Climate mitigation: Just,legitimate and hence politically feasible?

Abstract

An emerging consensus among social scientists holds that climate mitigation policies should be just and legitimate, not only because justice and legitimacy are valuable moral ends but because they are vital to policies’ political feasibility. Yet, the view that justice and legitimacy enable political feasibility in climate mitigation stands in sharp contrast to the mainstream view within normative political theory, where political feasibility is usually treated as a constraint on the realization of values such as justice and legitimacy. This paper explains how these conflicting perspectives arise and offers a multifaceted account of the relation between moral values and political feasibility in climate mitigation. By analyzing three conceptual distinctions – normative versus sociological, transcendental versus comparative, and wide-scope versus narrow-scope approaches to justice/legitimacy – we show how justice/legitimacy tends to enable political feasibility under the latter understandings (sociological, comparative, and narrow-scope) but constrain it under the former (normative, transcendental, and wide-scope). This clarification dissolves the apparent disciplinary contradiction and reveals the conditions under which values central to climate mitigation align with or limit political feasibility.

Keywords

political feasibility justice political legitimacy climate mitigation ideal and non-ideal theory

Introduction

As the window of opportunity for halting global warming below 2°C is closing, the feasibility of climate mitigation policies has risen to the top of the scholarly agenda of social scientists. To reach the climate goals, it is now widely acknowledged that hitherto dominant supply-side mitigation strategies – mainly fossil-free energy production and carbon dioxide removal – must be complemented with strategies targeting the demand-side of GHG emissions (Creutzig et al., 2016; Dubois et al., 2019; Moberg et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2021). While demand-side mitigation carries significant potential for GHG reductions, it also raises new challenges for policymakers and researchers in the field, as do various supply-side measures across domains such as negative emissions, degrowth, or energy infrastructure (Jewell and Cherp, 2019). In contrast to supply-side strategies that tend to target large industrial producers and only indirectly individual consumers, however, demand-side mitigation requires significant changes in both lifestyle and social organization, changes that can be politically contested and met with resistance from citizens (Copland, 2020; Mehleb et al., 2021). If technological progress sets the limits for supply-side carbon reductions, demand-side mitigation is constrained primarily by what can be politically achieved (Geels et al., 2020; Jewell and Cherp, 2019). Thus, the key question for bringing mitigation about is: what renders mitigation policies politically feasible?

This paper engages with a specific response to this question, which states that the normative status of a policy – specifically, its justice and legitimacy – is key for its political feasibility. The idea is not simply that a just and legitimate mitigation policy is (everything else equal) better than an unjust or illegitimate one. Rather, what is suggested is that justice and legitimacy enhance the policy’s prospects of successful implementation by rendering policies acceptable to recipients (Kitt et al., 2021; Maestre-Andrés et al., 2019). This view finds support both in experimental studies (e.g. Clayton, 2018; Huber et al., 2020) and in empirical analyses of the implementation of mitigation policies (e.g. Ibsen, 2024; Mehleb et al., 2021). Thus, on what appears to be an emerging scholarly consensus in the empirical social sciences, justice and legitimacy are important enablers of political feasibility in climate mitigation.

From a normative viewpoint, this sounds like excellent news. If justice and legitimacy are key to political feasibility, we should expect cautious politicians to craft just and legitimate policies independently of their concern for these values. By tailoring climate policies to what is politically feasible, we get a just and legitimate transition as a side effect. Yet, the rosy picture of the relation between normative status and political feasibility does not stand uncontested. Against it stands what we would describe as the mainstream view within normative political theory, considering political feasibility to be a constraint on the realization of normative values like justice and legitimacy (Gilabert, 2017; Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, 2012; Hamlin, 2017; Lawford-Smith, 2013; Southwood, 2022). It is not typically so that just and legitimate policies are more politically feasible than unjust and illegitimate ones. If this were the case, we should expect the world to be a significantly better place than it currently is. To arrive at practicable political proposals, most political theorists believe that we will have to relax our moral ambitions. This is true not least in the case of climate mitigation, where normative standards have been heavily criticized for not taking seriously the constraints set by key actors’ interests and opinions (Miller, 2008; Swift, 2008). Rather than enabling political feasibility, justice, and legitimacy must, on this view, be downplayed in order for climate mitigation to be practicable.

The aim of our paper is to shed light on the apparently conflicting views of the relation between normative status and political feasibility in climate mitigation. In what follows, we propose three conceptual distinctions that help us understand how the apparent contradiction arises. Disentangling these is necessary both for identifying in what sense justice and legitimacy could contribute to political feasibility and for assessing the resulting policies from a normative standpoint. We argue that justice and legitimacy tend to facilitate feasibility when approached through sociological, comparative, and narrow-scope lenses but tend to generate tensions if understood in normative, transcendental, and wide-scope terms. Our argument stresses the need for increased conceptual clarity while illuminating the conditions under which justice and legitimacy advance or constrain effective climate action.

The paper is structured as follows. (1) In the first section, we present two conflicting views of the relation between justice and legitimacy, on the one hand, and political feasibility, on the other, in climate mitigation. (2) The second section introduces three conceptual distinctions that apply to justice and legitimacy. (3) The third section employs these distinctions to explain and discuss the apparent contradiction. (4) The fourth section concludes the paper.

