Plurality in environmental justice: new insights
Led by Professor David Schlosberg and his team, an ambitious paper recently published in Environmental Politics journal explores the diverse meanings of justice understood and experienced by activists and researchers working in diverse areas of environmental justice (EJ) around the world.
This most recent work, part of the ARC funded Creating Just Food and Energy policy project, reports on a survey of the meanings of EJ circulating among activists and scholars globally. Employing the Q research method, the project sought to better understand trends in the personal opinions and priorities of those working at different scales and across specific areas of environmental justice. The paper identifies both areas of consensus as well as nuanced areas of difference.
The research found strong global agreement with what is understood as a ‘critical environmental justice’ perspective. Critical EJ focuses on the role of race, gender, colonisation and settler states, as well as the role of power – the power of capital in particular – in shaping the unequal and unjust environmental conditions many people experience in their daily lives.
This critical lens challenges liberal and state-based remedies notions of justice, pushing the boundaries of EJ thinking and practice towards more nuanced, multifaceted, and community-led approaches to more just environments. While some have argued that this critical approach is quite widespread, the paper offers the first empirical evidence to illustrate that changing reality.
While the activists and researchers who participated in this study demonstrated broad agreement on the key characteristics of critical environmental justice, the study also found some important differences. Four distinct, if overlapping, sets of EJ ideas, or discourses, emerged from this analysis. These are all variations on the critical EJ theme, yet each has a distinct focus and set of priorities around which issues and strategies are identified.
Differences include the details of how people get involved, what role the government and legal systems should play, how EJ ideas are put into action, and how disruptive political tactics are utilised. The presence of these diverse viewpoints and lived experiences, even within a mostly critical approach, shows how pluralistic, complex and evolving both the field and practice of EJ are.
By recognising the diverse ways people envision, recognise, and work towards justice through environmental systems and conflicts, this work sheds light on the multifaceted nature of contemporary environmental justice challenges and the need to embracing diverse strategies to tackle them.
Professor Schlosberg recently presented the work to the first OECD Conference on Environmental Justice, making the argument that governments and policymakers needed to understand the breadth of the arguments and critiques of environmental justice movements as they develop responses to inequities and weaknesses of current environmental policy.
The research team has many other articles in development, including on issues of systematic barriers to achieving environmental justice, the conditions that make EJ possible, and the intersection of environmental justice and adaptation policy and practice.
Please click here to read the paper.
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