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Transforming knowledge creation for environmental and epistemic justice
... Within modern governance, such knowledge has usually appeared as the epistemic foundation for decision making. However, as the environmental justice struggle indicates, this bias towards expert knowledge generates epistemic injustice (Temper and Del Bene 2016), side-lining local people, matter and meaning. ...
... This may be because they are only allowed to appear as exotic but less-than-human ecologically noble savages, whose right to decent treatment is based on keeping their traditions and thus not aspiring to modernity or wealth (Escobar 2006). Or it may be because environmentalism follows patterns of racial and gendered violence, against bodies and environments but also against ways of knowing that dominant groups and their thinking belittles as mere beliefs (Collier in this volume;Schlosberg 2013;Temper and Del Bene 2016). Science and its institutions help authorise such judgements. ...
... The wealthiest and most comfortable, who in general are the worst polluters (Wells and Touboulic 2017), seldom feature in the research or, indeed, even in the politics. In this case, however, people who might have been expected to make their knowledge count, thanks to their socio-economic status, did experience a form of epistemic injustice (Temper and Del Bene 2016), as the knowledge they considered most relevant was side-lined. ...
This chapter analyses the ways in which different urban gardening forms relate to neoliberalisation processes in the post-socialist city. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2020 including on-site observation and in-depth interviews with gardeners, activists and city officials in several Estonian cities, it seeks to understand the unequal treatment of community gardens and dacha allotment gardens. Despite equally fostering urban sustainability, dacha gardens are often negatively associated with a (post)socialist ‘survival strategy of the poor’ while community gardens are embraced for their transformative potential with regard to health, active citizenship, social cohesion, and environmental learning. Taking a critical approach to neoliberal urban governance, the study explores the adherence and/or resistance of both gardening forms to post-socialist urban neoliberalisation dynamics on three analytical levels: socio-spatial discourses, spatial materialities and cultivated subjectivities. As a result, the chapter conveys that dacha gardens rather ‘quietly’ maintain the system, while community gardens contribute to its thriving process, by being visible, actively engaging with, and being supported by, the neoliberal urban governance. This preferential treatment, however, comes at a price of higher vulnerability to co-optation attempts and neoliberal control of space, to which dacha gardens have hitherto resisted.KeywordsUrban gardeningAllotment gardensDachaCommunity gardeningQuiet sustainabilityContested spaceNeoliberal urban governancePost-socialist city
... While participatory and co-design process are grounded in experience, their outputs are often "guidelines" or "tutorials" that give little insight into the actual hands-on experiences of implementing collaborative design work (Moser, 2016). Nevertheless, studies of transformation toward sustainability show that collaborative or transdisciplinary socio-technical processes tend to bring to the surface power dynamics, contested questions of ownership, epistemic and value differences while demonstrating the role of conflict as an agent of transformation (Geels, 2019;Moser, 2016;Parsons, Fisher, & Nalau, 2016;Temper & Del Bene, 2016). The participatory prototyping process we analyze here, was planned for translating "big" questions on the meaning of digital sovereignty into hands-on engagement and transdisciplinary work which inevitably gave rise to epistemic and valuebased conflicts and tensions. ...
... Two of the co-authors led the academycommunity partnership in the framework of the MAZI pilot case in Berlin from their respective positions at the Design Research Lab at UdK[7] and the NGO Common Grounds [8]. Therefore, with this close and engaged positionality in regard to the research project we take the opportunity to critically reflect on the process of building community-based DIY networking in the city and discuss the conflicts and tensions that are inherent to messy processes of open-ended collaborative design projects (Temper & Del Bene, 2016). ...
This paper explores the role of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and open-source prototyping processes in participatory design practices aimed at advancing grassroots digital sovereignty. The emergent term "digital sovereignty" describes various forms of autonomy, self-determination and independence in relation to technologies, digital infrastructures and data. The case study we analyze here, (the MAZI EU-funded project) was planned for translating "big" questions on the meaning of digital sovereignty into situated hands-on engagements and transdisciplinary work between local residents, activists, academics and designers. It concerns a collaborative prototyping process that focuses on the development of Community Wireless Network (CWN) technology in Berlin's urban space, for creating locally and corporate-free platforms for sharing information and organizing collective action. The paper shows how DIY and open source prototyping can positively contribute to addressing challenges of participation towards digital sovereignty in the city, by bringing together different political and epistemic groups in academy-community partnership. However, by critically examining the tensions and conflicts that emerged in the process, it argues that openness and collaborative experimentation in itself do not guarantee the long-term infrastructuring goals of digital participation, self-determination and autonomy. Rather, the broader transition to digital sovereignty requires long-term design coalitions for sustaining the ongoing maintenance of open and collaborative socio-technical infrastructures.