Climate mitigation: Just, legitimate and hence politically feasible?

The feasibility of climate mitigation has lately risen to the top of both scholarly and political agendas. The IPCC AR6 recognizes six different dimensions of feasibility, assessing mitigation policies in terms of economic, technological, institutional, socio-cultural, environmental-ecological, and geophysical feasibility (IPCC, 2023: 28). It does not, however, consider political feasibility among the main factors constraining mitigation. One reason for this may be that political feasibility is assumed to be captured by other instances, such as institutional or socio-cultural feasibility, or constitutes an umbrella term that entails all aspects of feasibility (see, for example, Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, 2012; Jewell and Cherp, 2023). A second reason may be that the IPCC seeks to offer prescriptions for political agents. It seeks, in other words, to tell such agents what they should do and, hence, what they should will to do. If political will is at the core of political feasibility, as we will argue that it is, such prescriptions must therefore be crafted without regard to political feasibility.

Another reason may be conceptual confusion. While feasibility broadly understood means something like “doable under realistic conditions” (Jewell and Cherp, 2023: 2), a review of recent contributions to the literature on climate mitigation reveals that the understandings of political feasibility vary significantly. According to Wang et al. (2021), political feasibility is an effect of public opinion, market structure, and government capacity. Nielsen et al. (2020) argue that political feasibility includes public support for the policies, pressure from the interested and affected parties and their organizations, and political negotiations in legislative bodies. Jewell and Cherp (2019) regard political feasibility as a relation between the political cost of an action and the capacity of a particular agent to bear this cost. And Patterson et al. (2018) understand the political feasibility of climate mitigation as “the collective belief within a domestic political system about the scale and speed of decarbonization that is seen to be plausible and desirable within that society” (p. 2). Taken together, these definitions suggest a cluster of related features, including public support, stakeholder resistance, institutional constraints, and the political costs of implementation. This cluster is reflected in the literature’s recurring references to features such as socio-cultural barriers (Wynes and Nicholas, 2017), path dependencies (Béland and Howlett, 2016), voters’ distrust (Huber and Wicki, 2021), the electoral market orientation of politicians (Willis, 2018), and the benefits for decision-makers of deliberate inconsistencies between talk, decisions, and actions in climate policy (Rickards et al., 2014).

The problem of what characterizes political feasibility is not a novel one. In his seminal work on this topic, Giandomenico Majone observes that while it is fairly clear what economic or technical feasibility constraints amount to, it is much less so when it comes to political feasibility. Majone proposes three distinct political feasibility constraints deriving from the limitation of available political resources, the permissible distribution of benefits and costs, and the institutional framework (Majone, 1975: 265). For present purposes, we rely only on the first of these, because it best captures the mechanism through which normative status affects policies’ political feasibility. By “available political resources”, Majone refers primarily to the political support a given policy proposal can generate. For each step a policy would have to pass on its way to be adopted, we should assess the probability of passage (Majone, 1975: 266). Political support thus entails various aspects, including support from political agents, stakeholders, and public opinion, all of which could be summed up under the label “political will” (see Baatz, 2018: 82). “The level of political support which a given policy can command,” Majone writes, “may be conceived of as analogous to the economist’s ‘budget constraint’” (Majone, 1975: 266). As such, the capacity for engendering political support sets the outer limits to the politically feasible.

While the issue of feasibility is conceptually independent of that of desirability, our current interest lies in the proposal that the two may correlate in previously unrecognized ways in the context of climate mitigation. In recent years, it has become widely acknowledged that fairness considerations – both distributive and procedural – play a crucial role in policy acceptance in this area (Maestre-Andrés et al., 2019; Meyer, 2021; Patterson et al., 2018), with some studies suggesting that fairness is the single most important determinant of public opinion (Bergquist et al., 2022). Though the evidence is less conclusive, several studies also suggest that trust in government and institutions is crucial for mitigation policy acceptance (Cologna and Siegrist, 2020; Fairbrother, 2017; Kitt et al., 2021; cf. Devine et al., 2024).

Distributive fairness is conceptually close to justice, so much so that the two concepts are often used interchangeably. Similarly, procedural fairness and trust in governing institutions are intimately linked to their legitimacy. Insofar as fairness and trust determine mitigation policies’ acceptability, then, we should expect climate mitigation to be politically feasible only to the extent that such policies are sufficiently just and legitimate. This view is most clearly articulated by Ibsen (2024), who argues that climate mitigation is subject to two political feasibility constraints: the inequality constraint and the legitimation constraint. According to Ibsen, policies that impose unfair burdens on lesser advantaged groups will be met with resistance, as will policy proposals put forward by agents who lack political trust. His conclusion is that

the transition to a decarbonized economy must not only be distributively just and democratically legitimate because this is morally required but also because – given the present state of democratic-capitalist societies – only a sufficiently just and democratically legitimate transition will be politically feasible. (Ibsen, 2024: 3, emphases in original)

Note that the claim here is not that normative status and political feasibility are conceptually interrelated. In a recent article, Tank et al. (2025) criticize the tendency of the IPCC to factor normative status into conceptualizations of feasibility, assuming that things like reducing poverty or promoting water accessibility are part of what feasibility means (pp. 3– 4). While we agree with the authors that the issue of feasibility is indeed distinct from that of desirability (but see Räikkä, 1998; Miller, 2013), we here engage not with the conceptual claim that “feasible” entails “just” or “legitimate” but with the empirical claim that political feasibility is at least partly an effect of policies’ justice and legitimacy.

