I
One popular thesis:
Environmental degradation driven by the climate crisis systemically worsens living standards, thereby heightening socioeconomic and political tensions. These tensions often ignite armed conflicts, forcing populations to migrate and creating environmental refugees. The mass migration stems from both the decline of ecosystems and conflicts intensified by resource shortages. As a result, the climate crisis inflicts extensive and lasting damage on ecosystems and human communities, aligning with the definition of ecocide. Recognizing this causal chain highlights the necessity for global governance to address the ecological and humanitarian impacts of climate-induced conflicts.
(accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217251382404)
One admittedly incomplete review of the literature:
We draw three initial conclusions from [our review of the literature]. First, across the five environmental issues surveyed, the evidence on the contribution of environmental variables to violent political conflict is thin, weak, uncertain, and/or contradictory. Notwithstanding headline claims about climate being “a risk factor for conflict,” for instance, the consensus view of even the mainstream scholars who reached this verdict is that climate is a relatively low risk factor for conflict (evaluated as fourteenth out of 16 factors considered), is particularly uncertain (evaluated as the most uncertain of 16 factors), and is a factor over which there is “low confidence” in the mechanisms through which
climate affects conflict. . .Second, scarcity accounts of environmental conflict, which focus on the security impacts of natural resource availability shortages, are particularly unconvincing, there being much stronger evidence on the conflict effects of relative resource abundance, as argued in “resource curse” or “honey pot” . . .interpretations of environmental conflict, and discussed further in the next section. And third, although the body of evidence on climatic variables and conflict is much more extensive than on the other environmental issues considered here, dominating climate–security research, it is no less uneven. Indeed, our assessment is that the evidence is most robust on water and forests, through resource curse dynamics; that it is most extensive but also mixed on climatic variables; and that it is thinnest in relation to biodiversity and pollution.(accessed online at https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/energy/49/1/annurev-environ-112922-114232.pdf?expires=1770499611&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=C4CF5A6FB183C2A3D71433B9DE1662700
In short, the broader the narrative, including those for the climate emergency, the more likely there are granular counternarratives. Does the one negate or cancel the other? No, but it does force new questions, e.g. in this case: What local injustices would the earmarked global justice produce?
II
Some three decades ago, Jon Elster, the political philosopher, wrote Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens (1992). It’s of continued interest because one of the points is that not only can local justice systems lead to global injustice, global justice systems can lead to local injustices.
First, Elster’s definitions.
Local justice can be contrasted with global justice. Roughly speaking, globally redistributive policies are characterized by three features. First, they are designed centrally, at the level of the national government. Second, they are intended to compensate people for various sorts of bad luck, resulting from the possession of ’morally arbitrary properties.’ Third, they typically take the form of cash transfers [e.g., think reparations]. Principles of local justice differ on all three counts. They are designed by relatively autonomous institutions which, although they may be constrained by guidelines laid down by the center, have some autonomy to design and implement their preferred scheme. Also, they are not compensatory, or only partially so. A scheme for allocating scarce medical resources may compensate patients for bad medical luck, but not for other kinds of bad luck (including the bad luck of being turned down for another scarce good). Finally, local justice concerns allocation in kind of goods (and burdens), not of money.
Elster (1992, p4)
The semi-autonomous institutions are local in three senses for Elster: arena, country and locality. Different arenas, such as organ transplantation, college admissions and job layoffs, follow different principles: “Need is central in allocating organs for transplantation, merit in admitting students to college and seniority in selecting workers for layoffs” in the US. Allocative principles vary by country as well: “In many European countries, need (as measured by number of family dependents) can be a factor in deciding which workers to lay off”. Finally, allocative principles can also vary by locality within the same country or arena, as with the case of local transplantation centers in the US. (In case it requires saying, these systems have changed since Elster’s writing!)
In short, complexity in local justice systems comes not just from the fact that the goods are scarce, heterogeneous and in kind and that the sites of allocation may well be local contingent. Local justice systems vary also because principles are tied to complex arrays of criteria, mechanisms, procedures, and schemes.
Implications, including for climate justice.
Not only are local justice systems not designed to compensate for global injustices, they can also lead to those injustices:
From childhood to old age, [the individual] encounters a succession of institutions, each of which has the power to give or deny him some scarce good. In some cases the cumulative impact of these decisions may be grossly unfair. We can easily imagine an individual who through sheer bad luck is chosen for all the necessary burdens and denied all the scarce goods, because in each case he is just below the cutoff point of selection. To my knowledge this source of injustice has not been recognized so far…. Those who are entrusted with the task of allocating a scarce good rarely if ever evaluate recipients in the light of their past successes or failures in receiving other goods. Local justice is largely noncompensatory. There is no mechanism of redress across allocative spheres….
[B]y the nature of chance events, some individuals will miss every train: they are turned down for medical school, chosen by the draft lottery, laid off by the firm in a recession, and refused scarce medical resources; in addition, their spouse develops cancer, their stocks become worthless, and their neighborhood is chosen for a toxic waste dump. It is neither desirable nor possible to create a mechanism of redress to compensate all forms of cumulative bad luck. For one thing, the problems of moral hazard would be immense [i.e. if people knew they were going to be compensated for whatever happened to them, they could take more risks and thereby incur more harm]. For another, the machinery of administering redress for bad luck would be hopelessly complex and costly.
(Ibid 133-4)
Where so, local justice clearly can lead to global injustice.
But just as clearly from a local justice perspective, the global justice promised in, say, climate justice (e.g., via reparations), leads to local injustices, when the former is implemented uniformly over an otherwise differentiated landscape. One thinks immediately of how to define an “extreme event” that triggers so-called automatic debt relief.
