Procedural Justice in International Negotiations on Climate Change

Abstract

International negotiations on climate change are among the most difficult ever conducted worldwide because, besides the intrinsic complexity of the issues at stake, they are still pervaded by a plurality of values and views of the world which ultimately produces harsh and apparently insurmountable conflicts among countries. For these reasons, and with a view to the greater applicability of procedural justice to diverse pluralistic contexts of analysis, the ethical issues that characterize climate negotiations can be more usefully addressed by means of a specific version of proceduralism – that is, impure proceduralism. The aim of the article is therefore to set out a notion of impure procedural justice suitable for climate negotiations. To this end, it defines and empirically tests relevant fairness criteria in the formal negotiating setting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Our analysis shows that the single most important determinant of impure proceduralism, as evinced by the test conducted on fairness criteria, is information. It is finally argued that information can be enhanced in order to increase the fairness of processes and procedures when, consistently with Hampshire’s principle of adversary argument, all parties have an opportunity to be heard whilst advancing their cases.

Keywords: Climate change, Fairness criteria, Information, Negotiations, Procedural justice