The underlying idea is that normative status (justice, legitimacy) is important for ensuring acceptability, which in turn is a prerequisite for gaining political support. Still, the emerging picture is that justice and legitimacy are key to political feasibility in climate mitigation. From a normative standpoint, this sounds like excellent news: if more just and legitimate mitigation policies are also more feasible, a purely prudential mitigation strategy would automatically lead us toward the realization of those values. However, this optimistic outlook contrasts sharply with the more pessimistic one dominant in the field of normative political theory, which takes feasibility to constrain normative ideals.¹

To see this, we first need to take a step back and consider how feasibility is treated within this field. The concept of feasibility has in recent years attracted considerable attention from political philosophers. Among the proposed conceptualizations, we find possibility (Wiens, 2016), conditional probability (Brennan and Southwood, 2007), conditional probability with an incentives test (Stemplowska, 2016), and deliberation-worthiness (Southwood, 2022). Typically, however, conceptions of feasibility tailored to normative political theory are careful not to accommodate constraints attached to lacking political support, public opinion, and stakeholder resistance. For good reasons, it would seem: since feasibility constrains our political obligations, taking insufficient political will as a constraint would let moral agents off the hook simply because they are unwilling to do what is required of them (Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, 2012: 813). Because a concern for political support would unduly constrain the demands we place on the political agents whose support is needed, the traditional view has been that normative principles should be developed without concern for political feasibility (Räikkä, 1998: 28–29). While we may treat the political resistance of others as a constraint when asking whether carrying out a policy is feasible for some specific agent (say a state agency or a group of activists), it has no role in assessing the feasibility of principles that apply to society as a whole (Chahboun, 2024: 60).

Lately, however, political theorists working on climate issues have begun to challenge this assumption. Prominent proposals for a just mitigation are the Polluter Pays Principle, which holds that states should contribute to mitigation in proportion to how much GHG they have emitted; the Beneficiary Pays Principle, which holds that states should contribute according to how much they have benefited from global GHG emissions; and the Ability to Pay Principle, which holds that states should contribute according to their ability (Moellendorf, 2014; Tan, 2023). While feasible in the sense that they could be implemented if all relevant agents sought to do so, these principles may not be politically feasible in the sense that they are capable of generating sufficient political support. This has led critics to argue that they are too far removed from political realities to offer practicable recommendations for political agents. Arguing along these lines, Weisbach offers an objection to the Polluter Pays Principle:

As of 2016, the United States would, under a plausible interpretation of this theory, owe the rest of the world $12.4 trillion, or more than 600 years’ worth of its foreign aid . . . The cash flows from other rich nations would be of similar orders of magnitude. The claim that nations would make these payments is simply divorced from reality. (Weisbach, 2021: 19)

Weisbach argues that principles of climate justice that few, if any, states are likely to follow fail to be action-guiding for political agents in the real world (Weisbach, 2021: 26). In response to this and similar objections, many climate theorists have come to advocate more pragmatic approaches to climate justice (Brandstedt, 2019; Roser, 2016; Tank, 2020; Weisbach, 2021: 21). Leaving aside the question of whether and to what extent normative principles should cater to political feasibility, we note that both sides in this debate agree that concerns about political feasibility stand in conflict with highly ambitious normative ends. This view contrasts sharply with the picture emerging from the policy literature. If Ibsen’s findings suggest that too little justice and legitimacy will render policies infeasible, Weisbach and his followers argue, to the contrary, that too much justice will have this effect. In what follows, we will examine the confusing picture that arises from juxtaposing these two views. We will argue that the apparent contradiction can be resolved once we acknowledge that different approaches to justice and legitimacy are at play in the different fields.

Approaches to justice and legitimacy

This section proposes a set of conceptual distinctions that could help us investigate more thoroughly the claim that normative status drives political feasibility in climate mitigation. Our inquiry will focus on the normative concepts of justice and legitimacy. Broadly construed, principles of justice typically concern how to distribute benefits and burdens – specifying principles or rules that determine “who owes what to whom”, whereas principles of political legitimacy typically concern the exercise of political power, specifying principles that determine “who has political power over whom” (Barry, 1991; Buchanan and Keohane, 2006; Christiano, 2008; Valentini, 2012).² In this section, we propose three conceptual distinctions that we believe are key to understanding the conflicting views of the relation between normative status and political feasibility in climate mitigation. The distinctions that we will discuss here are those between normative versus sociological, transcendental versus comparative, and wide-scope versus narrow-scope approaches to justice and legitimacy. We will argue that for each of these pairs, adopting the latter approach should lead us to expect that normative status enables political feasibility, whereas the former approach will tend to produce a conflict between the two. However, we do not suggest that these approaches go together in the sense that adopting the former in one category will lead us to do the same in the others. Rather, the three should be understood as distinct variables that could be combined in a number of ways.

