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Biography
Supervisors: Andrew Allan and Dr Simon Cook
My research explores the potential for the principles and practice of restorative justice to address climate injustice. Climate justice challenges include inaction on mitigation of emissions; failures to support adaptation; failures to compensate for loss and damage and underlying structural and systematic injustices. One reason for these failures is an inherited narrative which limits responsibility to those with whom we are in physical or cultural proximity. But the nature of climate science reveals universal global moral relationships of responsibility and care. Restorative justice, with its guiding aim of restoring relationships, its focus on actual harm and repairing the needs of the harmed, its call to harmers to acknowledge the full extent of their responsibility and its imperative towards transformative change, has a potential role to play in the realisation of climate justice. My research aims to:
- develop a theoretical model of how restorative climate justice could work at different scales: e.g. nation state, institution, local community.
- carry out a participatory case study of the feasibility of this model for particular Andean communities affected by deglaciation and consequent harms including water insecurity, risk of glacial lake outburst floods, and loss of cultural and spiritual identity.
3. refine and adapt the original model, informed by the results of the case study.
Recent updates
September 2022 - presentation at Critical Legal Conference, University of the Arctic, 'Liminality, neighbourhood and climate change'.
September 2022 - chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Restorative Justice, 'Meeting on Thin Ice: The Potential for Restorative Climate Justice in Deglaciating Environments'.