Environmental justice: Beyond the ‘three-pillar paradigm’
Panel organizers: Linda Westman, Vanesa Castán Broto, Shizhi Zhang
From calls for climate justice in global climate negotiations to grassroots resistance against extractivism and sacrifice zones, demands for environmental justice resonate with highly diverse movements around the world. Since its emergence in activist mobilization against the unequitable burden of environmental pollution (The United Church of Christ, 1987), environmental justice struggles have become visible across geographies and policy domains. In contemporary research, the concept is often categorized according to three principles (Schlosberg, 2004). Distributive justice emphasizes fairness in the distribution of environmental resources and burdens, such as in relation to climate impacts or energy poverty. Procedural justice relates to fair decision-making processes, such as through participation, representation, and transparency. Justice in recognition relates to tackling the structural conditions of oppression, such as in debates on climate coloniality (Sultana, 2022) or lack of recognition of subaltern knowledges (Olazabal et al., 2021). These three principles also structure policy and action in the domains of energy and climate justice (Bouzarovski et al., 2023), hereby consolidating the three-pillar paradigm.
Despite the popularity and great flexibility of environmental justice as a concept, its application across settings may be constrained by its theoretical foundations. As scholars advancing decolonial, indigenous, and radical black thought have illustrated, no single, universal definition can capture the concept of justice (Álvarez & Coolsaet, 2020; Pulido & De Lara, 2018; Rodríguez & Inturias, 2018). Instead, claims for justice emerge from within specific social relations and systems of knowledge. This diversity equally manifests in movements for environmental justice (McGregor, 2018; Temper, 2019; Vermeylen, 2019), inspiring calls for the diversification of environmental justice theory to counter the imposition of thinking currents grounded on debates in the Anglophone sphere. For example, this argument has been raised in relation to environmental justice debates in China, where the concept has never seemed to capture dynamics of environmental politics in meaningful ways (Mah & Wang, 2017).
This panel explores theorizations of environmental justice beyond the ‘three-pillar paradigm’. We invite contributions that engage with alternative axes of meaning, including (but not limited to):
- Environmental justice principles derived from non-Anglophone philosophy and political theory, including perspectives based on decolonial and indigenous scholarship.
- Notions of environmental justice fixed in situated and experiential accounts, including those derived from feminist research;
- Theorizations or empirical work on environmental justice drawing on research in ‘less familiar’ settings (e.g., peripheral and liminal contexts);
- Activist accounts that do not fit within the existing bounds of environmental justice theory.
References
Álvarez, L., & Coolsaet, B. (2020). Decolonizing environmental justice studies: a Latin American perspective. Capitalism nature socialism, 31(2), 50-69.
Bouzarovski, S., Fuller, S., & Reames, T. G. (2023). Handbook on energy justice. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Mah, A., & Wang, X. (2017). Research on environmental justice in China: Limitations and possibilities. Chinese Journal of Environmental Law, 1(2), 263-272.
McGregor, D. (2018). Mino-mnaamodzawin: achieving indigenous environmental justice in Canada. Environment and Society, 9(1), 7-24.
Olazabal, M., Chu, E., Broto, V. C., & Patterson, J. (2021). Subaltern forms of knowledge are required to boost local adaptation. One Earth, 4(6), 828-838.
Pulido, L., & De Lara, J. (2018). Reimagining ‘justice’in environmental justice: Radical ecologies, decolonial thought, and the Black Radical Tradition. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1-2), 76-98.
Rodríguez, I., & Inturias, M. L. (2018). Conflict transformation in indigenous peoples’ territories: doing environmental justice with a ‘decolonial turn’. Development Studies Research, 5(1), 90-105.
Schlosberg, D. (2004). Reconceiving environmental justice: global movements and political theories. Environmental politics, 13(3), 517-540.
Sultana, F. (2022). The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography, 99, 102638.
Temper, L. (2019). Blocking pipelines, unsettling environmental justice: From rights of nature to responsibility to territory. Local Environment, 24(2), 94-112.
The United Church of Christ. (1987). Toxic waste and race. A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characterist!cs of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites. (https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1310/ml13109a339.pdf
Vermeylen, S. (2019). Environmental justice and epistemic violence (Vol. 24, pp. 89-93). Taylor & Francis.