To expand, the more uniform the application of climate justice policies, the greater the local pressure for suitably heterogeneous applications, if not alternatives. But the more differentiated on the ground, the greater the chance of global injustice when considered as universal principles uniformly applicable at the micro-level.
So what?
For one thing, the continued insistence that global climate justice involves money transfers (as distinct from in-kind compensation typical of local justice systems) ends up further monetarizing a global environment that local systems take to be quite otherwise.
In so doing, the insistence obscures the huge importance of in-kind compensations at the local level. Think here of the livestock sharing systems (e.g., khlata in Tunisia and mafisa in Botswana). These are local justice systems irrespective of the livestock involved being methane producers from a techno-managerial perspective on global climate. Indeed, I can’t think of a better example of global climate justice at odds with local justice systems, globally.
It also remains an open question—to be settled case by case in my view—as to whether the persistence of in-kind transfers within a cash economy (e.g., Scoones 2024) is more about pastoralist systems that are locally just than it is about the global injustices of the cash nexus.
III
What needs further highlighting is how far we can only get analytically and normatively in deploying that binary of justice/injustice. Indeed, some critics who question binaries, like nature/nurture or human/non-human to assume that there are justice systems which can or should correct for the equally well-known injustices others undergo and have undergone.
The twofold obstacle to any such conclusion is that (1) all manner of injustices are incurred without specific reference to principles or norms of justice and, anyway (2) those principles and norms prove contradictory, inconsistent or ambiguous when it comes to specific contexts (Douglass 2025). This is both an empirical and theoretical argument most recently associated with the political philosopher, Judith Shklar:
What sort of problem is injustice? One way of thinking about it is as an ethical problem. If not the first virtue of social institutions, justice is one of the most important moral values that should guide our reflections on politics. Injustice negates (or is a departure from) justice and is therefore a problem. Understood this way, there is a strong case for maintaining that we require principles of justice to evaluate cases of injustice: we can only identify the nature and scale of injustices with reference to some prior idea of justice. As should now be evident, this is not Shklar’s approach to theorizing injustice. She instead starts from our experiences of injustice and explores the political problems to which they give rise. The sense of injustice that we all experience should be understood in reference to the plural, competing, and ever-changing expectations that exist within any society, which cannot be formalized into determinate principles of justice. As this sense of injustice is a deep and inescapable feature of all social life, there is a political imperative to find ways of living together that can mitigate it as effectively as possible without (at the extreme) descending into cycles of violent revenge. To understand the problem of injustice in this way is to treat it as a political problem, first and foremost, rather than as an ethical one.
Such a sense of injustice repeatedly appears in the pastoralist literature (e.g., Krätli and Toulmin 2020, p. 68). Is it any wonder then that existing local justice systems are commended for providing some everyday order and stability? Scott-Villiers et al (p.35) write in their cases study of Somali-Kenya borderlands:
Most importantly, it is the ways in which people have been served by the Xeer system and Sharia over the many years of state neglect and war that is our focus here. Flawed though the system may be in relation to current circumstances and aspirations, community members across the rural borderlands feel that, on balance, it is a vital element in their lives. Its capacities not only to provide justice, but also insurance should also not be underestimated. Where else, people ask, do we have any assurances for carrying out business?
If your premiss is that global justice systems should correct for local injustices, then I don’t see how you can avoid your starting point being the really-existing messy nature of global justice and of local justice.
IV
An example of this messiness is geoengineering. It’s offered up as a last-ditch effort to save the planet in the midst of its very real climate emergency. Such indeed is the rationale for having in place robust monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems of the geoengineering interventions. Now of course, much of the current debate is about the unintended consequences of geoengineering and about the early warning systems for monitoring and evaluating them. But those consequences are almost exclusively dominated by concerns of global North and South experts and scientists.
I suggest that the major priority of governments and the regulators of geoengineering initiatives is to ensure that the early warning systems for droughts and bad weather still in operation among pastoralists and agriculturists of the developing world are also included and canvassed. Otherwise, we will be measuring the decrease (or increase for that matter) in the murders of local “rainmakers” (forecasters) because of a globalizing geoengineering.
Which takes us full circle, back to where the more global the system, the more unavoidable are local differences for policy and management.
Other sources
Douglass, R. 2025. “Who Needs a Theory of Justice? Judith Shklar and the Politics of Injustice.” American Political Science Review: 1–12 (accessed online at http://cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/who-needs-a-theory-of-justice-judith-shklar-and-the-politics-of-injustice/5B25A4AF90526DAE217F93E87765E074)
Elster, J. 1992. Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens, Russell Sage Foundation: New York NY
Krätli S., C. Toulmin 2020. Farmer–Herder Conflict in Sub-saharan Africa? IIED, Briefing. International Institute for Environment and Development, London (accessed online at http://pubs.iied. org/17753IIED)
Roe, E. 2023. When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene. IDS Working Paper 589, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/IDS.2023.025
Scoones, I. 2024. “Managing money: savings and investment in Zimbabwean agriculture” (accessed online athttps://zimbabweland.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/managing-money-savings-and-investment-in-zimbabwean-agriculture/)Scoones, I. 2024b. Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World. Polity: Cambridge, UK
Scott-Villiers, P., A. Scott-Villiers, and the team from Action for Social and Economic Progress, Somalia 2025. Navigating Violence and Negotiating Order in the Somalia–Kenya Borderlands. IDS Working Paper 618, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (accessed online at https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Navigating_Violence_and_Negotiating_Order_in_the_Somalia_Kenya_Borderlands/28715012?file=53375021)
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 