Conclusion: Towards a Transnational Order of Climate Justice

Abstract

Transnationally felt, deteriorating global climate conditions have the effect of making individual sovereign states appear too small to resolve the growing range of problems they present to humanity at large. The era of the Anthropocene has ushered in a series of geological and social transformations that do not apply exclusively to any one corner of the globe but represent a level of threat that every state is required to internalize. Although clearly limited in its own isolated capacities to halt the intensity of a globally relevant environmental destruction, the contemporary sovereign state, nevertheless, continues to be an important enabler of transformative potentials even as it also proves a major hindrance to efforts to address climate change problems. States acting consistently in self-interest have shown themselves to be a serious obstacle to the formation of more co-operative arrangements on issues such as resource sharing, accommodating displaced persons, or devising a collective plan of co-operative action to reduce rates of global warming, as we have seen throughout this book. That said, the modern democratic state still remains a main site of democratic governance (Habermas 2008: 447) and for that reason must play a prominent role in the future implementation of solutions to these problems. Although much of the analysis presented in this book assesses the various hindrances created by a state-bound outlook on deepening ecological challenges, it also has tried to draw attention to the significant potentialities created for a reform of this perspective by states’ legal endorsement of the universal validity of basic democratic principles.