Political Responsibility for Climate Change

Abstract

Global structural injustices are harms caused by structural processes, involving multiple individuals, acting across more than one state. Young develops the concept of ‘political responsibility,’ to allocate responsibility for structural injustice. In this paper, I am going to argue that when considering the climate crisis Young’s model needs to be adapted— to have agency as a basis for allocating political responsibility instead of contribution. This is a more intuitive way to allocate responsibility for the climate crisis given its nature as a threshold problem, and the subtle structural positions occupied by the individuals involved.

Keywords

• the climate crisis
• responsibility
• structural injustice
• agency
• iris marion young