... We relied on our own activist networks and on snowball methodology, as well as integrating the database with information from the social media profiles and webpages of environmental organizations, when possible. This process rests on the principles of the co-production of knowledge around socio-environmental conflicts, which is also at the core of the EJAtlas dataset (Temper & Del Bene, 2016). Evidence mainly comes from documentation produced from the ground up, i.e., from members of established organizations or collectives that have large social legitimacy amid environmental controversies. ...
... This shifts the role of scientists from one of truth-making to one of revealing the unavoidable complexity and plurality of the world. Our suggestion is that, when facing evidence of socio-environmental conflicts and injustices and while trying to quantify or measure CS(I) R, academia's focus in discussing CS(I)R in the context of development projects should be placed in amplifying the voices of those who are on the ground, by mobilizing knowledge that is co-produced between academia, environmental activists and defenders (Temper & Del Bene, 2016). While we recognize that scientists themselves are also part of a complex web of power relations, a push in this direction could be given by spending time and resources to amplify the voices of those who have less power, engaging with those affected by environmental injustices on the ground and using diverse channels to problematize the way companies account for sustainability. ...
Unlabelled:
Controversies around large-scale development projects offer many cases and insights which may be analyzed through the lenses of corporate social (ir)responsibility (CSIR) and business ethics studies. In this paper, we confront the CSR narratives and strategies of WeBuild (formerly known as Salini Impregilo), an Italian transnational construction company. Starting from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), we collect evidence from NGOs, environmental justice organizations, journalists, scholars, and community leaders on socio-environmental injustices and controversies surrounding 38 large hydropower schemes built by the corporation throughout the last century. As a counter-reporting exercise, we code (un)sustainability discourses from a plurality of sources, looking at their discrepancy under the critical lenses of post-normal science and political ecology, with environmental justice as a normative framework. Our results show how the mismatch of narratives can be interpreted by considering the voluntary, self-reporting, non-binding nature of CSR accounting performed by a corporation wishing to grow in a global competitive market. Contributing to critical perspectives on political CS(I)R, we question the reliability of current CSR mechanisms and instruments, calling for the inclusion of complexity dimensions in and a re-politicization of CS(I)R accounting and ethics. We argue that the fields of post-normal science and political ecology can contribute to these goals.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10551-021-04946-6.
... (Williams and Moore, 2019) Many environmental justice disputes and controversies encompass challenges to both the ways that decisions are made and the forms of knowledge and expertise that are deployed within decision-making processes. Recent scholarship has used the term epistemic justice (Ottinger, 2018;Fricker, 2017;Temper and Del Bene, 2016) to capture critiques of how certain power-laden, knowledge-making practices come to dominate, including to justify actions by the state while others are subjugated and rendered insignificant. While increasing attention has been given to such processes, there is an ongoing need for analysis of particular cases and experiences in order to deepen our understanding of how epistemic questions become refracted through the situated and shifting politics of governance and resistance in different settings. ...
... This unjustifiably differentiated risk management policy was therefore readily interpreted as playing both into longstanding attempts to find reasons for removing favelas from the city and into the deep differentials of wealth and power that run through the city's history and ongoing politics (Costa, 2018;Soares Gonçalves, 2015). Revealingly, in an interview undertaken with a staff member of Geo-Rio, it was all but accepted that the risk assessment was undertaken in a way that privileged the interests of those in the "formal city". ...
Environmental and climate justice scholarship has increasingly focused on how knowledge and expertise play into the production of injustice and into strategies of resistance and activist claim making. We consider the epistemic injustice at work within the practices of risk mapping and assessment applied in Rio de Janeiro to justify the clearance of favela communities. We trace how in the wake of landslides in 2010, the city authorities moved towards a removal policy justified in the name of protecting lives and becoming resilient to climate change. We examine how favela dwellers, activists and counter-experts joined efforts to develop a partially successful epistemic resistance that contested the knowledge on which this policy was based. We use this case to reflect on the situated character of both technologies of risk and the emergence of epistemic resistance, on the relationship between procedural and epistemic justice, and on the challenges for instilling more just climate adaptation strategies.
