Global Climate Justice: developing and operationalising a critical framework to embed the environment into global social policy

Introduction

With the latest data from the IPCC clearly showing the imminent and widespread impact that climate change will have, it is not without cause to argue that current efforts to combat the climate crisis are not enough. Given the far-reaching impacts, more research (and action) is needed that involves new perspectives and takes an interdisciplinary approach to engage with the all-encompassing nature of climate change.

Despite it being determined by the IPCC that humans and the climate are more strongly interdependent than previously thought, there is very little by way of conceptualising or measuring social and environmental outcomes together. By embedding environmental issues into social policy, transformative change could occur that, as yet, has been untapped. Social policy has the potential to both mitigate the worst effects of climate change and lay the foundations for a new, sustainable future. As such, this thesis aims to make use of this opportunity.



Research questions

There is a clear gap between scholarship on global social policy and how the environment intersects with social policy. After identifying that these broad disciplines may be connected using climate justice as a conceptual framework, it gives rise to two, interrelated, research questions:

Can global social policy be conceptualised within a critical climate justice framework?
If so, what would that framework look like?

Then, in order to operationalise these research questions, a further two questions are asked that invite a more empirical exploration:

Are nation states aligning themselves with the principles of climate justice?
If so, which countries are the most advanced?

The third and fourth research questions engage with empirical methods and contribute to knowledge by mapping possible reasons why current climate change agreements are falling short of their targets. The findings also provide a pathway for future research into how current policies may be adapted to be better informed by global climate justice. It is hoped that this outcome will lead to more socially-driven policies being made to help solve the global impacts of climate change.


Research Design

In order to answer both sets of research questions, the research will be broken down into three phases; engaging a mixed methods approach of triangulation. Phase 1 will combine the qualitative method of conducting interviews as part of the critical framework development process. Phase 2 will use quantitative methods to operationalise the framework, by collecting and counting evidence aligning with the framework from policy documents. However, the quantification of the results will not be seen as the final research result and a further qualitative step of more interviews will be conducted, providing meaning and context to better inform the findings.


Ethical Implications

Recognition of the four key ethical principles of participant harm, lack of informed consent, invasion of privacy and deception will be taken into account when designing the interviews during phases one and three in this thesis. However, these principles do not apply when using policy documents as data for Phase 2. This is due to the data being accessible and readily available within the public domain, with no prohibitions on its use for research purposes.


Impact and contribution to knowledge

This thesis will contribute to knowledge in two ways. Firstly, there is the methodological contribution of creating and testing a critical framework that combines the research areas of global social policy, environmental justice and climate justice.

The second is the contribution of conceptualising the environment within global social policy. This could lead to specific outcomes regarding the use of global social policy as a tool for mitigating the negative impacts of climate change.