Normative versus sociological approaches

The first distinction is that between real and perceived justice and legitimacy. To capture the difference between the real and the perceived normative status of a policy, we may distinguish between a normative and a sociological understanding of those concepts. On a normative understanding, theories of justice and legitimacy are concerned with what ought to be. They incorporate principles or rules that define what is just and legitimate, independent of what people generally perceive as just and legitimate. Moreover, they are often prescriptive in the sense that they are intended to guide human behavior and the design of basic institutions in society. These theories typically have a philosophical foundation, being grounded in philosophical reasoning about basic values like equality, duties and rights, freedom, and liberty.

Sociological understandings of justice and legitimacy, on the other hand, focus on how these values are perceived, practiced, and institutionalized within societies. A sociological approach is descriptive in nature, concerned with explaining and understanding how concepts like justice and legitimacy are embedded in social structures, cultural norms, and institutions. It has an empirical foundation, being grounded in empirical research, utilizing methods such as surveys, interviews, and ethnographic studies to understand people's perceptions of justice and legitimacy.

Needless to say, both normative and sociological approaches encompass a variety of understandings of what justice and legitimacy entail with regard to climate mitigation. On the normative outlook, different conceptions of climate justice will produce different verdicts concerning the justice of specific policies (see Meyer, 2021; Torné and Trutnevyte, 2024). A policy that assigns costs to the worst polluters will be in line with the Polluter Pays Principle, whereas one that places the largest burdens on the richest agents aligns with the Ability to Pay Principle. Disagreement about the true principles of justice is a problem inherent to the normative account. It is not certain, however, that a shift toward a sociological understanding will help us overcome this difficulty. Just like philosophical accounts of justice will produce different verdicts about a policy’s normative status, so will people’s perceptions of justice. This is especially evident in times of polarization and value conflict like our own. Depending on whose perspective we focus our sociological inquiry on, we may reach different conclusions regarding the justice and legitimacy of a specific policy. This may in turn lead to different conclusions regarding the relation between normative status and political feasibility.

Transcendental versus comparative approaches

A second crucial aspect of the relation between normative status and political feasibility concerns the kind of normative outlook that supports the fairness or legitimacy of a policy. The debate between transcendental and comparative approaches in political philosophy centers on the appropriate methodological framework for theorizing about justice and other political principles, such as legitimacy. If transcendental approaches identify universal principles that characterize perfect justice and legitimacy in a way that can be described as “top-down”, comparative approaches proceed from the “bottom up”, inquiring into the relative justice and legitimacy of different available alternatives (Sen, 2006).

Climate justice encompasses a variety of issues, including questions concerning who has a duty to mitigate, to whom this duty is owed, who should pay for societal adaptations, and who should bear the risks and harms that climate change inevitably produces. In this paper, we will restrict our discussion to issues concerning the just allocation of burdens of mitigation. The distribution of such burdens could be fully just according to a principled understanding of justice, or it could be relatively just compared to a specified set of alternative distributions. In climate justice, a fully just allocation of burdens may follow the Polluter Pays or the Ability to Pay Principle, allocating burdens to agents in proportion to their total emissions or their wealth, respectively (Moellendorf, 2014). By contrast, a comparatively just allocation might impose somewhat higher – though not strictly proportional – burdens on heavy polluters than on less heavy polluters, or offer compensation for regressive policy effects to the poorest households through revenue recycling (Barretz, 2024).

Similarly, institutions governing mitigation could be fully legitimate according to a specified conception of legitimacy, or they could be legitimate in comparison with a range of alternative institutions. Transcendental approaches set out to identify perfect justice and legitimacy, whereas comparative approaches identify what is most just relative to a set of available alternatives. In climate mitigation, a transcendental theory of legitimacy could specify a legitimate system of global climate governance, which ensures, for example, fair participation, accountability, and equitable outcomes for all states as well as robust international institutions that guarantee compliance with stringent emissions reductions, address global inequalities, and ensure representation for vulnerable populations (Caney, 2005). By contrast, a comparative approach might recommend consulting mini-publics at specific points in the decision-making process (Setälä and Smith, 2018) or granting indigenous peoples a special role in shaping policies that affect their cultural and territorial rights (Yankey et al., 2024), on the assumption that these measures enhance legitimacy – real or perceived – compared to the status quo.

Wide-scope versus narrow-scope approaches

Another aspect that affects how we conceive of the relation between normative status and political feasibility is the scope of a normative account, that is, who the rights-holders and duty-bearers are. For a long time, theories of justice and legitimacy used the nation-state as a (tacit) premise for their application. Duties of justice were thus conceived of as arising primarily among citizens in a state. But Rawls’ (1999) Law of Peoples and David Held’s (1995) Democracy and the Global Order – together with events such as terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and increased migration in light of increased processes of globalization – sparked an interest in extending theories of justice and legitimacy to the global domain. This opened up to a widening of the categories of duty-bearers and rights-holders to include other states as well as their citizens. Similarly, justice theories have traditionally tended to restrict their scope to the now living. Yet, in the wake of climate change, the question of justice between generations has become the focus of attention of scholars focusing on normative political theory (Caney, 2014; Gardiner, 2011). Here, the set of rights-holders is widened, not geographically but temporally, to include future generations.