... Recognising the political constitution of such action can help to identify what transformation means to whom, thereby establishing who gets to determine and benefit from transformative actions O'Brien, 2012). This is particularly the case when work to support transformative action is coupled with innovative methodologies for codesigning more just, inclusive and socially-relevant knowledge production processes for tackling environmental change and the uneven production of vulnerability (Temper and Del Bene, 2016). Such approaches build on situated understandings of environmental change and vulnerability, as well as on the situated knowledges and practices that uphold place-based transformations. ...
... Methodologically, this might mean moving beyond rapid and technical participatory vulnerability assessments to work collaboratively with diverse populationssuch as through collaborative scenario planning for environmental and epistemic justice in climate changed contexts (Temper and Del Bene, 2016). Such approaches can help to democratise the politics of adaptation by ensuring that adaptation efforts are both relevant to the lives of smallholder farmers and address the complex and multi-faceted vulnerabilities of marginalised social groups (such as those that live the vulnerability-productivity paradox). ...
Drawing attention to the production of vulnerability across scales in Sri Lanka, we contribute to knowledge of why certain people and social groups are vulnerable. We build our contribution on the theoretical application of ‘situated adaptation’. A situated analytical approach identifies, assesses, and responds to the everyday realities and politics of those living in climate changed environments. It highlights uneven geographies of vulnerability and opportunity, while identifying new imaginations and possibilities for transformative action that counter the production of vulnerability. We illustrate the utility of ‘situated adaptation’ by filling an empirical gap relating to experiences of political-economic and environmental change in Sri Lanka’s Dry Zone. We detail situated experiences by drawing on field research in the Anuradhapura District, revealing how the lives and livelihoods of farmer participants are structured by a productivity-vulnerability paradox. We demonstrate how a prevalent adaptation-development paradigm (whereby development and adaptation programs co-exist in theory and practice) is unable to address the structural drivers of vulnerability in Sri Lanka’s Dry Zone. A situated adaptation approach both explains why this is the case and highlights opportunities for alternative transformative actions, potentially identifying a more democratic and egalitarian politics of co-determining socionatural change.
... Social movements are one of the "social forms through which collectives give voice to their grievances and concerns about the rights, welfare, and wellbeing of themselves and others" (Snow et al., 2008: 3). Social movementsordinary people coming together, engaging in collective action to push for changeare crucial for bringing about transformative change (Carroll and Sarker, 2016;Solnit, 2016;Scheidel et al., 2017;Kothari et al., 2014;Temper and Del Bene, 2016;Choudry, 2015). There are other ways by which social change is driven, such as through legislation and court proceedings, educational systems and electoral outcomes. ...
... Some regions and countries are documented with a greater number of conflicts than others, not necessarily because there are more conflicts on the ground, but also because of better availability of conflict documentation and collaborators. See Temper et al. (2015) and Temper and Del Bene (2016) for further explanation of the EJAtlas' methodology and mapping process. ...
Attempts in Canada to include citizens in decision-making around extractive processes have been tokenistic at best and generally fail to meaningfully include the voices, opinions, and rights of people on whose land a given project is being planned. Therefore, informal avenues for influencing decision-making are being taken by communities, often Indigenous communities and often in the form of resistance. In this article we argue that resistance, in the form of blockades, occupations and other strategies are powerfully shaping outcomes in Canada, and indeed constitute a form of governance in and of themselves, helping drive the urgently needed transformative change that formal governance systems continue to fail to bring about. Our argument is based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of 57 cases of environmental conflict in Canada, accessed through the Global Environmental Justice Atlas. These cases provide concrete examples of this bottom-up, land-based governance through resistance led by communities on the front lines of extractivism. These diverse and inspiring cases ground our theorizing and raise important insights and lessons for understanding resistance as transformative governance.
... While universities push for excellence in sustainability research, they do also engage in sustainability experimentation on campuses (König and Evans 2013), even though such open-ended engagement might run counter to their epistemic research practice (Temper and Del Bene 2016) as well as teaching evaluation. In a global survey of university "sustainable campuses", Perondi (2020) identified four types of campus sustainability, the first being a Living Lab approach, which creates engagement of students through working on real-life challenges. ...
... Finally, we can also posit that the Test Site went through the front line of the struggle underlying any negotiation of sustainability, namely the interrelationships between economic, ecological and social modes of organisation and working through them (Hodson and Marvin 2017). Whether this has potential for transformation partly hinges on the question of how competing logics can in the end inform stakeholders such as an institution like the university on what was learned (König and Evans 2013), or even change epistemic practices (Temper and Del Bene 2016). On this point, we can agree that learning from the Test Site was only weakly communicated back to the institution (cf. ...
