Through their synergies, trade-offs, and contradictions, the sustainable development goals (SDGs) have the potential to lead to environmental justices and injustices. Yet, environmental justice (EJ), ...and social justice more broadly, are not currently embedded within the language and spirit of the SDGs. We part from the premise that “many ‘environmental’ problems are, by their very nature, problems of justice” (Lele, Wiley Interdiscip Rev Water 4:e1224, 2017). We review progress in EJ frameworks in recent years, arguing for the need to move beyond a focus on the four principles of mainstream EJ (distribution, procedure, recognition, and capabilities) towards a more intersectional decolonial approach to environmental justice that recognises the indispensability of both humans and non-humans. EJ frameworks, and the SDGs should recognise power dynamics, complex interactions among injustices, and listens to the different ‘senses of justice’ and desires of theorists, activists, and other stakeholder from the Global South. We analyze how EJ frameworks are, or fail to be, incorporated in the SDGs with a focus on the food–water–health nexus (SDG2, 3, 6); climate-energy (SDG7, 13), conservation (SDG14, 15); and poverty and inequality (SDG1, 10). We call attention to the ‘elephant in the room’—the failure to go beyond GDP but instead include economic growth as a goal (SDG8). We argue that sustainable degrowth and intersectional decolonial environmental justices would create better conditions for the transformative changes needed to reach the broader aim of the SDGs: to leave no one behind.
The present article analyses a unique database of 220 dam-related environmental conflicts, retrieved from the Global Atlas on Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), and based on knowledge co-production ...between academics and activists. Despite well-known controversial, social, and environmental impacts of dams, efforts to increase renewable energy generation have reinstated the interest into hydropower development globally. People affected by dams have largely denounced such ‘unsustainabilities’ through collective non-violent actions. Nevertheless, we found that repression, criminalization, violent targeting of activists and assassinations are recurrent features of conflictive dams. Violent repression is particularly high when indigenous people are involved. Indirect forms of violence are also analysed through socio-economic, environmental, and health impacts. We argue that increasing repression of the opposition against unwanted energy infrastructures does not only serve to curb specific protest actions, but also aims to delegitimize and undermine differing understanding of sustainability, epistemologies, and world views. This analysis cautions that allegedly sustainable renewables such as hydropower often replicates patterns of violence within a frame of an ‘extractivism of renewables’. We finally suggest that co-production of knowledge between scientists, activists, and communities should be largely encouraged to investigate sensitive and contentious topics in sustainability studies.
•The globalization of Environmental Justice (EJ) calls for a relational understanding of scale.•Environmental conflicts spur productive alternatives, demonstrating the positive ideal of ...EJ.•Deliberative methods in the university can promote the definition of shared values and vision in research.•Co-design informed by ‘care-full’ scholarship creates spaces for convivial sharing.•Power imbalances bound up in research co-production are not resolved through participation.
Environmental Justice is both a field of study and a social movement. This dialectical relationship between theory and praxis constitutes the basis of its empirical and theoretical richness. However, there is a persistent divide between theorist and activist approaches to Environmental Justice that needs to be abridged. This paper explains how through co-design we delved into the transformative potential of EJ research with and for social movements and aimed to unearth some of the tensions and colliding epistemologies inherent in co-production of knowledge.
Activities included workshops and consultations, visioning through appreciative enquiry, a pro-action café, and an online survey.
We conclude that co-design can help inform more just, inclusive and socially relevant scholarship, however we caution that the needed transformation in knowledge production and the dismantling of hierarchies remains an unfinished process that calls for ongoing attention to power dynamics and ‘care-full’ scholarship.
This article highlights the need for collaborative research on ecological conflicts within a global perspective. As the social metabolism of our industrial economy increases, intensifying extractive ...activities and the production of waste, the related social and environmental impacts generate conflicts and resistance across the world. This expansion of global capitalism leads to greater disconnection between the diverse geographies of injustice along commodity chains. Yet, at the same time, through the globalization of governance processes and Environmental Justice (EJ) movements, local political ecologies are becoming increasingly transnational and interconnected. We first make the case for the need for new approaches to understanding such interlinked conflicts through collaborative and engaged research between academia and civil society. We then present a large-scale research project aimed at understanding the determinants of resource extraction and waste disposal conflicts globally through a collaborative mapping initiative: The EJAtlas, the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. This article introduces the EJAtlas mapping process and its methodology, describes the process of co-design and development of the atlas, and assesses the initial outcomes and contribution of the tool for activism, advocacy and scientific knowledge. We explain how the atlas can enrich EJ studies by going beyond the isolated case study approach to offer a wider systematic evidence-based enquiry into the politics, power relations and socio-metabolic processes surrounding environmental justice struggles locally and globally. Key words: environmental justice, maps, ecological distribution conflicts, activist knowledge, political ecology
A transformation to sustainability calls for radical and systemic societal shifts. Yet what this entails in practice and who the agents of this radical transformation are require further elaboration. ...This article recenters the role of environmental justice movements in transformations, arguing that the systemic, multi-dimensional and intersectional approach inherent in EJ activism is uniquely placed to contribute to the realization of equitable sustainable futures. Based on a perspective of conflict as productive, and a “conflict transformation” approach that can address the root issues of ecological conflicts and promote the emergence of alternatives, we lay out a conceptual framework for understanding transformations through a power analysis that aims to confront and subvert hegemonic power relations; that is, multi-dimensional and intersectional; balancing ecological concerns with social, economic, cultural and democratic spheres; and is multi-scalar, and mindful of impacts across place and space. Such a framework can help analyze and recognize the contribution of grassroots EJ movements to societal transformations to sustainability and support and aid radical transformation processes. While transitions literature tends to focus on artifacts and technologies, we suggest that a resistance-centred perspective focuses on the creation of new subjectivities, power relations, values and institutions. This recenters the agency of those who are engaged in the creation and recuperation of ecological and new ways of being in the world in the needed transformation.
