This paper contrasts conceptions of global distributive justice focused on natural resources with a human rights-based approach. To highlight the shortcomings of the former and to emphasize the advantages of the latter, the paper looks first at the methodology of moral theorizing, showing that it misconstrues the claims individuals and groups made to natural resources and offers impracticable solutions. Second, I argue that distributive conceptions assume a narrow view of natural resources as economically beneficial goods. Human rights, I propose, are better suited to make sense of the variety of needs natural resources fulfill for humans. In virtue of their legal institutionalization, human rights enable agents to effectively pursue their legitimate claims to resources. Third, I look at the system of sovereignty over natural resources and argue that rather than dismissing it as unjustifiable, it should be reformed in line with the principles which underlie its structure – human rights.
Schlagwort: Natural Resources
Petra Gümplová presents a working paper on ‚Common Ownership of the Earth in the Anthropocene‘
This paper analyzes the conception of common ownership of the earth
(COE) and its recent appropriations in the theory of global distributive
justice. Taking Mathias Risse’s theory as the main reference point, the
paper asks whether COE provides a plausible starting point for thinking
about natural resource justice in the age of the Anthropocene.
After providing a brief summary of Risse’s argument, I focus on three
central aspects of Risse’s theory of COE: 1) the concept of ownership and
its underlying ontological assumptions, 2) the basic needs thesis, and 3)
the implications of common ownership for the climate justice. Concerning
the first, I argue that due to ontological assumptions built into
ownership’s structure and the corresponding relation to non-human
world it authorizes, it is problematic to meaningfully extend it to global
domain and utilize it to protect what I argue is better captured by the
term global commons. Concerning the basic needs thesis, I argue that
Risse relies on an implausibly specieist and anthropocentric notion of
basic needs which can no longer hold in the Anthropocene. I explore the
question whether the replacement of basic needs with human rights can
partially mitigate the basic needs thesis failures. Thirdly, I discuss Risse’s
view of intergenerational justice and the proposal of a fair distribution of
burdens of climate change mitigation. Here I argue for the framework of
global commons to be used instead of common ownership. Overall, I
argue that in the current environmental predicament, COE no longer
appears to be a meaningful conception to ground the morality of human
relationship to natural environment and provide plausible distributive or
other implications for the allocation of natural resources.
Petra Gümplová gave a working paper on ‚Reinventing Sovereignty over Natural Resources: the case of the Yasuní ITT Initiative‘
This paper discusses the Yasuní ITT Initiative through which a sovereign state (Ecuador) proposed it would forgo oil extraction in an area overlapping with a global biodiversity reserve and indigenous territory in exchange for financial compensation from the global community. This paper argues that the ITT Initiative provides an excellent opportunity for a much needed discussion about limits on sovereign rights to natural resources. The article first looks into problematic features of sovereignty with respect to natural resources and argues that it fails to facilitate a use of natural resources compatible with demands of domestic and international justice. Three issues are identified: the extractivist bias, the problem of territorial monism, and the justice deficit. In the second part of the paper I show how the ITT Initiative innovatively attempted to transcend these structural weaknesses in the current system thus providing a valuable model of self-limiting sovereignty over natural resources. Three aspects are highlighted: a fiduciary model of resource sovereignty, the recognition of extraterritorial rights of others to sovereign resources, and a model of international cooperation for the non-exploitation of resources and the effective mitigation of climate change.