Representing Future Generations

The impact of climate change on young people and future generations has become a key issue globally, and current international law-making processes insufficiently represent the interests of these groups. While ideally the interests of future generations would be mainstreamed, the authors argue that proxy-style mechanisms for representing future generations should urgently be pursued as a parallel strategy. This book analyses existing institutions in the UN which indirectly represent vulnerable groups and uses a novel combination of legal and philosophical methods based in the tradition of John Dewey's pragmatism and International Legal Realism. Chapters include case studies of climate change cases brought before international courts, tribunals and the UN envoy to demonstrate how representation of future generations can be implemented to bring about institutional reforms. Written in accessible language, it will make a useful reference for researchers, graduate students and policymakers in international environmental law, global environmental governance and environmental philosophy.

Peter Lawrence is an Adjunct Senior Researcher in the Faculty of Law at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Peter holds a Ph.D. in international law from Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He works closely with philosophers and has been a visiting scholar at the Munich School of Philosophy, Germany, the Ethics Institute, Utecht University, The Netherlands, and the Australian National University (ANU) College of Law, Canberra, Australia. He is the author of Justice for Future Generations: Climate Change and International Law (2014) and co-editor of Giving Future Generations a Voice: Normative Frameworks, Institutions and Practice (2021) and a contributor to the Oxford Handbook on International Environmental Law (2021).

Michael Reder is a Professor of Practical Philosophy with a focus on social and political philosophy at the Munich School of Philosophy. He earned his doctorate in 2006 with a dissertation on the Global Governance paradigm and completed his habilitation in 2011 at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. He has conceived and led numerous research collaborations on topics such as representation & democracy, climate change & justice, and politics & transnational solidarity. He has been a visiting scholar at Ateneo de Manila University, the University of Cambridge, Fordham University/New York, and Georgetown University/Washington, DC. He is also the author of numerous books, including Climate Change, Justice and Sustainability (2012) together with Edenhofer et al., Philosophie pluraler Gesellschaften (2018) and Tamoudi & Faets, Politik der Zukunft and Zukünftig Generationen als Leerstelle der Demokratie (2020).