Legal Pluralism and Human Rights in the Idea of Climate Justice

3.1 The ‘First Wave’: Roots of Climate Justice

Climate justice is a transnational discourse of plural conceptions of climate change and justice from below that compete in hegemonic processes at multiple, overlapping scales. A legal pluralist analysis helps demonstrate this in how actors vernacularise and disaggregate internationalist, statist climate narratives, meeting them, firstly, at the global level, but becoming increasingly multi-scalar and future-orientated.

Based on Scholsberg and Collins,¹⁶ climate justice encompasses three converging discursive spaces populated by different interpretations: academic debates, state-NGO policy arenas, and movements springing partly from North American ‘environmental justice’ movements. Thus, Indian ‘activist-scholars’ helped popularise the term¹⁷ influenced by environmental justice, alongside ‘a concerted effort’ by certain Southern states to recognise differentiated historical responsibilities.¹⁸ Academic discourses often focus on applying existing justice principles and rights to climate change.¹⁹ While many environmental and climate justice movements are ‘made up largely of assertions of various rights’,²⁰ Schlosberg suggests academic definitions are ‘too detached from (…) movements that use the idea;’ in practice, both ‘discourses of justice’ and ‘experiences (…) of injustice, inform how the concept is used’.²¹ Discourses of justice and injustice blend dialectically with normative and institutional openings at inter- and intra-state scales, including legal norms of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and rights. This characterised both the ‘first wave’ of climate interest in the early 1990s (when the UNFCCC was signed) and the ‘second wave’ in the late 2000s, represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and high-profile UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties (COPs).

Law has thus played a major role in climate justice. Inclusion of justice-related principles in the UNFCCC (1992) reflected discourse of justice and injustice, including in long-standing North-South UN divergences, providing foci for collective action frames for climate justice vernacularisation relevant to particular experiences of climate injustice; climate justice is often considered ‘a way to operationalize’²² the Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) principle, and other concerns, listed in Article 3 (‘Principles’), including intergenerational equity; that ‘developed’ states ‘should take the lead;’ ‘specific needs’ of ‘developing’ states; and the right to sustainable development.²³ Echoing legal pluralism’s premises, these open-ended principles are said to make climate justice ‘a jurist’s nightmare’ — ‘its meaning varies depending on the (…) actor that manipulates it, even if some of its semantic bases are institutionalised in legal texts’.²⁴

Early developments related to these top-down, statist institutional openings both reflect and parallel bottom-up climate justice movements stemming partly from particular historical discourse of justice and injustice in environmental justice movements. Environmental justice built on civil rights and feminist struggles against toxic waste in African American communities in the 1980s, consciously contrasting mainstream environmentalism’s ‘wilderness ethic’. Church groups were key.²⁵ While the Clinton administration was relatively receptive, the Bush administration closed domestic institutional spaces; this, along with growing climate awareness, encouraged a ‘more international frame’, especially ‘redefining climate change as (…) [a] human rights issue’.²⁶ This informed the first Climate Justice Summit at the 2000 Hague COP, developing into the International Climate Justice Network and 2002 Bali Principles of Climate Justice (based on the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit Principles of Environmental Justice), acknowledging inequality, indigenous concerns²⁷ and declaring climate change ‘a human rights issue’ in attacking market principles guiding negotiations.²⁸ A 2004 Climate Justice Declaration attacked carbon trading, arguing climate policy must not exacerbate existing injustices, and called for a just transition.²⁹ Religious groups were still central, including the 2005 World Council of Churches’ Spiritual Declaration on Climate Change.³⁰

Thus, institutional openings (and closings) in hegemonic processes both for subnational movements with particular historical and politico-economic influences, and at the UNFCCC’s inter-state level, initially promoted international frames for climate justice. The ‘feedback loop’ between international law and social fields at other scales saw actors compare high-level statist debates and principles contained in climate law with their lived experience of climate injustice. As such, climate justice proponents became increasingly active at international scales. Other norms, including rights, offered alternatives to statist, neoliberal hegemonic framings; indeed rights’ universalism and own international legal status further bolstered global frames.

3.2 The ‘Second Wave:’ Spillover and Frustration

Increasing international participation encouraged ‘social movements spillover’;³¹ environmental and burgeoning climate justice norms found receptive audiences in environmental and global justice movements, critical of neoliberalism and technocratic discourses, already operating in international settings, for whom ‘lack of progress in over 15 years of talks (…) spurred many veteran movement actors to radicalize’. Frustration increasingly centred around technocratic, neoliberal UNFCCC processes, especially the Kyoto Protocol’s market mechanisms, and ‘the stark juxtaposition of the “democratic, consensus-based United Nations” image with (…) backroom deals’.³² ‘Insider-outsider networks’ gradually built climate justice’s ‘epistemic community’,³³ linking North and South.³⁴ For example, the UN Human Development Report 2007/8 on climate change was written by a former Oxfam director, highlighting ‘equity and human rights’.³⁵ Certain states, particularly low-lying islands, championed rights approaches with support from (Northern-led) organisations, securing an Office of the High Commissioner report and Human Rights Council resolutions.³⁶ Additional impetus came from the labour movement, particularly Just Transition narratives. Increasing pressure to find a post-Kyoto agreement saw these dialectical trends converge under UNFCCC processes started by the 2007 Bali Road Map (designed to secure a new binding agreement), which lasted until the 2011 Durban COP.

