Planetary Justice and Contested Normativities: Processing In/Commensurability in the Anthropocene

Efforts to address the Anthropocene are increasingly guided by sophisticated models that identify pathways for large-scale socio-ecological transformation. Yet such approaches often presuppose that proposed interventions can be translated into practice without sufficiently accounting for how competing claims to justice are negotiated on the ground. Building on recent work on justice regimes, this talk argues that transformations are structured by the coexistence of plural and often conflicting normative orders that are only partially commensurable.

Rather than offering a direct ethnography of climate change, the talk draws on long-term research on land restitution in South Africa to analyse how such competing claims are articulated, contested, and provisionally aligned in practice. Ethnographic cases show that conflicts over land are not merely distributive, but involve divergent understandings of recognition, responsibility, and temporality, giving rise to persistent dilemmas of in/commensurability in practice. Under conditions of entanglement, attempts to redress one injustice may intersect with or reproduce others, including through processes in which particular claims to victimhood come to dominate and marginalise others. The talk proposes that such situations are not left unresolved but systematically processed through recurrent operations of selection, translation, and stabilisation of competing justice claims. These operations render plurality governable, while reorganising it in ways that generate specific tensions and vulnerabilities. Across cases, these tensions can intensify into breakdown, resistance, or renewed conflict. By identifying these patterns, the talk contributes an empirically grounded account of the social conditions under which transformations towards planetary justice become possible—or systematically break down under conditions of contested normativity.