Analyze

Addressing climate change in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais demands collaboration across traditional bureaucratic divisions. While the team officially tasked with devising climate plans falls under the purview of the Secretary of the Environment, their efforts to reduce vulnerability to climate change and support those already suffering its effects have brought them into many uneasy alliances. These efforts ranged from acquiring funding or technical support from European partners with fundamentally different views of environmental projection, to securing logistical aid from Civil Defense which was a part of the Mineiro military cabinet, to encouraging cooperation from the major economic institutions primarily focused around mining and agriculture. Working with these different groups necessitated that climate analysts become adept at shifting their rhetorical framing from audience to audience, but this work carried great ethical and practical risk. Were the climate scientists acting cynically when they adopted rhetoric they did not fully believe? Were they being naïve in trusting partners who may not genuinely value climate justice? What kinds of self-reflection might assist climate analysts and STS scholars in our efforts to grapple with the moral complexities of climate governance? 

Image Source: Ricardo Moraes/Reuters, "Deadly dam burst in Brazil prompts calls for stricter mining regulations," The Guardian, 10, November 2015.

Wald, Jonathan. 2023. "Beyond Cynicism and Naïveté: Ethical Complexities of Climate Governance." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Operations of transnational companies are affecting marginalized communities across the globe. As Kaswan had highlighted through examples of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in India, as well as pollution associated with oil companies in Latin America, the implications of distributive environmental justice in such contexts are apparent yet difficult to address. Across international boundaries law enforcement becomes increasingly difficult, which is at the heart of the problem of my research topic. 

“The “right” scale will depend upon the nature of the harm being analyzed and purpose for which information is being gathered.” (Kaswan, p 29)

“Numerous studies, at a multiplicity of scales, analyze the distribution of a wide variety of land uses, as well as risk: what exposures, with what consequences, do people experience?” (Kaswan, p 33). 

This text builds on concepts of equality, bases for deviating from the core idea of equality, and the multiple contexts that define and shape distributive justice. Kaswan additionally advances the distributive environmental justice by outlining the different contexts, including historical land use patterns, government regulations, infrastructure, and enforcement and the implications that each of these dimensions have on contributing to distributive injustice. 

The main narrative of this text builds on foundational ideas on equality and extrapolates it further to establish how distributive environmental justice, its ideas and articulations, as well as its operationalization, has taken shape throughout the years. To outline these points, Kaswan outlines different cases of environmental disaster, and subsequent government responses, to showcase how government institutions have both upheld and endeavored to address distributive environmental inequality in the past decades.