Saving the World Ep 7: (Dis)order and (in)justice in a heating world

A series of webinars created by the Hothouse at ANU, discussing the intersections between climate change, inequity, and human health. The focus is on actions that enable transformative change away from the harmful consumptogenic system to systems that promote good health, social equity and environmental wellbeing.

This episode featured Robyn Ekersley, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in Political Science at the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

The most influential accounts of the relationship between international order and justice in International Relations insist that establishing international order (especially among great powers) is necessarily prior to international justice.  However, these accounts were not fashioned with the challenge of global heating in mind, and they tend to ignore the many ways in which international orders constitute and maintain climate injustices. 

This presentation offered an ecologically enlarged account of world order that exposes the deepening contradictions between international ordering practices and their unjust disordering effects, which will undermine international order and produce increasingly dysfunctional states over time. It will be shown that addressing the climate (in)justice claims of the most vulnerable allows the demands of prudence and justice to converge to protect both societies and the climate system, but this will demand a new international economic order and not just a fairer and more effective climate regime.