Vulnerability and the Climate Change Regime

Abstract

Climate change is precipitating social issues that are not traceable to a discreet, culpable actor. This is because greenhouse gas accumulation in the stratosphere is a global problem transcending the socio-political boundaries that law uses to assign responsibility. The diffuse nature of climate change calls for new legal approaches that can provide greater juridical responsiveness to social problems and universal human vulnerability that is emerging in the wake of one of the most pressing environmental challenges facing the international community today. Those social problems include displacement and dispossession of indigenous communities whose livelihoods depend directly on their environment, such as Arctic communities in Alaska, rural dwellers in the Himalayas, livestock farmers in the Kalahari, and forest-dwellers in the Amazon. Farming communities reliant upon rain-fed agriculture also face food insecurity due to changing, unpredictable rainfall patterns. While social impacts may be most keenly felt at the local level, the global nature of climate change means that jurisprudential bases of law at all levels--local, national, regional, and international--need to promote coherent legal responses that recognize the global genesis of what may be seen as localized problems. This essay will draw on human vulnerability theory to discuss law's role in promoting social justice in the wake of climate change. Vulnerability is the "characteristic that positions us in relation to each other as human beings and also suggests a relationship of responsibility between the state and its institutions and the individual." Vulnerability theory critiques the contemporary understanding of "the legal subject," which is built on an ideology that values liberty over equality and manipulates contractual concepts such as choice and consent to justify exploitation and structural inequality. That inequality has distorted and constrained the conception of the legal subject into a narrow and limited autonomous subject that is at the center of the analysis that law uses to organize society. Human vulnerability theory calls for enriching the legal subject by placing it in social context, and engaging with its complex and dynamic characteristics. The paper is divided into five Parts. Part I provides an overview of human vulnerability theory. Part II presents a vulnerability perspective on liberalism and neoliberalism, two theories that underlie the current global climate regime. Part III examines the concept of vulnerability in the climate discourse, while Part IV applies human vulnerability theory to the global climate regime. The final part states the conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]