In this article we undertake a systematic mapping of 649 cases of resistance movements to both fossil fuel (FF) and low carbon energy (LCE) projects, providing the most comprehensive overview of such ...place-based energy-related mobilizations to date. We find that (1) Place-based resistance movements are succeeding in curbing both fossil-fuel and low-carbon energy projects. Over a quarter of projects encountering social resistance have been cancelled, suspended or delayed. (2) The evidence highlights that low carbon, renewable energy and mitigation projects are as conflictive as FF projects, and that both disproportionately impact vulnerable groups such as rural communities and Indigenous peoples. Amongst LCE projects, hydropower was found to have the highest number of conflicts with concerns over social and environmental damages. (3) Repression and violence against protesters and land defenders was rife in almost all activities, with 10% of all cases analysed involving assassination of activists. Violence was particularly common in relation to hydropower, biomass, pipelines and coal extraction. Wind, solar and other renewables were the least conflictive and entailed lower levels of repression than other projects. The results caution that decarbonization of the economy is by no means inherently environmentally innocuous or socially inclusive. We find that conflicts and collective action are driven by multiple concerns through which community mobilization seeks to reshape the energy regime and its impacts. These include claims for localization, democratic participation, shorter energy chains, anti-racism, climate-justice-focused governance, and Indigenous leadership. Climate and energy policymakers need to pay closer attention to the demands and preferences of these collective movements pointing to transformative pathways to decarbonization.
Can ecological distribution conflicts turn into forces for sustainability? This overview paper addresses in a systematic conceptual manner the question of why, through whom, how, and when conflicts ...over the use of the environment may take an active role in shaping transitions toward sustainability. It presents a conceptual framework that schematically maps out the linkages between (a) patterns of (unsustainable) social metabolism, (b) the emergence of ecological distribution conflicts, (c) the rise of environmental justice movements, and (d) their potential contributions for sustainability transitions. The ways how these four processes can influence each other are multi-faceted and often not a foretold story. Yet, ecological distribution conflicts can have an important role for sustainability, because they relentlessly bring to light conflicting values over the environment as well as unsustainable resource uses affecting people and the planet. Environmental justice movements, born out of such conflicts, become key actors in politicizing such unsustainable resource uses, but moreover, they take sometimes also radical actions to stop them. By drawing on creative forms of mobilizations and diverse repertoires of action to effectively reduce unsustainabilities, they can turn from ‘victims’ of environmental injustices into ‘warriors’ for sustainability. But when will improvements in sustainability be lasting? By looking at the overall dynamics between the four processes, we aim to foster a more systematic understanding of the dynamics and roles of ecological distribution conflicts within sustainability processes.
The Tana Delta, on the east coast of Kenya near Somalia, comprises riverine mangrove forests, wetlands and rangelands and is home to a range of indigenous pastoralist, farmer and fisher communities, ...whose traditional multi-user livelihood strategies have helped preserve exceptional local biodiversity. This study assesses conflicts over biomass through an analysis of Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP), an indicator used by system ecologists that quantifies human-induced changes on the productivity and harvest of biomass flows. HANPP is calculated by seeing how much of the net primary production (NPP) of biomass flows created through solar energy are appropriated by human activity, and how much is left in the ecosystems for other species. In this article we introduce calculations of the HANPP in political ecology by studying not only the distribution of biomass between humans and non-humans but also (and this is the main point) between different groups or social classes of humans. We also ask what alliances are being made to protect biodiversity and keep livelihoods intact. In a sugar cane plantation economy, biomass production and the proportion appropriated by humans may increase, the Orma pastoralists and the Pokomo farmers would be dispossessed, less biomass would be available for local 'wild' biodiversity, and a much larger proportion of the NPP would be exported as sugar or ethanol. Key words: Human appropriation of biomass; bioeconomy; biodiversity; property rights; pastoralists; sugar cane; wetlands.
Indigenous peoples are among the most affected by environmental injustices globally, however environmental justice theory has not yet meaningfully addressed decolonisation and the resistance of ...Indigenous communities against extractivism in the settler-colonial context. This paper suggests that informing environmental justice through decolonial analysis and decolonising practices can help transcend the Western ontological roots of environmental justice theories and inform a more radical and emancipatory environmental justice. The Unist'ot'en Resistance and Action Camp blocking pipelines in northwestern British Columbia, Canada, their "Reimagined Free Prior and Informed Consent protocol" and the Delgamuukw case are described to discuss limitations of the state and legal framework for accommodating a decolonial and transformative environmental justice. A decolonial analysis informed by these two moments of Wet'sewet'ten history suggests limits and adaptations to the trivalent EJ framework based on recognition, participation and distribution. It is argued that a decolonising and transformative approach to environmental justice must be based on self-governing authority, relational ontologies of nature and epistemic justice and the unsettling of power through the assertion of responsibility and care through direct action. This discussion is placed in the context of the expansion of the concept of ecological rights, for example through the enshrining of the "Rights of Nature" in the constitutions of countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador, to highlight the Inherent tensions in the translation of Indigenous cosmo-visions into legal systems based on universalist values.
PDF
