4.2 Division of responsibility in transition

4.2.1 Types of obligations

The main types of responsibility are legal liability and moral responsibility. Legal liability refers to the legal responsibility to act within the framework of the law. If someone does not bear their legal liability, they can be brought to justice in society to answer for their actions and be subjected to a punishment deemed appropriate. Legal liability is therefore a particularly powerful form of responsibility, because it is a matter of rules that are collectively defined in society. Their general purpose is to ensure the smooth running of living together in a society and a certain justness, the content of which is partly culture-specific. On the other hand, the limits to cultural practices are also determined by international human rights, the protection of which is also a duty of public authorities and national legislators and decision-makers.

Moral responsibility is not a legal responsibility, but it plays a very fundamental role in the functioning of human communities and in our own way of structuring the world and the limits of acceptable behavior. On many pressing issues, a renewed and strengthened sense of moral responsibility is also a first step towards the establishment of legal liability. For example, it will be much easier to achieve a binding climate law to reduce GHG emissions if the majority of the nation has first accepted the idea that the nation has a moral responsibility to contribute to climate action through sufficient emission reductions. (Of course, this applies only t democratic countries, where the majority viewpoint influences the lawmaking process. In dictatorships or oligarchies, the views of the people are less important for lawmaking, but even there, the implementation of laws is more challenging if there is significant public opposition.)

Non-legislative moral concepts (norms) guide our actions to a very large extent even in areas of life that are not decisively governed by mandatory legislation (such as many rules of relationships or behavior in public places, such as stores). Therefore, the moral concepts shared by the community – and their critical examination and public reflection – play a major role in guiding community action. This is also particularly relevant to the issue of responsibility in sustainability transition. The importance of the issue of responsibility-sharing can be easily seen by looking at everyday private and public debates in which individuals, companies, municipalities or states give explanations for why they are not acting in a certain way to, for instance, reduce their climate impacts or the biodiversity loss: saddling others with responsibility is one of the common responses. However, the current situation shows that current notions of responsibility-sharing have failed to generate enough leverage to significantly change unsustainable systems.

As part of thinking about, talking about and promoting the sustainability transition, it is also good to be able to critically look at issues of division of responsibility. When talking about responsibility, it is important to bear in mind the different forms of responsibility behind the actual division: on the one hand, the different degrees of responsibility associated with legal rights and, on the other hand, the distinction between positive and negative duties associated with moral responsibilities.

Legal rights, such as those listed in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the fundamental rights of citizens laid down in national constitutions, require duties and obligations to accompany them in order to be meaningful. If human rights do not create obligations for anyone, they have no meaning. Human rights therefore create three types of obligations for states, directed at both the present and the future: obligations (1) to respect, (2) to protect or fulfil, and (3) to implement. (And as an additional mention, separate remedial and restorative obligations where human rights have nonetheless been violated.) Respect for human rights requires that human rights not be violated by means of deprivation of liberty or violence, for example. Protecting human rights, in turn, requires the state to enact laws and law enforcement mechanisms that prevent other parties – such as companies or individuals – from violating human rights (for example, by enslaving workers). Criminal law, the police and the judiciary contribute to the task of protecting human rights. As for fulfilling human rights, it refers to taking active steps when a right is in danger of not being fulfilled, such as paying income support.

Since many rights require, directly or indirectly, a reasonable state of the environment, the requirement to respect and protect many human rights – for example, the right to food, water, health and a normal length of life – in itself creates obligations to protect the environment and, for example, to take climate action if future human generations are also thought to have rights. The recent discussion has also increasingly moved towards a perception that companies have broader human rights obligations than simply complying with laws that protect rights (we also discussed these in section 4.1.1). This responsibility stems from the fact that companies have considerable power and resources over issues such as the working conditions, livelihoods and work-related health impacts of their employees and subcontractors.

The various duties, which may be based on law or morality, are generally divided into negative and positive duties. States, companies or individuals can all have these duties. A negative duty is a duty not to do something: for example, not to use violence against other people. There are also negative duties related to caring for the environment, many of which are linked to laws prohibiting, for example, pollution of the environment (e.g. by dumping sewage or toxins into waterways or setting up a landfill in one’s backyard). Some endangered plant and animal species (and some non-endangered species) are protected, with a negative obligation not to collect and kill them. This is in order to safeguard the possibility of the species concerned to exist. In Finland, almost all mammal and bird species are protected, with the exception of species classified as game animals, a few bird species and some small rodents. Negative duties are generally considered to be the most fundamental rules of the moral code and particularly binding: for example, refraining from violence towards others is, in principle, a very strong obligation, the breach of which is normally justified only by a sufficiently serious need for self-defense. Otherwise, the breach of a negative duty may be punishable by criminal penalties, i.e. fines or imprisonment (in exceptional circumstances, such as war, the obligations may differ considerably from normal circumstances.) In general, respect for human rights also generates a negative duty not to violate them.

