Who Owes Whom?

Abstract: This thesis sets out to analyze a potential reframing of who owes whom? The orthodox external debt discourse describes how countries in the global South are heavily indebted to the industrialized North. However, since the industrial revolution, 20 per cent of the world’s population living in the global North has emitted 75-80 per cent of the carbon trapped in the atmosphere today. In a bizarre inverse relationship, the global South faces 75-80 per cent of the damaging consequences from climate change. In light of the North’s unequal use of the global commons, climate justice movements in the South are calling on countries in the North to pay their climate debt. According to the climate justice movement, this unrecognized and unpaid climate debt significantly exceeds the value of the financial debt, which the global South is currently repaying the North. As an emerging activist concept, limited research has been conducted on climate debt as of yet. This thesis hopes to make a contribution, however small, to this research gap. The thesis builds on data from an ethnographic field study, conducting interviews with the members of the climate justice movement in the Philippines, as well as relevant secondary sources. To analyze its findings, it uses a social movement theoretical framework (focused on framing and bridging vs. bonding rhetoric), as well as “Toulmin’s Argumentation Model”. The findings suggests that the climate justice movement in the Philippines employs both ethical and political aspects of framing in advocating for the recognition of climate debt, and that a potential recognition of climate debt relates to and reframes the external debt discourse of the Philippines and other indebted countries.