GOVERNING A JUST TRANSITION: CLIMATE POLICIES FOR GLOBAL AND DOMESTIC EQUITY

Abstract

This dissertation explores how climate policies can be designed and implemented to promote both environmental effectiveness and distributive justice at global and national levels. It comprises three interrelated essays that collectively offer a multi-scalar framework for understanding and advancing a just climate transition. The first essay introduces Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP) as a novel metric for assessing global climate responsibility, highlighting how carbon sink appropriation and trade-embedded ecological pressures contribute to international inequality. The analysis reveals that high-income countries have exceeded their fair share of global HANPP, while a significant share of HANPP is embedded in international trade flows—underscoring the need for incorporating carbon sink equity into climate negotiations.The second essay examines the distributional effects of carbon taxation across 168 countries using a high-resolution Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) framework, capturing heterogeneity across 65 sectors and 201 income groups. The findings suggest that carbon taxes, while effective at reducing emissions, impose disproportionate burdens on low-income households unless revenues are recycled through targeted social assistance programs. Building on the modeling framework and databases developed in the second essay, the third essay focuses on fossil fuel subsidy reform, examining its distributional, poverty, and environmental implications, and assessing how social protection mechanisms can mitigate the adverse impacts of subsidy removal. Together, these essays demonstrate that just transition policies must address both emission reduction goals and underlying social inequalities. The dissertation contributes methodologically by developing a SAM-based framework for evaluating the distributional impacts of climate policy (carbon taxes and removal of fossil fuel subsidies) and conceptually by introducing HANPP into climate justice discourse. Policy implications include the integration of climate instruments with social protection systems, the design of redistributive revenue recycling mechanisms, and the establishment of international carbon revenue funds to support low-income countries. These findings reinforce that fairness and effectiveness are mutually reinforcing in climate policy, and that durable climate action requires embedding equity considerations into both national welfare systems and global governance architectures.