While the spillover with global justice activists promoted comparatively disruptive protest,³⁷ many elite NGOs accepted ‘restrictions on their behavior in exchange for opportunities for influence’.³⁸ The Climate Action Network’s (CAN) ‘hierarchical, reformist (…) “first generation advocacy”, privileging Northern NGOs, led to dissident members launching Climate Justice Now! (CJN). CAN and CJN competed and cooperated around the pivotal 2009 Copenhagen COP, with overlapping membership,³⁹⁴⁰ while a more radical group, Climate Justice Action (CJA) formed around (largely European) direct action networks.⁴¹ Unequal movement actors thus exploited multiple scales and varying access to international institutional spaces using different normative and institutional groundings.

Given growing international agitation and raised expectations, failure to secure agreements at Copenhagen began a shift in scale and social fields for many movement actors. Demonstrating that states themselves are non-unitary actors within uneven inter-state relations, certain Latin American states organised alternative spaces, chiefly the 2010 Cochabamba World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC), attended by thousands of state and movement representatives. Latin American climate justice vernacularisation invoked indigenous norms as part of growing recognition of legal pluralism in constitutional reform.⁴² These alternative fora became sites for contention. Feminists criticised promotion of supposedly indigenous concepts like buen vivir [‘living well’] — which stresses ‘human rights and democracy’ through ‘ancestral communitarian natural law’⁴³ — for essentialising ‘male/female complementarity’,⁴⁴ themselves mobilising international human rights standards.⁴⁵ Thus, the same legal norms were employed differently by actors in the same discursive spaces. Indeed, not only were legal norms like rights pluralised, but plural norms were legalised, with cooption possible in either direction. The CMPCC Peoples’ Agreement ‘infused’ indigenous norms into international discourses.⁴⁶ As Fabricant suggests, this can obscure their ‘territoriality and materiality’,⁴⁷ leaving them open to being ‘commoditized, and refashioned’⁴⁸ to serve hegemonic interests. Subsequently, parts of the Peoples’ Agreement were included ‘in brackets’ in negotiating texts for the 2010 Cancun COP, including indigenous and ‘Mother Earth’s’ rights. None of these were adopted but gave the impression climate justice was taken seriously in statist procedures. Bolivia and Ecuador’s own pursuit of neoliberal resource extraction contradicted their climate justice rhetoric; Cochrane suggests this warns against reifying indigeneity or ‘displacing class oppression with notions of cultural diversity’,⁴⁹ demonstrating how legal pluralism cannot disregard political economy.

Cancun thus represented ‘an almost total reinscription and subsumption of this “other” discourse’ of climate justice. This was a turning point for many climate justice advocates frustrated again in their international engagement.⁵⁰ The 2011 Durban COP’s results were described by some as ‘tantamount to genocide’.⁵¹ Still, Durban witnessed a concerted strategy by several states, increasing ‘youth activism’, and an ‘occupation’ by civil society groups, which ‘injected a new dynamic’ into climate justice and secured more radical targets, some non-market mechanisms and increased adaptation finance. A turn to more multilevel approaches to climate justice was encapsulated by a Bolivian negotiator, who stated ‘the key thing is not inside the COP’, but ‘strong organization from social movements (…) around the whole world’.⁵²

3.3 Multi-sited Climate Justice and Rights

From a legal pluralist perspective, simultaneous influx of normative orders (including movement spillover) and institutional openings in the global climate discursive space saw vernacular frames globalised and global frames, including UNFCCC legal norms, vernacularised, as well as crossovers between global frames (especially through human rights). However, the shortcomings of these institutional openings and global frames encouraged a strategic switch away from the global scale, albeit with altered, hybrid frames merging ‘local’ and ‘global’. This decentralisation and hybridisation expanded issues, scales and actors involved in climate justice. For example, ‘just sustainability’ movements, like ‘transition towns’, seek ‘to transform both dominating and unsustainable practices of production and consumption’ and ‘rebuild the material relationships we have with (…) resources we use’.⁵³ This ‘pushes beyond the qualifiers “environment” or “climate” (…) understanding that justice itself depends on a stable and predictable set of environmental conditions’.⁵⁴

Rights interpretations have played a role in the emergence of multi-sited climate justice. In Derman’s analysis of civil society COP discourses, ‘uneven responsibilities, vulnerabilities, and impacts’ are strategically linked ‘to rights language as mobilized in legal doctrine’. Rights assist in disaggregating the UNFCCC’s statist principles ‘from the national scale to (…) individuals and communities’, seeking ‘increased recognition and representation of marginalized stakeholders’.⁵⁵ Thus, for Skillington, ‘hybrid’ climate justice coalitions share a diagnostic ‘frame of exploitation’, linking ecological degradation to ‘certain economic actors’, and a prognostic frame advocating ‘expansive politics of sustainable development’, where private exploitation of commons is seen as a rights violation,⁵⁶ implying special compensatory rights.⁵⁷