Domestic theories of justice justify duties of justice by appealing to, for example, the social contract (Hobbes, 1996 [1651]), the role of the community and its shared values (Sandel, 1982), a shared national identity and history (Miller, 1995), or the particular institutional relationship between citizens (Nagel, 2005). Theories of global justice, on their part, expand the scope of moral and political duties beyond nation-state borders to encompass all human beings, justifying the rise of these duties with reference to, for example, a global Rawlsian ‘original position’, in which individuals choose principles of justice without knowing their place in the world at large (Beitz, 1999), the inequalities of the global economic order (Pogge, 2002), inequalities that undermine individuals’ opportunities to live a decent life (Moellendorf, 2009), and global interconnectedness, which binds people across the globe and generates shared responsibilities and mutual obligations (Caney, 2005).

Domestic theories of political legitimacy typically justify the rise of duties of legitimacy by appealing to, for example, the idea that political authority is legitimate if it is based on the consent of the governed (Locke, 1689), a state’s ability to protect and promote fundamental rights (Nozick, 1974) or basic liberties of citizens (Rawls, 1971), and democratic participation among those subjected to the law (Dahl, 1989; Habermas, 1996). Theories of global political legitimacy, on the other hand, insist that principles of legitimacy should be extended to international institutions, ensuring that global governance structures are accountable, participatory, and representative of the global population (Kuper, 2004; Sen, 1999; Shue, 2014).

Given the nature of the problem, it should come as no surprise that principles of climate justice often are tailored to the global domain. The previously mentioned Polluter Pays Principle, Beneficiary Pays Principle, and Ability to Pay Principle all apply on a global level, distributing burdens either to states or to individuals regardless of their state belonging (Lawford-Smith, 2016; Tan, 2015). Few attempts have been made to identify principles of just mitigation that apply specifically to the domestic level and concern the distribution of burdens among citizens of a state, even if global principles such as the Polluter Pays Principle and Ability to Pay Principle can also be relevant domestically. One explanation for this may be that domestic justice is an issue that permeates the whole of society, and thus it makes little sense to treat the burdens of climate mitigation separately from other problems of distribution that arise within the state (such as how to share the cost of public education or the building of railways). Rather than coherence with some specific principle of climate justice, then, the justice of domestic mitigation policies will depend on the extent to which these policies contribute to – or disrupt – domestic justice at large.

Few attempts have been made to identify principles of just mitigation that apply specifically to the domestic level and concern the distribution of burdens among citizens of a state. This is not because global principles such as Polluter Pays Principle and Ability to Pay Principle have no domestic relevance but because domestic mitigation is embedded in broader institutional and distributive contexts that may call for additional considerations.

Regardless of whether we discuss justice on the domestic or the global level, we usually consider duties of justice to be owed to the currently living. Shifting focus to intergenerational justice creates an asymmetry, since future generations can do nothing to harm or benefit the presently living. Still, the intergenerational approach is vital for climate justice, since the duty to mitigate is primarily owed to future generations. This is not because present generations are not already harmed by climate change but because any efforts made to mitigate today will pay off only in the future. While the presently living thus shoulder the burdens of mitigation policies, future generations are the primary beneficiaries of such policies. Some have argued that it would therefore be just to shift burdens of mitigation from present to future generations, to the extent that this is possible. As an example of such shifting, Broome suggests that present generations can refrain from investing in infrastructure that aims to benefit future generations, using the money they would otherwise have spent on this on mitigation (Broome, 2012). Importantly, however, shifting the costs of mitigation onto future generations is different from placing the burden to mitigate on them. Since failures to mitigate now will impose much heavier burdens on these generations than mitigation would on the presently living, and mitigation will become costlier the longer it is postponed, failures to halt global warming will constitute an injustice against future generations.

Justice, legitimacy, and political feasibility: A multifaceted account

We began this paper by identifying what appeared to be contradictory views of the relation between normative values and political feasibility in climate mitigation. While normative theorists tend to treat feasibility considerations as a constraint on the pursuit of justice and legitimacy, climate scholars in the social sciences highlight justice and legitimacy as enablers of political feasibility in climate mitigation. Having identified different possible understandings of the core concepts – justice and legitimacy – we are now in a better position to understand what accounts for this apparent contradiction. This demonstrates how different understandings of policies’ justice and legitimacy yield different verdicts concerning their political feasibility.

The normative versus sociological dimension

The most striking difference between normative and empirical approaches is their respective focus on the normative and sociological dimensions. While political theory deals with normative understandings of justice and legitimacy, empirical scholars privilege justice and legitimacy in the sociological senses. While this should come as no surprise – after all, empirical scholars should arguably be empirically oriented – confusion arises when the language used does not clearly signal which conception is employed. Claims that “policy fairness [was found] to be the most decisive factor” (Thaller et al., 2023) and that “only a sufficiently just and democratically legitimate transition will be politically feasible” (Ibsen, 2024: 3) create the impression that justice and legitimacy in the normative senses are what contribute to political feasibility. Looking beyond such slips, however, it is easy to see that what enables political feasibility in climate mitigation is perceived rather than actual justice and legitimacy.

