Climate migration raises difficult normative and methodological challenges for political theory. Existing scholarship largely applies theories of international rights and distributive justice to climate-induced mobility, focusing on ‘refugee’ status and how the international community should allocate responsibility. We suggest that, although these approaches answer many important questions, they are limited by their reliance on the constitutive norms and concepts of the current state-based international order. Other emerging debates question how climate migration disrupts foundational ideals of territorial sovereignty and national self-determination. These debates underscore the need for normative analysis that is attentive to power hierarchies, cultural loss, and community-led adaptation practices. We suggest that this mandates methodological innovations through “engaged” or “grounded” political theorizing: we must do normative political theorizing that incorporates the perspectives of affected communities and addresses fragmented arenas of practice that span national borders. Having thus motivated the importance of engaged political theory, the talk will share the preliminary results of a project based in Australia that is doing engaged political theorizing with Pasifika communities who are concerned about climate migration, and will offer tentative suggestions about the values that emerge.
Stephanie Collins is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. She works on collective responsibility, the ethics of care, group agency, and structural injustice. She is currently co-leading a project titled ‘The Ethics of Australia’s Shared Responsibility for Pacific Climate Displacement.’ The talk will present joint work with Terry Macdonald (University of Melbourne) and Luara Ferracioli (University of Sydney).