However, given different rights interpretations compete across social fields within uneven hegemonic processes, cooption of climate justice through rights to bolster statist interests is also evident. Human rights’ ongoing tension is that they, too, are state-based law, despite the transcendent prefix ‘human’; indeed, as much as they disaggregate sub-nationally, they bear imprints of historical struggles from particular contexts. Grear suggests rights are ‘intrinsically ill equipped to prevent (…) violations justified in the name of “national interest”’ — and, given ‘national interest is increasingly defined by (…) neoliberalism’, rights are ‘even more vulnerable’ because they ‘are already colonized’ by neoliberalism, meaning ‘climate justice already contains (…) the juridical receptors for corporate viral capture’.⁵⁸ Skillington’s discourse analysis finds hegemonic climate discourses easily reframe rights around ‘the “preeminent right” of states to exploit dwindling resources’.⁵⁹ This paradox is appreciated in legal pluralism by Merry — rights inspire movements for social change but, often, ‘to be part of the human rights system (…) [actors or movements ]must emphasize (…) a modernist view of the individual and society embedded in the global North (…) along with democracy, the rule of law, capitalism and the free market’.⁶⁰ This sounds caution about what Grear calls a ‘strong rule of law’ climate justice approach because climate injustice ‘is a manifestation of a structural pathology in which law itself is central’.⁶¹ Grear suggests going ‘beyond seeing climate injustice as a symptom of climate change (as if simply “caused by” it)’, and instead acknowledging ‘systemic structural conditions’ of ‘liberal legal subjectivity’ and global inequality.⁶²

Doing so overcomes what Fisher (no relation) calls the ‘global trap’ — assuming the international is ‘the space for the best access to climate justice’, despite climate change being ‘mediated through multiple local problems’⁶³ — a familiar issue in rights and legal pluralism, and a dilemma for ‘translators’ who, echoing Merry, vernacularise transnational climate justice through seeking resonant frames.⁶⁴ Translators ‘claim their own space’ in climate debates but often ‘claimed’ spaces simply ‘feed into the UNFCCC’.⁶⁵ As with the CMPCC, particular injustices can be ‘redefined as part of wider national injustices’ to ‘match with (…) global [statist] discourses’.⁶⁶ Fisher demonstrates how Indian climate justice movements struggle to situate arguments about intra-state distribution against the government’s ‘climate nationalism’,⁶⁷ framing statist historical responsibility and national average per capita emissions. Greenpeace India endorsed a disaggregated rights-based framework, Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs), but abandoned this as it failed to resonate.⁶⁸ Echoing Grear, Fisher suggests climate justice must go beyond the ‘global’ ‘to explore the distribution, recognition and participation of different actors across different spaces’, rather than seeing climate injustices as ‘additional’ to existing structural inequalities. Otherwise, hegemonic discourses of domestic transition can repackage ‘climate justice as the resilience of existing social systems rather than the transformation to new more equal societies’.⁶⁹ For rights and related discourses, then, possibilities for cooption in unequal, multiscalar hegemonic processes around climate justice are acute.

3.4 Climate Justice, Rights and Legal Pluralism

To assist in analysing particular contexts, climate justice aspects that compete within these discursive spaces are identified as responsibilities, rights, distributions, procedures and recognition, where recognition is a dimension in which injustices are linked to ‘cultural or symbolic injustices’.⁷⁰ Bulkeley et al conceive of these within a pyramid, rather than a two-dimensional ‘plane’ as in statist iterations, ‘where distributions, procedures, rights and responsibilities form the four triangular faces, and recognition (…) the square bottom’; consequently, ‘each facet (…) is bound to’ and ‘filtered through the others, refracting and reconfiguring what (…) justice entails in any one context:’⁷¹

Fig 1

We might add a fourth dimension — time — and recognise both diagnostic and prognostic frames. Furthermore, we might think of parallel dimensions, with the pyramid in competition with the statist two-dimensional plane in hegemonic processes.

This provides a heuristic for examining climate justice from legal pluralist and rights perspectives: various symbolic frames (recognition) are used to vernacularise climate justice norms (rights, responsibilities, distributions and procedures) by actors in social fields at different scales (the pyramid’s three-dimensional space). Discourses and narratives that emerge, contesting hegemonic discourses across the two-dimensional statist plane, operate at different spaces within the pyramid dependent on which aspects they relate to or combine with in different contexts; at different heights depending on how they are translated at different scales; and emerging at different times depending on historical struggles. Thus, climate justice began by engaging with inter-state and international climate discourses on rights, responsibilities, distributions and procedures through more disaggregated strategies, using recognition to highlight climate injustices; this spatially global and temporally diagnostic frame has gradually deepened within the pyramid by further discourses of recognition and expanded with scales shifting more to the particular level, while temporal perspectives have unfolded towards more transformative, prognostic visions of transition and social change. Rights have played a role in this spatial deepening, scalar expansion and temporal unfolding.

