1. Introduction

Global disasters, from catastrophic fires in Australia to the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforce a broadly shared view that we face a planetary crisis that urgently requires stronger modes of planetary stewardship and earth system governance. Calls for immediate political action abound. The business press advocates “carbon neutrality” and “carbon pricing” as “first building blocks for a new era of planetary stewardship” (Kell, 2019). Global governance experts call for “a new constitution-type agreement that will redefine the relationship between humans and the rest of the community of life” (Young et al., 2017, 69, see also Kotzé, 2019a). Some political theorists offer an even more radical reading of the emerging landscape of planetary stewardship, arguing that a global Leviathan of some sort is likely to take shape in response to the emergent planetary crisis (Wainwright and Mann, 2018). All this comes down, in short, to an increasing call for more effective planetary stewardship and transformative change towards stronger earth system governance, from local to global levels.

At the same time, however, considerations of justice are becoming increasingly pronounced in sustainability research. Numerous studies of inequality have shown how those who benefit from the economic processes that underlie global environmental degradation pass on the risks and burden of environmental externalities to humanity at large or to future generations (Okereke et al., 2009; Hailemariam et al., 2019). Sustainability scholars have addressed questions of distributive, representative, procedural, or intergenerational justice, including recent calls for new conceptualizations of “planetary justice” (e.g., Biermann and Kalfagianni, 2020). And yet, often this literature stays at the level of ideal conceptions and abstract arguments drawing on normative theories of justice. What is missing—and this is our main point here—is a clearly articulated pro-poor focus within diverse and often abstract conceptions of planetary justice.

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In short, planetary stewardship requires planetary justice. There is an urgent need for better theoretical approaches and differently focused empirical studies that put the needs of the poor first in analyzing and advocating for effective governance responses to planetary ecological crises and earth system transformations. Inspired by Gandhi’s Talisman (Austin, 2003, vii), we argue that this requires powerful state and non-state actors across all scales of governance to abide by the following three tenets of pro-poor planetary justice:

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We consider these three tenets (which have both a distributive/substantive and a representational/procedural component) as necessary and non-negotiable. Importantly, fostering a pro-poor focus within planetary justice scholarship and practice will also elicit greater social and political legitimacy for efforts at planetary stewardship (Gupta, 2019). Yet few analyses to date have outlined contours of a pro-poor focus within planetary justice. In this Perspective, we seek to begin this debate within the earth system governance research community. We discuss, first, the extent to which the dominant approaches to planetary stewardship and earth system governance address the poor in their notions of justice, and then briefly sketch out what alternative approaches might be needed.

What falls under the global poor is subject to many debates. Our understanding of the poor follows the UN definition of poverty as “a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information” (United Nations, 1996, 38). Poverty depends not only on income but also on access to social services and is intertwined with social discrimination and exclusion. Most of the nearly 1 billion people that live below the international poverty line of US$ 1.90 a day live in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia (Sumner et al., 2020). While a pro-poor focus within planetary stewardship and planetary justice is relevant for the poor in all countries, it is particularly pertinent, we argue, for countries in the Global South that are home to the so-called “bottom billion” (Collier, 2007; for a recent critique, see Ravallion, 2020).

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