An African Approach to The Motivation Problem of Climate Action

In this paper, I propose and defend a complementary approach to motivating individual climate action in collective harm cases. Addressing global climate change is one of the most critical and urgent collective harm problems facing the world today. The literature on approaches to reversing the negative course of climate change has prioritised Western-centred scientific solutions primarily focused on collective action projects. The focus on collective action as the sole solution raises two significant issues: (1) The problem of inconsequentialism, which questions the sufficiency and relevance of any individual contribution to solving a collective harm problem like climate change, and (2) The Motivation Problem (TMP), which exposes the difficulty of motivating individual/non-collective action, given their insignificance in collective action cases. Here, I present a new approach to motivating individual climate action in cases of collective harm, based on an African concept of Complementarity, against the challenges of inconsequentialism and TMP. I call this a complementary obligation. Furthermore, I demonstrate that a complementary obligation grounded on the Principle of Complementarity provides an alternative and more defensible justification for individual moral obligation to act in collective harm cases.