Experiments are deemed not only useful, but necessary in sustainability transformation to enhance local decision-making. This is especially apparent in Finland where national government programmes and city administrations promote sustainability experimentation and bottom-up initiatives in the interest of equitable participation. At the same time, universities are expected to respond to societal calls for major infrastructural transformations, while neoliberal principles shift responsibility from authorities to individual citizens. This paper examines the case of a student-driven sustainable campus initiative called “Test Site” in a university committed formally to sustainability education. The students questioned whether sustainability should be taught in air-conditioned classrooms, what topics were socially just and worth pursuing, and rather sought material engagement, creative exploration and autonomy. Invested faculty members were dependent on demonstrations and proof of impact, or at least convincing visuals, to sustain the initiative. The outcome of experimenting most valued by the students however was the material-based social learning on how to self-organise. The meaning of such “minor” experiments thus becomes muddled, involving local, situated power dynamics among university management, faculty and students and what is regarded as useful space and activity for learning. The case illustrates how an experimental site partly removed from university constraints rendered explorations of self-organising participants as valuable yet depended on visible proofs to justify this very exploration as worthwhile. Even within a neoliberal and highly hierarchical governance structure, some participants are able to make small gains to pursue socially just solutions.
... (Williams and Moore, 2019) Many environmental justice disputes and controversies encompass challenges to both the ways that decisions are made and the forms of knowledge and expertise that are deployed within decision-making processes. Recent scholarship has used the term epistemic justice (Ottinger, 2018;Fricker, 2017;Temper and Del Bene, 2016) to capture critiques of how certain power-laden, knowledge-making practices come to dominate, including to justify actions by the state while others are subjugated and rendered insignificant. While increasing attention has been given to such processes, there is an ongoing need for analysis of particular cases and experiences in order to deepen our understanding of how epistemic questions become refracted through the situated and shifting politics of governance and resistance in different settings. ...
... This unjustifiably differentiated risk management policy was therefore readily interpreted as playing both into longstanding attempts to find reasons for removing favelas from the city and into the deep differentials of wealth and power that run through the city's history and ongoing politics (Costa, 2018;Soares Gonçalves, 2015). Revealingly, in an interview undertaken with a staff member of Geo-Rio, it was all but accepted that the risk assessment was undertaken in a way that privileged the interests of those in the "formal city". ...
Environmental and climate justice scholarship has increasingly focused on how knowledge and expertise play into the production of injustice and into strategies of resistance and activist claim making. We consider the epistemic injustice at work within the practices of risk mapping and assessment applied in Rio de Janeiro to justify the clearance of favela communities. We trace how in the wake of landslides in 2010, the city authorities moved towards a removal policy justified in the name of protecting lives and becoming resilient to climate change. We examine how favela dwellers, activists and counter-experts joined efforts to develop a partially successful epistemic resistance that contested the knowledge on which this policy was based. We use this case to reflect on the situated character of both technologies of risk and the emergence of epistemic resistance, on the relationship between procedural and epistemic justice, and on the challenges for instilling more just climate adaptation strategies.
... The EJAtlas was created in 2011 through a collaborative process between academics and civil society groups (Temper and Del Bene, 2016). Among the aims of establishing the EJAtlas was to advance and expand political ecology by going beyond case study research and moving towards large comparative and statistical analyses (Temper et al., 2018a). ...
... The use of newspaper accounts on conflict and mobilization events is also a common practice in social movement studies, despite limitations on potential coverage bias (for a thorough discussion and justification see Earl et al. (2004)). The EJAtlas has made a substantial effort in facilitating data gathering from various sources on a global scale to bring local knowledge to environmental conflicts research (Temper et al., 2015;Temper and Del Bene, 2016). ...
Recent research and policies recognize the importance of environmental defenders for global sustainability and emphasize their need for protection against violence and repression. However, effective support may benefit from a more systematic understanding of the underlying environmental conflicts, as well as from better knowledge on the factors that enable environmental defenders to mobilize successfully. We have created the global Environmental Justice Atlas to address this knowledge gap. Here we present a large-n analysis of 2743 cases that sheds light on the characteristics of environmental conflicts and the environmental defenders involved, as well as on successful mobilization strategies. We find that bottom-up mobilizations for more sustainable and socially just uses of the environment occur worldwide across all income groups, testifying to the global existence of various forms of grassroots environmentalism as a promising force for sustainability. Environmental defenders are frequently members of vulnerable groups who employ largely non-violent protest forms. In 11% of cases globally, they contributed to halt environmentally destructive and socially conflictive projects, defending the environment and livelihoods. Combining strategies of preventive mobilization, protest diversification and litigation can increase this success rate significantly to up to 27%. However, defenders face globally also high rates of criminalization (20% of cases), physical violence (18%), and assassinations (13%), which significantly increase when Indigenous people are involved. Our results call for targeted actions to enhance the conditions enabling successful mobilizations, and for specific support for Indigenous environmental defenders.
