact that the very social policies which climatologists and scientists claim will reduce the risks of climate change will also predictably, if indirectly, determine which individuals will live in the future. One proposed solution to this problem is outlined grounded in terms of the notion of collective interests

Justice between generations: investigating a sufficientarian approach

A key concern of global ethics is the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens amongst persons belonging to different populations. Until recently, the philosophical literature on global distribution was dominated by the question of how benefits and burdens should be divided amongst contemporaries. Recent years, however, have seen an increase in research on the scope and content of our duties to future generations. This has led to a number of innovative attempts to extend principles of distribution across time while retaining a focus on the entitlements of the existing poor. In this article, I examine a key aspect of intergenerational justice, namely, the appropriate 'pattern' of well-being that should be obtained across generations. With the aid of research into the impacts of global climate change, I evaluate a number of rival accounts of the pattern of justice and go on to explore the merits of a 'global sufficientarian' ethic, which holds that as many persons as possible should enjoy a satisfactory level of well-being regardless of when or where they live

Equity and the Kyoto Protocol

Global climate change raises a number of important issues for political scientists and theorists. One issue concerns the ethics of implementing policies that seek to manage the threats associated with dangerous climate change in order to protect the interests of future generations. The focus of much of the debate about climate change and inter-generational equity is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol to this Convention. This article outlines the mechanisms adopted by the Kyoto Protocol and three rival 'climate architectures', evaluating each in terms of some basic principles of equity

Qui bono? : justice in the distribution of the benefits and burdens of avoided deforestation

In this paper, I explore the question of how the costs of undertaking an important type of climate change mitigation should be shared amongst states seeking an environmentally effective and equitable response to global climate change. While much of the normative literature on climate mitigation has focused on burden sharing within the context of reductions in emissions of greenhouse gas, I explore the question of how the costs of protecting tropical forests in order to harness their climate mitigation potential should be distributed amongst developing and developed states. In response to this question, I outline and defend a ‘beneficiary pays’ account of forestry mitigation burden sharing that requires affluent states to finance measures supporting avoided deforestation while less affluent states, within whose territory these forests tend to be located, implement these measures. The normative basis for this account, I argue, is a principle of ‘unjust enrichment’ according to which developed states must bear much of the cost of avoided deforestation for its climate mitigation potential because of the huge economic benefits their citizens have accumulated from productive activities that have contributed to climate change

There is sufficient evidence to suggest Whitehall is leaning on researchers to produce politically useful research.

The quality of scientific evidence in government heavily depends upon the independent assessment of research. Pressure from those commissioning the research may pose a threat to scientific integrity and rigorous policy-making. Edward Page reports that whilst there is strong evidence of government leaning, this leaning appears to have little systematic impact on the nature of the conclusions that researchers reach due to the presence of disincentives within academia and research administrators within government

What’s methodology got to do with it? Public policy evaluations, observational analysis and RCTs

Are methodological choices critical to the success of an evaluation study? For policy evaluation research, the kind of research that governments and international organizations commission to find out whether policies or other interventions are working, we might expect methodology to play a more important role than for conventional academic research. If the questions evaluation research explores are relatively simple, empirical rather than theoretical issues – above all whether the program works or not, what is going wrong and how might it be fixed if not – and if governments make decisions committing huge public resources based on these evaluations, we might expect those who sponsor and conduct such research to be especially concerned with its scientific credibility as established through the empirical research techniques it uses (Box 31.1). This appears to be the reasoning behind those who advocate policy evaluation research adopting the ‘gold standard’ of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which are especially popular among politicians and government officials since they are deemed to be ‘the best way of testing whether a policy is working’ (Cabinet Office 2012). However, the activity of evaluating policies is rarely simply a matter of developing and applying a convincing methodology to guide policy by showing government what works and what does not. This chapter looks at the role of methodology in evaluations from the perspective of whether there is any evidence that policy-makers are more likely to pay attention to, or act upon, studies that are deemed to be methodologically superior, whether by virtue of being more sophisticated, rigorous or appropriate. The concern of this chapter is not with establishing the merits and demerits of different methodologies in evaluation studies, but rather with assessing the role of methodology in explaining the impact or lack of impact of any evaluation studies. In practical terms it seeks to answer the question: if a researcher makes additional efforts to increase the integrity or sophistication of the research methodology used to perform an evaluation, will the effort pay off in terms of increased influence for that research

Undergraduate research: an apprenticeship approach to teaching political science methods

Undergraduate research, the practice of teaching students by engaging them in a research project, has a long record of achievement. Research-based evaluations show it is likely to have a range of positive educational and career outcomes for students. Many examinations of these benefits apply to STEM subjects. This paper sets out one approach to undergraduate research in political science, based on an apprenticeship model. Using a small survey of all those who have followed the GV314 course at the London School of Economics since 2004 the paper finds evidence that the benefits of undergraduate research appear to be quite striking outside STEM subjects too