Though unsurprising, the insight that only sociological, not normative, justice and legitimacy enable political feasibility is disappointing. Since popular beliefs about justice and legitimacy may differ significantly from what justice and legitimacy genuinely demand, we have less reason to celebrate the proposed correlation between justice and legitimacy and political feasibility when those concepts are understood in sociological terms. The reasons for disappointment are both normative and practical. First, since justice and legitimacy in the normative sense are inherently valuable, it is easy to see why a correlation between those and political feasibility should be welcomed by policymakers and citizens alike. Yet, since perceived justice may refer to what is actually a flagrant injustice – for example, when opposition to carbon taxes is framed by citizens as fair (e.g. “not punishing ordinary truck drivers”) while it normatively undermines distributive justice and the Polluter Pays Principle (Carattini et al., 2018) – we cannot attribute this inherent worth to justice in the sociological sense. Further, appeals to justice may, upon closer examination, turn out to be rationalizations of self-interest. It has, for example, been shown that frequent car drivers tend to defend principles exempting those in need from reducing their emissions, whereas non-frequent drivers defend principles that require those who emit most to reduce their emissions most (Hammar and Jagers, 2007). Since there is no reason why frequent drivers would have different perceptions of justice than non-frequent drivers, this signals that their responses reflect self-interest rather than moral conviction.

Besides these normative issues, however, there are also practical concerns that affect the usefulness of the observed correlation. If political feasibility correlates with justice and legitimacy in any principled sense, we could use this information to tailor predictably feasible policies. Yet, if political feasibility correlates with justice and legitimacy in the sociological sense, this gives us considerably less practical guidance. One problem is that people’s perceptions of justice and legitimacy may differ, so that a policy that appears just and legitimate to one recipient will appear unjust and illegitimate to another. Knowing that, for each agent, the normative status of a policy is key to its acceptability is then unhelpful for predicting the political feasibility of different policy proposals in society taken as a whole. Another problem is that even a single agent’s perceptions may be inconsistent in a way that renders their judgments about specific policies unpredictable. If perceptions about justice and legitimacy are inconsistent in these ways, knowing that they determine policy acceptance will also be of limited use for policymakers.

Still, we may argue that a correlation between political feasibility and sociological justice and legitimacy is better than no correlation at all. Though this involves a risk that perceptions will be inconsistent or diverse, there is also a chance that they will display at least some degree of consistency and overlap. It is also possible that justice and legitimacy in the sociological and normative senses may coincide, either through empirical coincidence or by conceptual design. Normative appeals to “public reason” and “overlapping consensus” are attempts to derive normative principles from widely held moral views (Rawls, 1987, 1993, 1997). And many normative accounts of legitimacy include appeals to some form of popular consent (Habermas, 1996; see Peter, 2023). Though normative accounts of this kind do not take people’s perceptions of justice and legitimacy at face value but rather as a starting point for philosophical inquiry, orienting ourselves toward perceptions about justice and legitimacy may constitute a step in the right direction. Furthermore, we may even argue that the crucial role perceived justice and legitimacy seem to play in climate mitigation is good news even if those perceptions are both inconsistent and fundamentally mistaken. This is because appeals to normative values render agents susceptible to normative argumentation. If people hold that the justice and legitimacy of a policy are what render it acceptable or not, this could open up dialogue about what justice and legitimacy actually entail. Indeed, this may be true even if agents’ appeals to justice and legitimacy are made in bad faith, since employing normative language may create expectations – both in ourselves and in others – that we will respond to normative concerns.

The transcendental versus comparative dimension

Normative and empirical approaches also tend to differ with regard to the transcendental versus comparative dimension. This, we recalled, concerned whether the policies under evaluation are transcendental in the sense of identifying perfect and universal justice or legitimacy, or only comparatively just or legitimate in relation to the status quo and/or accessible alternative policies. Normative approaches are typically concerned with identifying transcendental normative standards that tell us what a fully just and legitimate transition toward carbon neutrality would look like. Principles of justice, such as the Beneficiary Pays Principle or the Ability to Pay Principle, distribute costs of mitigation in a way that ensures that no agents have to shoulder burdens that are not rightfully theirs. From the viewpoint of justice, then, we have nothing to complain about as long as these principles are followed. Likewise, normative scholars’ attempts to identify what a legitimate transition would require typically strive for perfect legitimacy, leaving no space for complaints given that their standards of legitimacy are met. Since perfection is demanding, it is easy to see that it may come into conflict with political feasibility – especially since wealthy and powerful agents have much to gain from trying to resist shouldering their fair share of the burdens or allowing the less well-positioned a say in decision-making procedures.

This highlights an important point about the relation between political feasibility and acceptability discussed above: when it comes to political feasibility, not only numbers count. It also matters for which agents a particular policy is acceptable or not. Some agents – typically the wealthy and powerful – are better positioned to hinder the realization of particular policy proposals. Given that ideal standards of justice and legitimacy allocate a heavier share of the burdens to the wealthy and strive to restrict the influence of the powerful over decision-making procedures, we should expect such standards to be met by resistance from those who are most likely to succeed in preventing policy implementation (Chahboun, 2024). This is the mechanism brought forward by Weisbach when he states that it is “simply divorced from reality” that the US would carry the costs the Ability to Pay Principle allocates to it. Rather than the normative content of specific principles of climate justice, the target for Weisbach’s critique is the transcendental approach, seeking to identify perfect justice rather than tailor principles that could be successfully implemented under current real-world conditions (Weisbach, 2021; see also Heyward and Roser, 2016).

