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BELL
ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES:
WHAT RIGHTS? WHICH DUTIES?
The leaders of Tuvalu – a tiny island country in the Pacific Ocean midway
between Hawaii and Australia – have conceded defeat in their battle with the
rising sea, announcing that they will abandon their homeland.1
The plight of the Tuvaluans is only the most dramatic example of the
displacement of persons caused by environmental disruptions. The rise in
sea levels caused by global warming has caused lowland flooding, salt-
water intrusion, coastal erosion and more destructive storms in Tuvalu.2
It has become ‘an endangered nation’.3 However, sea level rise is only
one environmental cause of population displacement. Desertification,
I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for financial support for the project
of which this paper is a part. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the
‘International Justice in a Globalised World’ workshop, ISSEI Conference, Aberystwyth,
July 2002. I would like to thank the participants at the workshop for their very helpful
comments. I would also like to thank Simon Caney, Avner de-Shalit, Tim Gray, Peter Jones
and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful written comments.
1 L.R. Brown, Environmental Refugees (2002) at http://www.foes.org.au/ci/ci_ecoref.
htm.
2 Ibid.
3 Gayoom, cited in ibid.
12 For discussion of the displacement effects of climate change see, for example, J.
McCarthy, Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14, 43–4; Myers, op. cit., 1; and B. Muller, The Great
Divide (Oxford: Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, 2002), 3–4.
13 See, for example, J. Griffin, ‘Introduction: The Many Dimensions of the Climate
Change Issue’ in ed. J. Griffin, Global Climate Change: The Science, Economics and
Politics (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003), 1–24, pp. 4–7.
14 Typically, talk of ‘climate change’ refers to change ‘attributed directly or indirectly
to human activity’ – see J. Miguez, ‘Equity, Responsibility and Climate Change’ in eds
L. Pinguelli-Rosa and M. Munasinghe, Ethics, Equity and International Negotiations on
Climate Change (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002), 7–35, p. 7). The important issue for
140 DEREK R. BELL
18 J. Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999),
9–10; original emphasis.
19 Ibid., 14, 35. See also J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), 16–7; and J. Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 6.
20 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, op. cit., 34; original emphasis. In the remainder of this
paper, I use ‘reasonable’ to cover ‘reasonable or decent’. In the context of this paper, the
distinction between ‘reasonable liberal peoples’ and ‘decent peoples’ is not important. For
the idea of ‘decent peoples’ see ibid., 4, 64–7.
21 Ibid., 87.
22 Ibid., 34. See also ibid., 47–8, 71.
23 Ibid., 35.
24 See ibid., 29.
25 Ibid., 37.
26 For excellent critical discussions see C. Beitz, ‘Rawls’s Law of Peoples’, Ethics 110
(2000), 669–96; Caney, op. cit.; A. Kuper, ‘Rawlsian Global Justice: Beyond The Law of
Peoples to a Cosmopolitan Law of Persons’, Political Theory 28 (2000), 640–74; and T.
Pogge, ‘Critical Study: Rawls on International Justice’, The Philosophical Quarterly 51
(2001), 246–53.
142 DEREK R. BELL
features of Rawls’s theory that shed light on how he might view the plight
of potential and actual environmental refugees.
A striking feature of Rawls’s account is the emphasis that he places on
borders or ‘boundaries’.27 A people have their own territory and their own
social and political institutions.28 They are responsible ‘for their territory
and its environmental integrity, as well as for the size of their population’.29
For Rawls, the arbitrariness of a society’s boundaries ‘from a historical
point of view’ is irrelevant for three reasons.30 First, the idea of a world
state is untenable: therefore ‘there must be boundaries of some kind’.31
Second, a society’s wealth does not depend on its natural resources but
rather on ‘its members’ political and civic virtues’, including their ‘indus-
triousness and cooperative talents’.32 There is ‘no society anywhere in
the world – except for marginal cases [such as “Arctic Eskimos”] – with
resources so scarce’ that with good government it could not achieve the
level of wealth necessary to maintain just institutions.33 The ‘arbitrariness
of the distribution of natural resources’ associated with arbitrary borders
‘causes no difficulty’ because any inequalities of wealth among peoples
are the result of their own choices.34 Third, ‘unless a definite agent is given
responsibility for maintaining an asset and bears the loss for not doing so,
that asset tends to deteriorate’.35 Someone must be deemed responsible
for the earth’s natural resources and the most plausible division of respon-
sibility (given Rawls’s two earlier points) makes peoples responsible for
their ‘territory and its capacity to support them in perpetuity’.36
Rawls’s commitment to (slightly limited)37 national sovereignty over
a territory and its natural resources has important implications for how
we should respond to the kinds of environmental problem that can cause
population displacement. Consider the case of global climate change.
