Most scholars of climate change policy agree that although ethical considerations are an essential feature of all public policy debates, they are fundamental in a particularly direct and obvious way to climate-change policy. Ethics often involves weighing conflicting principles or interests. Simply, addressing climate change requires ethical consideration from multiple perspectives, as it involves balancing competing interests such as environmental protection, economic development, social justice, and individual rights. However, it is unclear to what extent and how ethical frameworks like consequentialist and deontological reasoning inform or influence climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience policymaking proposed by the Paris Treaty Agreement along with some specific conference of the parties (COPs). For instance, scholars like Dietz et al. (2007) agree on the claim that some ethical perspectives be considered to address issues of mitigation, adaptation, and the long-term task of building resilient economies and societies. The rationale is that climate change involves interest groups and stakeholders whose climate policy advocacies and preferences are divergent in the public policy debate related to global warming, specifically when it involves complex ethical considerations and principles. Presumably, taking power imbalances and disparities in influence into account, ethical arguments, or at least some moral disagreements among different interest groups are expected to arise when choosing between economic development and environmental sustainability. Using Analysis of the policy-related data, I expect to navigate the complexity of ethical frameworks identified in the Paris Agreement and conference of the parties’ document from a polycentric approach standpoint. On that account, I hope to join the public policy debate on interest groups and stakeholders’ sphere of influence and polycentric governance.