Positive duties impose an obligation to take active steps to secure and achieve something desirable. For example, ensuring the welfare of the children and pets of the family are positive duties (as is ensuring the welfare of farm animals for a livestock farmer – although the perception of welfare and the duties to safeguard it is considerably more modest in the case of farm animals than, typically, in the case of pets). Working for an employer with whom one has a contract of employment and paying money in a shop in exchange for the goods one wants are also examples of positive duties. In principle, there is a very large number of positive duties, and there is no limit to the number of new positive obligations that can arise, for example through various commitments. Positive duties are, therefore, often competing with each other or imposing conflicting requirements. For example, Riikka Aro, who studied the lifestyles of affluent and university-educated middle-aged people with an initial concern for the environment in her doctoral thesis, found that acting in an environmentally sustainable way is often overturned by a wave of conflicting expectations from both oneself and one's immediate family: taking environmental issues into account, which is perceived as important, easily falls lower in priority than, for example, meeting the expectations of children and spouses or fulfilling certain social, living standard or choice-related expectations.

Thinking about responsibility through traditional divisions of responsibility has proved useful in addressing the state of the environment at the local level. It is well suited, for example, to thinking about responsibilities to protect habitats from degradation and non-human species from disturbance and killing. However, global environmental problems are by their very nature wicked problems, i.e. very complex and large-scale dilemmas for which there are no single right solutions and for which doing or not doing a single act is often not decisive. This is where the division of responsibilities becomes more challenging.

What level of GHG emissions could be considered a breach of the "do not cause climate change" rule, for example at the level of a state, a company or an individual? What does it mean to minimize emissions as quickly as possible, and what kind of slowdowns are acceptable, for example in the interests of a just transition? Thinking in terms of negative duties also often leads to thinking of responsibility for sustainable action as a change in consumption patterns: the “do no harm” guideline is easier and more concrete to think about as the carbon footprint of one's own consumption and the impact of resource use (and it is much harder to see the individual's ability to contribute to reducing the harm caused by society as a whole).

Changing systems is essentially a jigsaw puzzle linking both individual and policy level action and ultimately appears to be a critical positive duty in terms of sustainability transition. But who has the responsibility to promote systems transition and why?

4.2.2 Role-based division of responsibility in the case of wicked problems

We look at the roles involved in sustainability transition from a moral perspective when considering who should do what. This reflection also applies to our own responsibility at the individual level and to what it takes to act responsibly in each role. Thinking about responsibilities in relation to wicked problems is particularly challenging.

In the case of climate change-related problems, wickedness has also been conceptualized as structural injustice (which we learned about in the Good life and planetary well-being course). The prevailing, unjust situation has been arrived at through complex chains of influence: for example, the actions of states and corporations have historically been intertwined, and it is often not possible to say unequivocally that a particular environmental harm is caused by the actions (or inactions) of either states or corporations. It is difficult to point at obvious culprits who would have a decisive role to play in exacerbating environmental problems.

Rather, we have become entangled in a jumble of ecological crises (dragging human communities that have emitted only non-existent amounts into the mess with us) as a result of complex and often unintended and unfortunate developments and path dependencies. Due to these trajectories, taking care of the well-being of family members, for example, can consume a lot of fossil energy, and acting otherwise while promoting family well-being can be very difficult. The opportunity to make climate-smart choices in everyday life is partly within the scope of individual choice, but the constraints and costs of these choices are determined by structures and processes that are out of the individual's control.

In such cases, it is pointless to divide the responsibility for solving problems by considering the blameworthiness of each action itself. Philosophical and political studies have started to build a role-based and forward-looking conception of responsibility for structurally embedded injustices. Responsibility is, then, not imposed on the basis of causing reprehensible harm in the past, but of participation in human communities and thus of the possibility of influencing future events through one's own position. As an idea, this kind of forward-looking responsibility is very familiar in roles related to parenthood and occupation. They include responsibilities that are not based on any harm caused in the past but on the norms and influence of that role: for example, parents have a responsibility to ensure the health of their children and a safe environment for them to grow up in, while doctors have a responsibility to help patients.