4.1 Hegemonic Climate Discourses

I now turn to actors within Norwegian social fields⁷² that vernacularise climate justice at various scales, and within Norway’s historical and politico-economic context. The following observations are based on the author’s participation in climate discourses⁷³ and a review of publicly-available sources evidencing how Norwegian actors frame climate justice.

‘Climate justice’ as a Norwegian term [klimarettferdighet] became entrenched during the second wave, characterised by movement spillover, initially between environmental, development and church organisations. Church groups were particularly active translators — including development NGO Norwegian Church Aid (NCA), and the state church and Christian Council of Norway’s environmental initiative, ‘The Work of Creation and Sustainability’ [Skaperverk og Bærekraft], which produces Klimarettferdighet magazine.

Klimarettferdighet, like climate justice, has gradually expanded, beginning with international statist discourses during the ‘second wave’, before turning to more transformative, localised transition discourses post-Durban. As legal pluralism suggests, frame choices were partly inspired by institutional openings provided in the dominant state framing (the two-dimensional plane). Indeed, a central moment of the second wave globally was the then Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s announcement of what were considered the world’s most ambitious carbon cuts in 2007.⁷⁴ Ytterstad illustrates how this originally met little criticism within Norway, especially regarding prioritisation of buying tradable credits in other countries over domestic cuts and without discussion of Norway’s petroleum industry,⁷⁵ suggesting a ‘radicalism at an impasse’ with ‘no climate policy from below’; partly, this is because potential critics were Socialist Left Party members that had to balance criticism with their party’s position in the governing coalition, while others lacked concrete alternatives.⁷⁶ Put differently, climate justice proponents carefully negotiated their government’s high-profile climate agenda (or climate nationalism) with increasing frustration over insufficient progress. Like on the global scene, then, climate justice in Norway emerged as an alternative, building on pre-existing themes, as a way out of this ‘impasse’.

Tracing the emergence of klimarettferdighet therefore requires acknowledgement of the central contradiction in Norwegian hegemonic discourses: Norway promotes itself within international climate discourses, while maintaining its position among leading petroleum exporters. This encourages an international, statist frame that deflects attention from the national level. Navigating this climate nationalism has been the overriding challenge for translating climate justice.

Three themes have supported this international, statist frame: promotion of inter-state emissions trading; financing of high-profile climate initiatives in Southern states, and pursuit of technologies, like carbon capture and storage (CCS), that prolong carbon-intensive industries and avoid ‘carbon leakage’. As linguistic analysis of 2012’s government climate change white paper suggests, hegemonic narratives emphasise ‘international agreement (…) as the only satisfactory way to tackle climate change’,⁷⁷ with the Norwegian government as ‘hero’ despite the general ‘villains’ label for industrialised countries.⁷⁸ This climate policy exceptionalism has solid normative roots; Norgaard’s ethnographic research in the early 2000s in one rural community found, rather than insufficient scientific knowledge, a ‘socially organized process’ of ‘denial’ caused climate inaction;⁷⁹ alongside norms stressing tradition and local patriotism, ‘social narratives, some produced by (…) government, to deflect responsibility for and legitimate Norwegian climate and petroleum policy’, including egalitarianist and eco-friendly narratives were constructed.⁸⁰ Temporally, Fløttum and Espeland find ‘responsibility is left to the future and said to presuppose international cooperation’; as such, ‘the direct relation between Norwegian climate initiatives and effects is concealed’.⁸¹ This diagnostic frame thus postpones implications for Norwegian political economy.⁸² Indeed, another white paper on the Arctic frames climate change as an opportunity opening new (petroleum-related) economic possibilities.⁸³ The contradiction between addressing climate change and developing petroleum is captured by former Prime Minister Stoltenberg, who said ‘the goal is not to keep the carbon in the ground’ but ‘to reduce emissions to the atmosphere’. Representatives of the new government have even described use of petroleum-generated wealth to finance climate measures as ‘a paradox that we actually should be proud of’.⁸⁴ As Norgaard concludes, ‘denial of (…) climate change serves to maintain Norwegian global economic interests and perpetuate global environmental injustice’.⁸⁵ This provides the politico-economic context for examining legal pluralism, rights and klimarettferdighet.

Using the two-dimensional plane to understand dominant statist discourses, firstly, promoting emissions trading as the goal of international negotiations minimises Norway’s responsibility given its relative size globally, emphasising global emissions and thus global emissions reductions financed by Norway in other countries, but simultaneously obscuring global impacts of Norwegian petroleum exports. Distributions are downplayed, hiding Norway’s historically disproportionate contribution, with formal, inter-state procedures prioritised and rights understood as states’ rights to emit; thus, recognition of responsibility for climate harms is clouded, with discussion purely at aggregated state level. Norgaard found evidence of this in communities’ denial of responsibility through the phrase ‘Norge er et lite land’ [‘Norway is a small country’], especially as international legal discourses move beyond the Kyoto Protocol’s national targets applying only to ‘developed’ states.⁸⁶ The Kyoto Protocol itself assisted this by allowing emissions reductions to be financed by ‘developed’ states overseas to meet their targets; this financing was to be ‘supplemental’ to domestic reductions,⁸⁷ but Norway and others interpreted this legal anchoring liberally to (re)establish a global frame for post-Kyoto discussions.

