Norms for the Earth: Changing the Climate on “Climate Change”

Abstract

AbstractClimate change poses a grave security threat to national borders, habitats, and vulnerable people. Plagued by asymmetries in both states' vulnerability to climate impacts and their capacity to mitigate them, climate change presents states with a “wicked” problem that poses significant obstacles to interest-based solutions. Yet, most global climate change policy involves rationales and mechanisms grounded in an interest-based logic of consequences: information-sharing, reciprocity, and exchange. We argue that strategies that promote ethics-based discourse and policies offer considerable promise for hastening stronger global climate governance. We argue that successes in human security norm-building, including bans on land mines, cluster munitions, and nuclear weapons, provide climate scholars and practitioners with alternative governance models that rely on activating a logic of appropriateness and spearhead faster, more effective climate action. We identify five strategies that previous scholars have shown fostered efforts to promote a logic of appropriateness in human rights, humanitarian law, and disarmament. We examine the empirical experience of those strategies and particularly highlight the recent success of efforts to negotiate a treaty banning nuclear weapons. Given the success of these strategies in other issue areas, we argue scholars of climate change could fruitfully focus greater attention on political efforts that promote strong global ethical norms for climate action.