Advanced Review Climate justice and the international regime Chukwumerije Okereke * Contestations over justice and equity in the climate regime provide the most striking evidence of the quest by relevant actors to ensure that institutions for global environmental governance are based on widely shared ethical standards of responsibility and fairness. This review article examines recent policy debates and literature on distributive justice and the climate regime and highlights some areas of key research. The review indicates that while discussions on climate justice have gained ascendency within the international regime circle with noticeable impacts, a lot remains to be clarified about the status of justice concepts and how to best design polices that reconcile moral ideals and power politics. Hence, although the current regime performs well in terms of recognizing the need for and incorporating concepts of distributive justice between the rich and poor countries; it has not provided a basis to sufficiently upset the underlying forces and abiding structures of global inequality.  2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. WIREs Clim Change 2010 1 462–474 C limate change has thrown up questions about the nature and ethical basis of international political institutions ‘in ways that have never been faced’. 1 Contestations over justice have been one of the most prominent features of the international climate regime. Similarly, competing claims over how policies may be designed to realize these ideals constitute some of the principal challenges facing global climate governance. 2,3 Climate justice has also provided the impetus for the most recent intense and widespread academic engagement with the ethical issues associated with interstate relations and the international regime. 4,5 However, while demands for scholarship on climate justice represent significant aspects of the global climate governance landscape, much still remains to be done to clarify the status, implications, and best approaches for climate justice within the context of the international regime. This review article examines recent policy debates and literature on justice and the climate regime and highlights some areas of key research. The review touches on various kinds of justice issues (distributional, procedural, retributive, and systemic) in both inter- and intra-generational perspectives. However, the term distributive (or distributional) * Correspondence to: chuks.okereke@smithschool.ox.ac.uk Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2BQ, UK DOI: 10.1002/wcc.52 justice is used here in many places as shorthand for referring to these various dimensions of justice. Within the debate, one can distinguish a number of disparate approaches, focus, and paradigm—from economics through political science to international law. 6 In this article, I propose to organize the review around five prevalent questions and concerns: These include 1. Is justice applicable in international regimes? 2. What are the dimensions of justice implicated in the climate regime? 3. What principles of justice currently underpin the international climate regime? 4. How does the climate regime handle questions of justice? 5. In what ways are principles of justice mobilized around specific concepts and climate policies? It is important to emphasize that the above categorization is approximate and not intended to be seen as rigidly defined mutually exclusive questions. The seven questions overlap quite frequently both in policy debates and in literature. 7,8 Indeed, one of the key features (and weakness) of the climate justice scholarship is that the majority of the offerings tends to be too broad, even ‘cinematic’ in scope. Furthermore, while the review touches on questions of intergenerational equity much of the focus, for the 462  2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Volume 1, May/June 2010