In contrast, when empirically oriented scholars claim to identify a connection between policies’ normative status and their political feasibility, the appeal is not to universal standards but to people’s more or less intuitive judgments about the effects mitigation policies will have on them or others. This falls closer to the non-ideal outlook, considering the justice and legitimacy of policies relative to the status quo or available alternatives (Heyward and Roser, 2016; Sayegh, 2018). Two things are worth noting here. The first is that it matters whether mitigation policies are expected to enhance justice and legitimacy in society overall or whether it suffices that they merely avoid worsening existing injustices or lowering legitimacy. One reason to think that mitigation policies should contribute more than others to justice and legitimacy is that they have deep and pervasive effects on society. Still, from a policy perspective it seems odd that a certain policy area should be subject to higher demands of justice and legitimacy than others. If not, a comparatively just and legitimate mitigation policy may simply be one that does not violate normative standards more than others.

The second thing to note is that comparatively just mitigation policies may be less than perfect in more than one sense. As is easily seen, a policy can be comparatively just even if it allocates a disproportionate share of burdens to some agents, as long as alternative policies burden these agents even more. In addition, however, a policy can be comparatively just even if it leaves duties of mitigation undischarged, that is, if it fails to achieve the mitigation necessary to reach the climate goals. On a fully just distribution, the total share of burdens to be distributed amounts to what is required to halt global warming. On the comparative account, however, a comparatively just mitigation policy may be deficient not only due to a disproportionate distribution of burdens but also because the totality of burdens distributed is too small, leaving duties of mitigation undischarged (Hohl and Roser, 2011).

In most cases, we should expect comparative justice and legitimacy to be less valuable than their transcendental counterparts. Just like the normative/sociological dimension, then, the transcendental/comparative dimension not only explains why scholars adopting normative and empirical approaches draw different conclusions regarding the correlation between justice and legitimacy, on the one hand, and political feasibility, on the other; it also shows why this correlation is less encouraging than it may initially seem.

Still, comparative justice and legitimacy (at least if understood in the normative sense) are better than no justice and legitimacy at all. In this sense, the correlation between normative status and political feasibility still constitutes a step in the right direction. What remains to be seen is whether there comes a point where coherence with normative standards no longer enhances but instead hinders mitigation policies’ political feasibility. This section has pointed to several reasons why this may well be the case – first and foremost, the heavy demands that transcendental normative standards are likely to place on privileged groups and states, paired with the capacities of those groups and states to resist policies that allocate heavy burdens to them.

The wide-scope versus narrow-scope dimension

As mentioned earlier, the scope of justice and legitimacy refers to the subjects – duty-bearers and rights-holders – to which they apply. While narrow-scope accounts of justice and legitimacy restrict the set of rights-holders on a temporal or geographical basis, a wide-scope account will instead broaden the subjects to a global and/or intergenerational level.

Normative theories of justice and legitimacy in climate mitigation are typically tailored to the global arena. This makes sense given the global nature of climate change and the vast contributions required to counter it, which exceed what any single state could provide on its own. The global focus could help to explain why normative political theorists see a conflict between justice and legitimacy, on the one hand, and political feasibility, on the other. Though it is easy to see how an unjust distribution of burdens on the global level could render overly burdened agents unwilling to carry the costs assigned to them, it is equally likely that a just global distribution will be resisted by agents that are assigned heavier burdens than others, for example, rich or high-emitting states or individuals (Kenehan, 2017; Page, 2008). And since such agents are typically more powerful than others, their resistance is more likely to be successful than that of less influential agents. While the fact that those who should carry the largest share of the burdens of mitigation usually have the largest capacity to resist is true also on the domestic level, the domestic arena provides an institutional framework for voicing discontent and enforcing policies that is lacking on the global arena. Without such institutions, it is hard to see how mitigation policies’ justice – real or perceived – would contribute to their political feasibility.

Similarly, it is easy to think of examples where global legitimacy may run into conflict with political feasibility. Though we wish to leave specific conceptions of legitimacy aside, most understandings of this concept hold it to require some extent of democratic control. Legitimacy on the global arena would arguably require the development of an institutional framework for democratic global governance, something which is resisted by most of the world’s states (and, presumably, their citizens) today (Buchanan and Keohane, 2006; Erman and Kuyper, 2020; Held, 1995). The real reason to think that global and intergenerational normative considerations will impact political feasibility less than domestic and intragenerational ones is that the opportunities for effective protest are fewer in the global arena and non-existent across generations, that is, among people not yet born.

In contrast, empirically oriented climate scholars’ claim that normative status determines political feasibility typically refers to the justice and legitimacy of domestically tailored mitigation policies. Studies relying on self-reported acceptability usually ask respondents to consider different policy alternatives, such as carbon taxes or cap-and-trade. Since such policies are adopted and implemented at the domestic level, we should expect concerns regarding their normative status to refer primarily to justice and legitimacy in their domestic applications. Likewise, when observed in actual protests against climate mitigation policies, appeals to injustice and illegitimacy are typically domestically framed. For example, the Yellow Vests’ protests in 2018, which led the French government to withdraw an unpopular fuel tax, have been attributed both to its perceived unjust effects on workers and rural residents (as opposed to white-collar and urban residents) and to a lack of trust in domestic political elites, in particular President Macron (Mehleb et al., 2021; Ibsen, 2024).