Rawls’s conception of international justice seems particularly ill-suited to
this kind of situation for two reasons. First, the global climate and the
composition of the upper atmosphere that determines it are not part of
the ‘territory’ of any nation. They are part of the ‘global commons’, yet
27 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, op. cit., 38.
28 See ibid., 23–4, 38.
29 Ibid., 38–9. See also ibid., 8.
30 Ibid., 38.
31 Ibid., 39; original emphasis. See also ibid., 36.
32 Ibid., 117 and 108.
33 Ibid., 108. The reference to Arctic Eskimos is from ibid., 108, n. 34.
34 Ibid., 117. See also ibid., 39.
35 Ibid., 39.
36 Ibid., original emphasis. See also ibid., 8.
37 The limits are set by the eight principles of the law of peoples.
ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES: WHAT RIGHTS? WHICH DUTIES? 143
Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent
their having a just or decent political and social regime.38
Rawls defines a burdened society as one that lacks ‘the human capital and
know-how, and, often, the material and technological resources’ needed to
secure and maintain the conditions necessary for just institutions.39 The
aim of the duty of assistance is to enable burdened societies to achieve
just institutions and thereby become members of the society of (just)
peoples. For Rawls, the duty of assistance involves more than ‘merely
dispensing funds’.40 It is the political and social culture of a people that
determines ‘how a country fares’: ‘assistance’ therefore must also include
an international ‘emphasis on human rights’ aimed at changing ‘ineffective
regimes’.41 It is not clear whether Rawls’s account of burdened societies
extends as far as societies threatened by (or suffering from) the potentially
devastating effects of climate change. However, even if we were to include
them among burdened societies, Rawls’s theory would still offer only
limited support to environmentally burdened peoples. It does not require
equality of wealth among members of the society of peoples. Instead, it
may allow large inequalities of wealth among (just) peoples. Therefore the
support that one society must offer to another society to deal with their
environmental problems may be very limited. Moreover, Rawls’s duty of
assistance is intended to help the citizens of burdened societies to make
best use of their own territory. It does not require that developed nations
38 Ibid., 37.
39 Ibid., 106.
40 Ibid., 108.
41 Ibid., 117 and 109. Rawls cites Sen’s work on the role of human rights and women’s
rights in preventing famines (ibid., 109–10).
144 DEREK R. BELL
However, there are two reasons to doubt that peoples in a Rawlsian inter-
national order would agree to a treaty that would offer genuine protection
to potential or actual victims of climate change. First, we have already seen
that a Rawlsian international political system is likely to face ‘tragedy of
the commons’ problems. It may be collectively rational for everyone to
sign an international agreement to mitigate the effects of climate change
42 Members of the society of peoples might agree to help each other in emergency
conditions, such as natural disasters, including offering temporary accommodation for
disaster victims. However, agreeing to permanently accommodate victims of global climate
change would seem to be more demanding. More generally, accommodating people from
burdened societies would be a ‘long-term’ commitment, given that such societies are so
far from achieving and maintaining the just institutions necessary to support their people
(ibid., 106). If a people must rely on its own territory in perpetuity, it must have ‘at least a
qualified right to limit immigration’ (ibid., 39, n. 48).
43 Ibid., 108, n. 34 and 108.
44 Ibid., 108, n. 34.
45 Ibid., 37.
ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES: WHAT RIGHTS? WHICH DUTIES? 145
but it is individually rational for each (or, at least, most) peoples to continue
with a “business as usual” approach rather than paying the economic cost
of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.46 Moreover, the benefits and
burdens of climate change and climate change mitigation, adaptation or
compensation are not equally shared among peoples. Developed peoples
must pay the economic costs of mitigation, adaptation or compensation
while it is less developed peoples that suffer the most serious consequences
of inaction (because of their climate and location and – more importantly
– their lack of infrastructure and resources to adapt to climate change).47
The different incentive structures facing the parties to any potential agree-
ment, combined with the economic inequalities between them, are likely to
ensure that any international agreement does more to protect the rich than
it does to protect potential environmental refugees. In short, the potential
signatories of a climate change treaty are not equally situated because they
are not economically or environmentally equal. Therefore any agreement
they reach will reflect these differences.48 The eighth principle – if it
applies to environmentally burdened peoples – might place some limits
on the kind of treaty that could legitimately be negotiated by members of
the society of peoples. Even so, on Rawls’s theory, it is only burdened
societies that should be protected from ‘exploitation’, however; relatively
poor members of the society of peoples must make their own way in the
global marketplace and in international treaty negotiations.