This is confirmed in Norway’s COP activity. Lahn, a former civil society member of Norway’s negotiation team, documents how Norway positioned itself centrally in ‘second wave’ COPs through ‘the Norwegian proposal’ to give states rights to emit greenhouse gases. Rather than being allocated for free, a percentage of emissions permits would be auctioned. High-emission states would have to buy extra permits from those who did not use their permits and via auction through the UN, generating revenue for the UN for Southern climate initiatives.⁸⁸ As Lahn suggests, by presenting negotiations as a means to share ‘the right to use [atmospheric] commons’ through commodification without attaching distributive principles,⁸⁹ the proposal, although eventually rejected, contributed to financialising climate talks without accepting ‘this enormous economic redistribution must happen in a just way’.⁹⁰ Crucially, the proposal implied emissions rights ‘do not need to have any connection with how large countries’ emissions actually are;’ rather, permits would be set internationally and traded globally. Thus, ‘responsibility (…) is moved from the local and national level to (…) closed meeting rooms in international negotiations’, implying nothing is left if these negotiations fail⁹¹ — the ‘global trap’ outlined previously — and meaning Stoltenberg’s high-profile pledge (already caveated with ‘if it contributes to an international agreement’) was never intended to be taken domestically.⁹²

Secondly, financing climate initiatives in the South, especially rainforest-related, further deflects attention from Norwegian responsibility with inter-state, global framings, while securing Norway’s position as a leading climate actor. It provides, nonetheless, limited recognition of inter-state distribution. Consequently, klimarettferdighet translators must carefully walk the line between criticism and cooption; the initiatives are both praised as evidence ‘politicians are important driving forces (…) for climate justice’⁹³ and increasingly subject to scrutiny of their effectiveness.⁹⁴

Thirdly, unlike the first two more diagnostic themes, CCS and carbon leakage are more prognostic, presenting Norwegian petroleum as the solution to international challenges: it is portrayed as ‘cleaner’ than international competitors, therefore preferable for addressing Southern energy poverty, and Norwegian gas is a ‘bridge’ between coal and renewables (arguments documented by Norgaard⁹⁵ already in the early 2000s). As Fløttum and Espeland note, this narrative ‘invites an ethical evaluation’ but ‘does not take up the ethical implications (…) connected to petroleum export’.⁹⁶ Again, international climate law features here; such claims are ‘justified by switching the focus from national targets and measures (…) to emphasizing climate change as an international problem’,⁹⁷ inviting comparisons between Norwegian petroleum and other energy sources. Norwegian responsibility is further diminished — indeed, practically absolved — while giving limited recognition to inter-state distributions by invoking energy poverty. Thus, this narrative hints at transition (primarily through CCS) without changing course. This is accompanied by the suggestion unilateral transition will not only hurt Norwegians (through job and economic losses), but have limited or adverse effects, given ‘carbon leakage’, whereby industries leave Norway for ‘developing’ states where environmental standards are lower — yet again supporting an international, statist framing. Norgaard links this to popular arguments emphasising Norwegian’s past poverty.⁹⁸

In summary, hegemonic Norwegian climate narratives are dominated by statist, international frames that deflect responsibility, but adopt aspects of justice frames by implying Norwegian petroleum can solve climate and developmental crises. This includes coopting rights in emissions rights and the defence of Norwegians’ rights implied by carbon leakage. These narratives, reflecting the political economy of an oil-dependent state, are carefully woven into existing norms in social fields. The following outlines how, in the context of these hegemonic processes, klimarettferdighet vernacularises climate justice in countering statist, diagnostic narratives, before examining development of more prognostic frames focused on domestic transition in line with Norwegian norms and political economy.

4.2 Counter-hegemonic Responses

Like climate justice discourses generally, klimarettferdighet framed itself first and foremost in global, statist terms to critique hegemonic statist framing, amplifying and disaggregating responsibility to focus on Norway, and using recognition of individual and collective injustice to stress procedures, distribution and rights beyond states. This involves several frames.

Firstly, responsibility is expanded to acknowledge historical responsibility. Already in 1996, a Church synod declaration, ‘Consumption and Justice’, stated Norway has ‘through its oil extraction, transport policies and reduction of research on alternative energy sources failed its global responsibilities’.⁹⁹ Both Friends of the Earth Norway [Naturvernforbundet]¹⁰⁰ and leading NGO Future in Our Hands [Framtiden i våre hender] (FIVH), frame their websites on international climate politics under klimarettferdighet, linking to UNFCCC principles. FIVH argue historical responsibility ‘should form the basis of Norway’s climate policy’,¹⁰¹ demanding binding agreements with ‘massive transfers from rich to poor’ to repay ‘climate debt’, and ‘just distribution of emissions rights’ to allow increased emissions from historically ‘underdeveloped’ states.¹⁰²

Secondly, intergenerational justice has increasingly extended klimarettferdighet’s temporal reach to stress recognition of rights of and distribution to future generations, evidenced by the ‘Grandparents’ Climate Campaign’. New legal and rights-based narratives referencing the constitutional right to an environment guaranteed for ‘descendants’ are increasingly prevalent.¹⁰³ Appeal to (non-climate) national law has thus also featured among movement strategies in vernacularising transnational climate justice.

