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Abstract:
A substantial proportion of the United States population is at or below the poverty level, yet many of the greenhouse gas emissions reduction measures proposed or adopted to date will increase the costs of energy, motor vehicles, and other consumer goods. This essay suggests that although scholarship and policymaking to date have focused on the disproportionate impact of these increased costs on the low-income population, the costs will have two important additional effects. First, the anticipated costs will generate political opposition from social justice groups, reducing the likelihood that aggressive measures will be adopted. Second, to the extent aggressive measures are adopted, they will miss large potential emissions reductions because the low-income population will be unable to respond by purchasing less greenhouse gas-intensive, but more expensive, consumer goods. The essay proposes a novel remedy to address this problem: equity offsets. These offsets will allow other individuals and organizations to subsidize low-income individuals' purchase of less greenhouse gas-intensive goods, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the political opposition to emissions reduction measures, and the hardships caused by the higher costs of consumer goods. The essay suggests that the creation of a private or public equity offset program along these lines is feasible and will begin to address all three implications of the climate change equity problem.

climate change, environmental law, environmental policy, offsets, justice, equity, greenhouse gases

Abstract:
Private equity offsets are a partial solution to the difficult justice issues raised on the global level by climate change. Equity offsets allow individuals to follow their moral intuitions about the global differences in carbon emissions and the impact of global warming on individual lives. An active equity offset market could precede a post-Kyoto international agreement for global emissions reductions and could enhance the prospects for the adoption of such an agreement.

Climate change, justice, equity, global private governance, global public governance, international law

Abstract:
We have been asked to examine climate change justice by discussing the methods of allocating the costs of addressing climate change among nations. Our analysis suggests that climate and justice goals cannot be achieved by better allocating the emissions reduction burdens of current carbon mitigation proposals — there may be no allocation of burdens using current approaches that achieves both climate and justice goals. Instead, achieving just the climate goal without exacerbating justice concerns, much less improving global justice, will require focusing on increasing well-being and inducing fundamental changes in development patterns to generate greater levels of well-being with reduced levels of material throughput. We identify several core characteristics of the public and private policy architectures and initiatives necessary to accomplish this task. We also propose examples of short- and long-term initiatives. Our near-term approach recognizes that a focus on public law remedies and nation-states is necessary but not sufficient. We suggest a feasible new mechanism, equity micro-offsets, that could reduce emissions while improving well-being among the poor. Equity micro-offsets can harness altruistic preferences, market mechanisms, and private oversight to reduce emissions and increase well-being in poor countries. Equity micro-offsets also suggest the nature of the long-term political, social, and economic macro-transformation that may be necessary. From household cook stove initiatives to policy architectures that include forestry, agriculture, and other overlooked sectors, achieving climate and justice goals will require transformative approaches, not just improved cost allocations.

climate change, greenhouse gases, environmental law, environmental policy, international agreements, social justice, environmental justice, microfinance, and offsets

Abstract:
In activist circles feminist political thought is often viewed as abstract because it does not help activists make the kinds of arguments that are generally effective with donors and policy makers. The feminist political philosopher's focus on how we know and what counts as knowledge is a large step away from the terrain in which activists make their arguments to donors. Yet, philosophical reflection on the relations between power and knowledge can make a significant contribution to women's human rights work in the area of evaluation. Feminist political philosophy can offer guidelines for how to evaluate the work of women's human rights organizations and their funders in light of the social, political, and economic conditions that render their work necessary and difficult. This article offers 1) an account of the difficulty in showing the impact of social change activism using conventional modes of measurement, particularly those that focus on first order effects, 2) feminist theoretical insights into the interrelatedness of global gender injustices that may help us develop better benchmarks of evaluation for women's human rights programming, and 3) a sketch of how to approach the evaluation of organizations and donors who seek to support global gender justice.

feminism, global justice, women's rights, philanthropy, development

Abstract:
When we study human rights empirically, what do we mean to study‘ The existence of institutions that enable the realization of rights or the enjoyment of those rights‘ The absence of flagrant violations of some of the basic individual rights or the sense that one’s rights will not be flagrantly violated‘ What theory of human rights should we use‘ Most positive theory of human rights – that is, empirical studies that seek to show the correlation between political institutions or economic conditions on human rights recognition, are based on the first kind of normative human rights theory, the one that defines rights outside of the struggle for them, This paper puts forward a methodology for the empirical study of human rights from the inside: do people enjoy their human rights‘ Using the Latin American Public Opinion Project democracy survey database, we propose a new fashion to measure human rights from the same people who struggle to advance them. In this paper, we will flesh out what might be meant by rights “enjoyment” and how we might study rights enjoyment empirically. We test whether our measurement of human rights enjoyment matches or not the traditional measures of human rights and discuss how this notion of rights enjoyment can advance our understanding of human rights.