When the same thinking is applied to sustainability issues, the perspective shifts from cause and effect to how we participate in the shared processes that contribute to producing and reproducing – but also solving – environmental problems. We, therefore, have a shared responsibility to seek to change the practices and systems that affect the processes of production, consumption and everyday life. Taking responsibility requires participation and collective action: choices made at the individual level, such as a single purchase decision in a store, do not change the structures that make detrimental behavior easy and normal, or sometimes even the only sensible choice.

A forward-looking approach to responsibility is not intended to turn a blind eye to historical events. It is quite undeniable that the countries of the Global North, as well as the first industrialized countries and their wealthiest populations, have benefited most from the fossil economy and ecologically unequal international trade (discussed in the Introduction to planetary well-being course). Therefore, communities in at least most Western and industrialized countries also have a special moral obligation to compensate the countries of the Global South for the harm they have caused and to repay the benefits they have earned through unjust means. The concept of climate debt illustrates this idea. According to it, industrialized countries have taken on more “climate space” than they are entitled to. This share has, therefore, been taken without permission from communities in the Global South. To pay this climate debt, the Global North must both radically reduce its own emissions and financially support the Global South in its own emission reductions and adaptation to climate change. The climate debt is a narrative of sorts, a new framework for describing global North–South relations that has been used in particular by climate justice movements.

Debt for Climate movement calls for the cancellation of the debts that the Global South states owe to Global North states or North-dominated international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF in the name of climate debt. Photo from Buenos Aires, June 2022, during the G7 summit. Several Argentine trade unions (e.g. ATE and CTA Autónoma) also participated in the demonstration. A long banner reads in Spanish: "The only real debt is the debt to people and nature." (Photo: Debt for Climate.)

Forward-looking responsibility thinking in relation to sustainability transition is thus fixed on the roles that different actors have. As people in different roles have access to different resources, networks, knowledge and influence, the precise means of taking collective responsibility depend on these opportunities. The principle of role-based division of responsibility is similar to the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" in international environmental law and, for example, in the UNFCCC Framework Convention on Climate Change (which, in the case of the Framework Convention, applies to states). For example, the roles of politician, journalist, researcher, sports club activist, social media celebrity and consumer offer very different opportunities for influence from the point of view of the sustainability revolution. One could speak of role-fitting, sustainability-promoting responsibilities: for example, those who prepare and make policy decisions are particularly well placed to provide leverage through the public sector to demand and drive change, and to crack the structures that support the prevailing system. Influential social media celebrities, in turn, can play an important role in raising awareness among a particular group of people, changing political attitudes (for example, in terms of support for climate action) or changing their own consumption behavior.

The amount of responsibility also varies according to the resources of the actors, which means that even in the idea of shared responsibility, an old lady living in the small municipality of Pihtipudas is not generally thought to have the same responsibility for promoting sustainability as the newly elected director of city development – although this may be different if the old lady from Pihtipudas still has significant social capital and tacit, informal influence on key people in regional development work in Central Finland through her work history, for example. The amount and nature of responsibility is influenced by the power available in the role (including political power, material wealth and influence on public opinion), the benefits achieved or foreseeable benefits from transition, social capital, knowledge, and involvement, i.e. how closely a change in the system or process affects the actor in question.

While the power and responsibility of big actors are easy to identify, actors of all sizes have the resources and capabilities essential for assuming responsibility. For example, a small local business can act as a driver of change and strengthen capacities if it is well regarded and trusted. For example, it can play a key role in getting a local biogas project off the ground, or the sustainability training it provides to its employees can spread knowledge and good practice to the local community and other

NGOs and other coalitions of individuals can also trigger big changes: in France, for example, the Citizens' Convention on Climate, a panel of 150 citizens who came together to discuss fair climate action, initiated a process that resulted in France banning domestic flights on routes that would take less than 2.5 hours by train or bus from the start of 2023. Local communities, for their part, are important awareness-raisers and policy mouthpieces, tailoring sustainability action to local conditions, taking into account regional or community-level strengths and challenges. Even grand plans are ultimately implemented at the local level through concrete action. An example of this is the "bicibus" experiment  launched in Barcelona in March 2021, which takes hundreds of children safely to school at a same time, as a kind of a muscle-powered bus.