A fair path to the future? - foundations for empirical research

Looking ahead, the quest for environmental sustainability may turn out to be the most important political challenge of the twenty-first century. Though consensus is growing about some of the policy objectives like climate stability, political attitudes to these issues remain highly contested. Political parties seem to differ on both ontological assessments (how severe are the problems) and remedial strategies (what to do about them). Surprisingly, turning to empirical political research, few attempts have been made to study these variations in any systematic fashion. Simultaneously, in political and moral philosophy, environmental sustainability has emerged as a key issue of intergenerational distributive justice. With its advanced theoretical vocabulary, contractual conceptions of justice have successfully been applied to issues ranging from climate change to resource depletion. By bringing these two scholarly approaches into contact, this paper explores how theoretical work on intergenerational justice can be used to inform empirical studies of party attitudes to environmental sustainability.