Colloquium Lecture: Anna Stilz (UC Berkeley), "Collective Self-Determination and International Authority in Climate Governance"

Abstract: In the future, a sustainable solution to climate change will likely require authoritative international institutions to regulate many matters that have long been regarded as wholly the province of national legislation. Global environmental institutions may also need to depart from consensual models of decision-making, and attach significant costs to state behavior to incentivize compliance.

In addition to being a currently salient issue, climate change governance provides a good case for exploring philosophical questions around the legitimacy of international authority. How might future authoritative global climate governance be made legitimate? Is such extensive international authority in tension with the notion, implicit in theories of collective self-determination, that each society’s internal affairs should be the concern of its own citizenry? How should future climate governance be structured—should these institutions be structured democratically, or authorized in some other way?

This paper sketches a theory of legitimate international authority, with special reference to climate governance. I argue that an international authority is legitimate if: (a) it is required to define and enforce rules of morally mandatory cooperation constitutive of a global society that adequately secures equal self-determination for individuals and collectives; (b) the authority is multilaterally authorized by what I call reasonable cooperator peoples; and (c) the authority is appropriately limited, leaving space for self-determining peoples to order their institutions in a manner that reflects their distinct priorities and values. I apply this account to future climate governance, as a case study in how the supranational rules and institutions necessary to administer a collective-autonomy-protecting global society should be designed. Here I argue that these institutions should be instances of multilateral representative governance, in which reasonable cooperator states pool their sovereignty to regulate matters of global environmental concern.