Similarly, normative theories of climate mitigation usually have an intergenerational focus. Duties to mitigate are likewise owed to future generations, whom the presently living should protect from the serious harms that would follow from climate collapse. Yet, since future generations have no direct impact on policy acceptance or implementation today, we have little reason to expect that violating standards of intergenerational justice would reduce policies’ political feasibility. As Tank et al. (2025: 3) observe, unduly burdening future generations often remains perfectly feasible, absent present resistance. In contrast, the conclusion that justice and legitimacy enable political feasibility usually refers to the distribution of burdens among the now living or the trust present‑day generations place in their governments. It is, again, when considered in the narrow sense of justice and legitimacy within present generations that these values enable political feasibility.

In contrast to the previous dimensions considered in this paper, there is no clear hierarchy between wide- and narrow-scope approaches to justice and legitimacy; generally speaking, both of them are equally worth pursuing. It is also hard to think of cases where wide- and narrow-scope standards stand in direct conflict with each other. Still, one could easily imagine cases where the demands of one standard are realized without consideration for the other. A state may discharge its full share of mitigation duties according to global standards of justice while distributing the burdens unjustly among its citizens. Conversely, a state may adopt a policy that distributes burdens of mitigation among its citizens in a perfectly just manner but fails to discharge the duties assigned to it by global standards of justice. Though not imposing excessive burdens on any of its citizens, the state does not carry its full share of the burden as determined by standards of global justice. This wrongs either other states that are forced to “take up the slack” or future generations who will suffer more harm than necessary due to global warming. Further, it implies that what appears to be an unjust burdening of the poor when considered from a domestic viewpoint may not be so according to global standards of justice, typically because not even the most heavily burdened members of a wealthy society may carry their fair share of the total global costs of mitigation.

Likewise, a policy may be fully legitimate according to domestic standards (e.g. that decision-making should follow democratic procedures) while failing to satisfy global standards of legitimacy (e.g. that all those significantly affected by a decision should have a say in the decision-making or that all subjected to the rules should have a say) (Goodin, 2007; Habermas, 1996). The main reason for thinking that falling short of wide-scope normative standards will have less impact on political feasibility than falling short of narrow-scope ones is that wide-scope standards include rights-holders (e.g. foreign citizens or future generations) that have no direct impact on decision-making processes in contemporary states. For a failure to take their interests into account to hinder political feasibility, we must normally assume that agents belonging to the narrow scope (citizens in a state or the presently living) will act in their names. Though possible, it is much more likely that disadvantaged groups that can voice their dissatisfaction within democratic political institutions will be successful in protesting decisions that go against their interests.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have examined what initially appeared to be two contradictory views of the relationship between normative status and political feasibility in climate mitigation. While scholars conducting normative theory saw a conflict between justice and legitimacy, on the one hand, and political feasibility, on the other, scholars conducting empirical studies claimed that justice and legitimacy were key to the political feasibility of mitigation policies. We have argued that this apparent contradiction dissolves once we acknowledge that the conceptions of justice and legitimacy differ along three dimensions: normative versus sociological, transcendental versus comparative, and wide-scope versus narrow-scope approaches. Normative theorists typically consider justice and legitimacy in the normative, transcendental, and wide-scope senses, leading them to conclude that political feasibility constrains the realization of these values. In contrast, empirical scholars tend to ground their claims on sociological, comparative, and narrow-scope understandings of these concepts, aligning justice and legitimacy with political feasibility. Our results rebut the (overly) optimistic view that normative status and political feasibility go hand in hand in climate mitigation. However, if justice and legitimacy in the sociological, comparative, and narrow-scope senses enhance political feasibility, this may still be a good thing. This underscores the practical value of our conceptual framework. Crucially, carefully distinguishing between sociological versus normative, comparative versus transcendental, and narrow versus wide-scope understandings of justice and legitimacy reveals how these values can both enable and constrain political feasibility in climate mitigation. We therefore recommend that scholars explicitly state which approach they employ to avoid misunderstandings.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Naima Chahboun

Eva Erman

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors have financial support from three research projects: Vetenskapsrådet (2023-00739) Professor Eva Erman; Vetenskapsrådet (2023-00918) Professor Eva Erman; Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (MMW 2023.0009) PhD Naima Chahboun.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Naima Chahboun, PhD, is a researcher at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University. She works in the field of political philosophy, with special interest in philosophical methodology. Chahboun has published in journals such as Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy and Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Eva Erman is Professor at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University. She works in the field of political philosophy, focusing on democratic theory and philosophical methodology. Erman is the author of The Practical Turn in Political Theory (2018) and Human Rights and Democracy (2005). She has also published more than 55 articles in international peer-reviewed journals such as British Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Nature Machine Intelligence and European Journal of International Relations. Since 2008, Erman is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the scholarly journal Ethics & Global Politics (Taylor & Francis).

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