Sustainable development, global governance and justice

Project management: Prof. Dr. Darrel Moellendorf

Bitter poverty, massive social inequalities and climate change are some of the most pressing problems facing humanity. Billions of people live in extreme poverty and are equally threatened by the crises of the global financial system and the effects of climate change. One of the most important moral reasons to address climate change is its direct relevance to people in economic hardship.
The starting point of the research project was the assumption that mitigation of and adaptation to climate change impacts and poverty reduction cannot be seen as separate policy objectives. The extreme deprivation and particular vulnerability of people living in poverty cannot be reconciled with an international order based on the concept of human dignity as understood in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Persistent poverty, growing social inequality and rising CO2 emissions are signs of gross misguided developments in the current system of global governance.
Within research field 1, research on politics and institutions is not understood unilaterally as a process in which power, rule and violence or long-term structures and other factors are understood as “external” factors, but as a process in which norms and normative orientations play a central role. Numerous questions posed by the problem of climate change also provided an opportunity to ask fundamental moral questions about the possible emergence of a just international normative order. The concept of the “right to sustainable development” can play an important role in the arguments of poor countries, according to which international climate protection policy must not set back their legitimate development goals. There is also a kind of intergenerational normative order that emerges with particular urgency in this context. The idea that people who are alive now have a moral obligation to future generations to combat climate change justifies climate protection policy, but also requires specific forms of justification itself.
This research project encompassed moral philosophy and political theory discussions, analyses of international organizations and institutions, as well as the investigation of suitable courses of action that bring about social change. In particular, the PI’s research examined the social and normative connection between climate change and poverty. The dissertation project by research associate Daniel Callies entitled “Intentionally Manipulating the Climate: The Ethics and Governance of Climate Engineering”, looked in particular at possible arguments against climate engineering research.

The most important events and lectures in this project:

Lecture: Progress, Destruction, and the Anthropocene (by Darrel Moellendorf), University of Duisburg-Essen, May 2017.

Lecture: Progress, Destruction, and the Anthropocene (by Darrel Moellendorf), Liberty Fund/Social Philosophy and Policy conference, Redondo Beach, June 2017.

Workshop: Author-Meets-Critic Section on his The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change (by Darrel Moellendorf), ECPR Prague, September 2016.

Presentation: “Climate Engineering and Playing God” (by Daniel Callies), Warwick Graduate Conference on Political and Legal Theory, University of Warwick, England, February 2016.

Presentation: “Institutional Legitimacy and Solar Radiation Management” (by Daniel Callies), Science, Technology, and Public Policy Fellows Workshop, Harvard University, November 2016.

The most important publications in this project:

Moellendorf, Darrel: “Taking UNFCCC Norms Seriously”, in: D. Roser and J. Heyward (eds.): Climate Change and Non-Ideal Theory, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 104-124.

Moellendorf, Darrel: “Can Dangerous Climate Change Be Avoided”, Global Justice Theory Practice Rhetoric 8, 2016, [online] http://publikationen.stub.uni-frankfurt.de/index.php/gjn [05.10.2017].

Moellendorf, Darrel: “Global Distributive Justice: The Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in: D. Held and P. Maffettone (eds.): Global Political Theory, London: Polity Press, 2016.

Moellendorf, Darrel and Axel Schaffer: “Equalizing the Intergenerational Burdens of Climate Change-An Alternative to Discounted Utilitarianism”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy XL, 2016, pp. 43-62.

Moellendorf, Darrel: “The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy”, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

people in this project:

Project management / contact person

Moellendorf, Darrel, Prof. Dr.

Project staff

Visak, Tatjana