In summary, we have seen that Rawls’s conception of international
justice may not be wholly silent on the environmental issues that we are
46 On the difficulty of designing a successful climate change treaty given the incentive
structures of individual states, see Barrett’s discussion of the shortcomings of the Kyoto
Protocol and some possible alternative approaches in S. Barrett, Environment and State-
craft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 373–98.
47 A point of considerable contention in the Kyoto negotiations has been the possibility
of imposing emissions limits on less developed (non-Annex I) countries (some of whom
will become major polluters in the near future). However, it is widely agreed that even if the
economic development of less developed nations should be managed to control their emis-
sions, a substantial portion of the costs of ‘clean development’ should be met by developed
nations. See, for example, T. Banuri and E. Spanger-Siegfried, ‘Equity and the Clean
Development Mechanism: equity, additionality, supplementarity’ in eds L. Pinguelli-Rosa
and M. Munasinghe, op. cit., 102–36, p. 103.
48 It might be suggested that Rawls could require ‘fair standards of treaty negotiation’
just as he suggests that peoples should agree to ‘fair standards of trade’ including ‘fair
background conditions’: but both ideas are problematic in the context of Rawls’s theory
(Rawls, The Law of Peoples, op. cit., 43 and 42, n. 52). The analogy with the domestic
context would suggest that ‘fair background conditions’ would require radical redistribu-
tion of wealth among societies to produce something closer to Beitz’s ‘global difference
principle’, which Rawls rejects (ibid., 116–9). If we think of treaty negotiation as analogous
to trade, the same problem of ‘fair background conditions’ arises.
146 DEREK R. BELL
T HE C OSMOPOLITAN A PPROACH
62 At least, in principle – see Beitz, ‘Rawls’s Law of Peoples’, op. cit., 692 for some
potential qualifications based on pragmatic or instrumental considerations.
63 Beitz explicitly mentions climate and location as ‘natural resources’ – see Political
Theory and International Relations, op. cit., 206.
64 Ibid., 203. The idea of the ‘basic structure’ of society comes originally from Rawls:
see his Political Liberalism, op. cit., 258.
ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES: WHAT RIGHTS? WHICH DUTIES? 149
It would be inappropriate to take the sort of pride in the diamond deposits in one’s back
yard that one takes in the ability to play the Appassionata. This is because natural resources
come into the development of personality (when they come in at all) in a more casual way
than do talents.69
Beitz’s example – diamond deposits – may make his position seem plaus-
ible. It is true that diamonds ‘are not there, as parts of the self, to
begin with. They must first be appropriated’ before they can be ‘worked
on, shaped, and benefited from’ in ‘the development of personality’.70
However, it is much less clear that the same is true of the islanders’
territory.
The physical environment in which a person lives may well be (partly)
constitutive of their identity.71 In the modern world, many of us may not
have a place that we think of as ‘home’ or we may be able to make many
places our ‘home’ for periods of our lives.72 However, the people most
likely to be displaced by climate change may also be most likely to have a
closer attachment to the land that is their ‘home’ and the community that
shares that ‘home’.73 If we conceive of natural resources (and wealth) as
substitutable, we may think that it is fair to make decisions that will leave
the potential victims of climate change ‘homeless’; but if we recognise that
social and natural environments are more than mere resources, we cannot
so readily conceive of such decisions as just. Beitz’s cosmopolitan theory
of justice succumbs to the liberal temptation to conceive of the environ-
ment as a resource; and yet liberal neutrality demands that the environment
should not be conceptualised in any pre-determined way.74
In summary, I have suggested that Beitz’s cosmopolitan approach has
significant advantages over Rawls’s society of peoples approach in the
69 Ibid., 139.
70 Ibid., 140 and 139.
71 This claim might be interpreted in different ways. I intend to claim that a person’s
identity may be formed in the context of and in response to their physical environment.
The meaning of their life – and what Matthew Humphrey calls their ‘sense of ontological
security in the face of the uncertainties of life in human society’ – may depend on the
preservation of that context. See M. Humphrey, Preservation versus the People? Nature,
Humanity, and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 187.
72 On the idea of attachment to ‘home’ in the modern world see M. Dummett, On
Immigration and Refugees (London: Routledge, 2001), 18–9.
73 On the idea of the ‘land as an inalienable home for those who inhabit it and not as an
object to be bought and sold for economic gain’ see M. Smith, An Ethics of Place: Radical
Ecology, Postmodernity and Social Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 159. Islanders
seem especially likely to have this kind of attachment to their ‘home’.
74 On this point, I disagree with those who blame liberalism – understood as a philosoph-
ical position – for reducing nature to mere resources. Liberals may be guilty but liberalism
properly understood is not.
ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES: WHAT RIGHTS? WHICH DUTIES? 151
C ONCLUSION