Thirdly, statist interpretations of procedures, distribution and responsibilities have been disaggregated through recognition of Southern actors beyond inter-state financing. This involves social movement spillover with development and global justice campaigns. Klimarettferdighet arose around the Bali Road Map through the ‘Climate Seen from the South’ campaign by FIVH, the Rainforest Foundation, WWF, Naturvernforbundet, and the Development Fund Norway, which commissioned a climate policy review from Southern activists ‘from a climate justice perspective’,¹⁰⁴ Southern recognition was central to COP mobilisations: campaigners demonstrated for klimarettferdighet in Oslo in 2009 alongside Global Migrants for Climate Action.¹⁰⁵

Fourthly, distribution, rights and responsibility are often visualised through a global carbon budget — the remaining carbon that can be emitted while avoiding serious climate change. The Norwegian foreword to Naturvernforbundet’s 2011 report Klimagambling (translated from Friends of the Earth UK) suggests ‘rich states, based on all reasonable evaluations of justice, must leave as much as possible of their carbon budget to (…) the South’, necessitating ‘even greater’ emissions reductions in Norway.¹⁰⁶ Through recognition, carbon budgeting thus links leaving Norwegian petroleum reserves untouched to let Southern states exploit theirs.

Rights have featured prominently in these framings through GDRs, which combine historical responsibility, recognition of Southern development concerns and domestic action within a global carbon budget. Tom Athanasiou, GDRs’ developer, appeared at Naturvernforbundet’s 2012 conference ‘Climate Justice: Climate Politics is the Politics of Wealth Distribution’. Naturvernforbundet used GDRs to endorse disaggregated alternatives to UNFCCC statist ‘developed’-‘developing’ binaries.¹⁰⁷ Rights-based development organisation NCA, a central climate justice translator since 2007,¹⁰⁸ have championed GDRs since 2008.¹⁰⁹ Their 2014 primarily English report, Norway’s Fair Share of an Ambitious Climate Effort, argues, under GDRs’ ‘Responsibility and Capacity Index’, Norway should contribute to global reductions corresponding to 300 percent of 1990 domestic emissions by 2020 — far higher than official targets. The (Norwegian) foreword links historical responsibility to oil, stressing Norway must finance Southern initiatives and domestic cuts. GDRs are anchored in UNFCCC’s CBDR principle.¹¹⁰

Thus, climate justice has been vernacularised in frames of historical responsibility, intergenerational justice, recognition of Southern actors and carbon budgets to disaggregate diagnostic statist narratives. While these translate more-or-less directly from transnational discourses, including operationalising UNFCCC principles, they merge with existing normative and institutional contexts in two ways. Firstly, they acknowledge (through expanding responsibility) Norwegian petroleum’s global contribution — a long-standing concern for klimarettferdighet actors, especially the church and environmentalists, as seen in FIVH’s 2010 klimarettferdighet campaign that stresses Norway must ‘quickly leave the oil age’, countering arguments that ‘poor countries need energy’ and about ‘clean’ extraction, and linking this to Statoil’s overseas tarsands investments.¹¹¹ While assumptions of ‘eco-friendly Norway’ found by Norgaard bolster exceptionalist arguments for Norwegian petroleum, and many Norwegians appreciate petroleum’s contribution to their welfare, challenging petroleum’s hegemony is increasingly resonant not only with environmental norms but growing recognition of adverse economic effects of ‘oil dependence’ in raising prices and monopolising certain skills.¹¹² Secondly, solidarist norms (vital to development organisations and the church) are projected onto the inter-state and inter-temporal level, using recognition to emphasise disaggregated distribution, procedures and rights. This includes use of the folk concept of dugnad (collective work community members are expected to participate in). Naturvernforbundet refer to a ‘climate dugnad’, the share of which must be higher for developed countries.¹¹³ As noted, these are among norms Norgaard identifies that are co-opted in hegemonic discourses to justify Norway’s high profile in climate negotiations and continued promotion of petroleum as ‘solution’. Industry lobbyists invoke ‘solidarity’ to defend petroleum. Nonetheless, klimarettferdighet actors increasingly counter this, an NCA, FIVH and Statistics Norway report showed reducing petroleum production would have little effect on poverty (as little is exported to the poorest nations).¹¹⁴ Through exploiting institutional openings provided by statist, international narratives in hegemonic discourses that protect petroleum interests, klimarettferdighet increasingly employs more multi-scalar and multi-temporal frames. While countering statist diagnoses, they imply a more prognostic, proactive focus on Norway’s responsibilities, promoting a turn from the global towards domestic transition.

