Janus-Faced Climate Justice in Guatemala: How Many Faces Do Citizens Perceive?

Climate justice is an interpretive framework to address the various risks, impacts and disparities associated with climate change, yet empirical evaluations of the sources of support for climate justice and its three pillars – procedural, recognition and distributive – remain limited. We follow the literature on climate justice and the variety of institutional and non-institutional climate actions to identify the factors that move individuals to consider supporting the three-pillared justices, such as personal experiences with climate-related events, perceptions of climate change as threats to livelihoods, government preparedness and planning, and civic engagement. We test these factors using a national public opinion survey in Guatemala, a country that combines high vulnerability to climate change threats as well as low adaptive capacity to cope with these threats. Our results show that the sources of support for distributive climate justice align well with climate justice. By contrast, procedural and recognition forms of climate justice are not explained very well by the factors commonly associated with the broader concept of climate justice. Our findings have large implications for the underpinnings of the separate expressions of climate justice and the outcomes they seek to achieve.