Reimagining climate equity to incorporate the non-human

Abstract

Over time, international environmental law has increasingly accommodated principles of equity and justice. Yet, climate equity remains a contentious, if not exclusionary, concept. This article applies new materialist theory and a posthuman perspective to climate equity. It explores the concept of climate (in)equity as enshrined in existing climate jurisprudence, and attempts to reimagine the concept in order to incorporate the subjectivity and interests of non-human matter into an otherwise enclosed and marketized climate-change legal discourse. The analysis in this article finds that prejudicial approaches to climate equity that prioritize dominant human subjects produce unjust consequences for excluded, vulnerable human populations and for non-human subjects, with these unjust consequences shaping both policy and lived experience. The article suggests that adopting new materialist/posthuman ontological and epistemological pluralism will support the incorporation of human–non-human entanglements in climate equity, and that such a determination must extend to reforming the inequitable enclosures and exclusions driven by the climate equity assemblage.