4.3 Turning Klimarettferdighet Inward

This has sparked debate on how climate justice, especially distributions, rights and procedures, manifests itself within Norway, invoking norms of civil society involvement in socioeconomic transitions and social democratic norms, including tripartite cooperation.¹¹⁵ Like transnational narratives, this turn began in earnest after Durban. For Copenhagen, NCA and FIVH organised an activist conference at Oslo Opera House, taking 1,200 activists by boat to Copenhagen, where Norwegian signatures on a global climate justice petition were given to the Environment Minister.¹¹⁶ For Cancun, numerous organisations organised a parallel conference in Oslo, addressed by the leader of the Confederation of Trade Unions — demonstrating increasing movement spillover.¹¹⁷ Thereafter, previously-described convergence of frustration with COPs and revitalised multi-scalar struggles at Durban shifted strategic scale to domestic levels; a post-Durban article by Ytterstad, referencing Norwegian participation in Durban’s union ‘World of Work’ conference and Friends of the Earth’s ‘One Million Climate Jobs’ launch, calls for demoralised environmentalists to join others, especially unions, in ‘the movement for climate justice and green jobs’.¹¹⁸

More future-orientated, disaggregated discourses build on expanded notions of Norwegian responsibility in diagnostic frames, giving responsibility collective social dimensions deeper within the climate justice pyramid. This connects responsibility to individuals’ and organisations’ responsibility through appeal to solidarity, including the Church encouraging ‘klimadugnad’ (a climate ‘dugnad’ (grassroots voluntary effort)).¹¹⁹ Collective mobilising frames build on norms of civil society involvement in policy-making, including the Church’s active social role based on state establishment and status as a democratic, membership organisation. Skaperverk og Bærekraft’s founding document, opposing shifting ‘realisation of a sustainable society and global justice (…) to the kingdom of heaven’, seeks ‘political and social change’, recognising climate change as ‘a global question of right and wrong’ and ‘a political question’, including regarding oil. As the Church is both ‘central and local’, it ‘has a responsibility (…) to build environmental involvement across political divides’, but also be ‘radical, proactive and admonishing’.¹²⁰ This deepened social responsibility builds on stewardship and ‘practical’ love in scripture, ‘challenging the powerful’. Indeed, ‘being created in God’s image means (…) we have a unique responsibility’. Klimarettferdighet thus ‘challenges us both individually and collectively;’ Church members are encouraged to take collective action, including using their vote.¹²¹

Emphasising Norwegian responsibility within disaggregated global discourses also highlights consumption. Sometimes, this involves sacrificial narratives. Church groups have connected responsibility to forsaking, though adding that relinquishing material goods ‘can improve (…) quality of life’.¹²² Similar sentiments are heard from the anti-consumerist FIVH, suggesting klimarettferdighet implies ‘disadvantages’ for Norwegians because it ‘cannot be achieved by the rich becoming richer’.¹²³ By emphasising state-level responsibility to critique state narratives that diminish responsibility, sacrificial narratives can imply all Norwegians are wealthy, ignoring domestic distribution.

Sacrificial narratives have thus diminished as new, domestic-orientated actors have spilled-over into klimarettferdighet movements, particularly unions, who increasingly connect international solidarity norms with their members’ self-interest as part of the growing focus on socioeconomic transitions from carbon-intensive industries. A statement (‘The Climate Struggle — a Struggle for Social Power’) from several leaders within the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) declared that climate policy ‘cannot (…) be reduced to a question of sacrifice (…) of our hard-won rights’, but is ‘about creating a better society’.¹²⁴ This reflects debates within LO between some unions favouring counter-hegemonic klimarettferdighet to protect existing rights and the adoption of hegemonic discourses by LO generally. LO formally supports a ‘just transition that emphasises working life, social and work-related rights, decent and green jobs in a sustainable low-emissions society’, stressing tripartite cooperation.¹²⁵ However, LO is criticised for supporting petroleum, shifting responsibility to ‘workers in poor countries’ and ‘descendants of today’s well-fed Norwegian working-class’.¹²⁶ In early klimarettferdighet narratives, non-LO confederations featured more prominently.¹²⁷

LO’s 2014 climate strategy largely reflects hegemonic climate narratives. Petroleum-related responsibilities are downplayed, echoing arguments around Norwegian gas replacing coal and carbon leakage that stress climate initiatives ‘should to the greatest possible extent be established within regional and global deals’. Indeed, transitions are couched in terms of ‘market advantage’. LO thus links union values of solidarity and equality to climate justice frames — that ‘especially poor people are hard hit’, the diminishing carbon budget, and historical responsibility¹²⁸ — but within a politico-economic analysis that links workers’ interests to continued petroleum production. Cooption of climate justice language within hegemonic productivist ‘class compromise[s] (…) between organized labor, the state, and capital’ is said to protect existing entitlements and avenues of influence, particularly institutionalised social dialogue, and therefore ‘the political power of [Northern] unions’ as institutions, instead of global environmental justice.¹²⁹ A split, replicated in LO, is often seen between unions in carbon-intensive sectors and those in others. For legal pluralism, this suggests how politico-economic interests promote formalistic use of legal entitlements to promote current interests, rather than broader social change.

