Lost Liability and Increased Vulnerability

This paper aims to investigate the paradigms underlying two environmental research programmes’ pronouncements on responsibility for the effects of the Anthropocene: The International Climate Change Regime, the de facto arbiter of climate justice today; and New Materialism, a promising and increasingly popular movement in the environmentally aware humanities. It argues that the regime tends to displace historical liability by framing climate harms as arising from impending natural hazards and by translating these heterogeneous losses into commensurable monetary/utility values suitable for insurance, markets, and technical adaptation. Contrastingly, while new materialism, prima facie, promises a corrective epistemology that foregrounds entanglement, non-human agency and situated knowledges, this promise is also laden with some political risks: dispersed causation as a reason to soften human accountability, and the recognition of agency’s susceptibility to co-optation in ways that reproduce domination. Accordingly, the paper argues that, as they are, neither paradigm manages to secure justice for climate harms, and instead end up complicating institutional accountability and continuing domination.