However, several LO and non-LO unions are central in initiatives promoting more transformative frames. During the 2013 general election, over 100 organisations joined Klimavalg 2013 [‘Climate Election 2013’]. One of Klimavalg’s demands was that klimarettferdighet ‘be given concrete content’, demanding parties ‘take historical responsibility seriously’ and that states like Norway ‘take a lead with emissions cuts at home, and contribute financially to (…) adaptation and development of renewable energy for fighting poverty’.¹³⁰ By demanding reduced oil extraction, a focus on transport and household energy, and ‘green jobs and new industrial development’, the socioeconomic turn towards a ‘transition’ repackages globally-framed responsibility and procedures discourses alongside more domestic distribution and rights demands.¹³¹

One offshoot of Klimavalg is Broen til framtiden [Bridge to the Future], an initiative between unions, environmental NGOs, Skaperverk og Bærekraft and Concerned Scientists Norway that has produced books on green jobs and slowing oil extraction, and a petition (‘Slow down Norwegian oil extraction — 100,000 climate jobs now!’). One session of their 2014 conference was a ‘conversation’ on klimarettferdighet, chaired by Bård Lahn, involving Lars Haltbrekken (Naturvernforbundet), Ingrid Næss-Holm (NCA) and John Leirvaag (leader of the Norwegian Civil Service Union, an LO member). The discussion’s premise was that ‘climate struggle is about democratisation of the economy and society (…) redistribution between North and South, and (…) generations’, and Lahn linked these distributional themes to historical responsibility and carbon budgets. Leirvaag stressed Norwegians have undertaken transitions previously by creating security around them, ensuring no particular groups suffer disproportionately, through, for example, taxation to catalyse change, and focusing on research to create new jobs. He stressed LO represents different workers, including in petroleum, and involves them in dialogue. Addressing carbon leakage, Leirvaag suggested Norway’s welfare allows it to lead, building green jobs, rather than protecting jobs that must disappear eventually. Haltbrekken also stressed that it is better a transition starts smoothly than suddenly, supporting green jobs. In answering whether there is hope for a just international agreement, Næss-Holm stated both bottom-up and top-down strategies were necessary by movements, especially unions, to influence states, as inter-faith work demonstrates.¹³²

This discussion demonstrates how klimarettferdighet bases itself in, but broadens, hegemonic discourses’ stress on how the transition affects Norwegian rights and distributions to combine domestic and global rights and distributions. This thus expands on the same social democratic and civic participatory norms stressing workers’ and civil society’s involvement in socioeconomic transitions as hegemonic arguments around carbon leakage. Initiatives now link klimarettferdighet with broad social change and specific industry-related transitions, as Broen til framtiden’s new book (including contributions from unions in petroleum-related sectors and an oil worker) shows.¹³³ Crucially, using social democratic norms of state-led socioeconomic and industrial transitions, undertaken with democratic involvement (including tripartite cooperation), builds on the model used to create the petroleum industry, a point increasingly made¹³⁴ to resonate with economic arguments against ‘oil dependence’ — thus, it provides a frame that is potentially both resonant and historically credible for moving beyond petroleum to a more diverse, sustainable economy. The Church has increasingly used this, including in oil-dependent regions; the Bishop of Stavanger, home to the petroleum industry, used his 2012 new years’ sermon to connect klimarettferdighet to ‘looking critically at new oil finds and growth’.¹³⁵ In subsequent media debates featuring familiar industry counter-arguments, he linked klimarettferdighet and intergenerational justice to acknowledgement that ‘our entire welfare is anchored in’ petroleum.¹³⁶

The transformative turn is also seen in local transition groups, including ‘Sustainable Life in Landås’, Bergen. The project, framed as research, rejects dichotomies between individual or national scales, endorsing working collectively in ‘appropriately’-sized local spaces. The long-term goal is making the ecological footprint of ‘the West’ sustainable through alliances with local government, community institutions, NGOs, church groups and transition towns internationally.¹³⁷ The group springs partly from church networks, but emphasises human rights first in their list of ‘common denominators’.¹³⁸ They seek a ‘third-way in the climate struggle’ based on cultural and political gatherings locally, local food production, energy efficiency and transport.¹³⁹ Such initiatives vernacularise global narratives of climate justice, sustainable development and human rights, merging with civic participatory and social democratic norms to reframe climate change as a threat to both others’ and Norwegians’ welfare.

In summary, the proactive, prognostic turn in klimarettferdighet vernacularises climate justice by stressing recognition of responsibilities, rights, distributions and procedures within Norway, building on acknowledgement of petroleum dependence and solidarity in diagnostic frames, and augmenting this with civic participation and social democratic norms. Individual and collective dimensions of Norwegians’ responsibility, including consumption, are addressed. Increased union involvement has encouraged and been encouraged by this, furthering the socioeconomic, industrial transition focus. While different unions operate differently within hegemonic processes based on politico-economic interests, new alliances connect diverse actors, and promote green jobs and transitions across sectors with tools including law and rights (especially the constitutional environmental right and workers’ rights). Crucially, this confronts the politico-economic premise of hegemonic narratives by suggesting petroleum dependence threatens rights globally and domestically; it also anchors its solution of state-led socioeconomic transition with significant civil society involvement and tripartite cooperation in norms crucial to the history of the petroleum industry itself.