... Nevertheless, the atlas is a showcase of the pedagogical opportunities inherent within social movements and activist work (Clover 2010;Hall 2009;Lowan-Trudeau 2017). As such, we claim that the EJAtlas is a tool that allows students to learn from and engage with the global Environmental Justice movement Temper and Del Bene 2016). ...
... Martinez-Alier 2015, Temper andDel Bene 2016). Cases can be added across ten main categories: Nuclear energy; Mineral Ores and Building Materials Extractions; Waste Management; Biomass and Land Conflicts; Fossil Fuels and Climate Justice/Energy; Water Management; Infrastructure and Built Environment; Tourism Recreation; Biodiversity Conservation Conflicts; and, Industrial and Utilities Conflicts. ...
Through literature review, anecdote, and empirical case study, this chapter explores the role of contemplative practice—yoga, meditation, reflection, breathwork—in the sustainability classroom as a way to increase both learner resilience and learner capacity to engage the challenging content of socio‐ecological resilience.
... The Data Sheet or Form (with five or six pages of information) which is used to add cases was developed collaboratively between scholars and activists in the EJOLT project (EJOLT 2018) at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2011Barcelona ( -2015 Martinez-Alier 2015, Temper andDel Bene 2016 that Atlas visitors can build with existing cases. For instance, in Figure 6.2 we have selected those cases related to mining conflicts in the world and further selected one case. ...
... Nevertheless, the atlas is a showcase of the pedagogical opportunities inherent within social movements and activist work (Clover 2010;Hall 2009;Lowan-Trudeau 2017). As such, we claim that the EJAtlas is a tool that allows students to learn from and engage with the global Environmental Justice movement Temper and Del Bene 2016). ...
The chapter analyzes how the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas.org), an online interactive platform developed to visualize and study struggles against environmental injustices worldwide, is used in higher education curricula to teach environmental justice and sustainability themes.
... Packard's role of knowledge facilitation demonstrates how philanthropy can both reinscribe Western-based management strategies and promote the recognition and legitimacy of traditional knowledge in decision-making. This point is important because funder engagement with diverse ways of knowing can have serious implications for conservation agendas and who is empowered to shape them (Avelino, 2021;Baker & Constant, 2020;Dawson et al., 2021;Hickey, 2020;Martin et al., 2019;Temper & Del Bene, 2016). The types of knowledge bases that are legitimized and valued-for example, within Western ideas of managing nature versus I 0 qoliqolis-define what ideas act as truth and allow some forms of governance to make sense, while others do not (Liboiron, 2021;Van der Molen, 2018). ...
Environmental governance scholars have overlooked philanthropic foundations as influential non‐state actors. This omission, along with the continued growth in funding from private foundations for conservation issues, presents important questions about what foundations do in governance spaces. To address this gap, we examine The David and Lucile Packard Foundation's involvement in Fiji and Palau in the context of the Foundation's “Western Pacific Program”—a series of coastal and marine‐related investments made from 1998 to 2020. We describe and analyze six governance roles that the Packard Foundation contributed to: funding, influencing agendas, capacity‐building, convening and coordinating, facilitating knowledge, and rule‐making and regulation. In documenting the Packard Foundation's governance roles, we provide scholars and practitioners a conceptual framework to more systematically and strategically think about foundations as more than funders. This research helps move the conversation around conservation philanthropy beyond binary conceptions of “good” versus “bad,” and, instead, toward deeper considerations about what foundations currently do within governance systems, how they engage with diverse practitioners, as well as what they can and should do to advance conservation goals.
... The braiding of knowledge systems to advance understanding about climate change, its impacts, and possible actions to address it requires not only a fair use of the different knowledge systems, but also fair processes through which those knowledge systems can interact, or, in other words epistemic justice, sometimes termed cognitive justice (Dutta et al., 2021;Temper and Del Bene, 2016). There are various aspects of epistemic justice to consider regarding the interaction of different knowledge systems and their influence on climate reporting. ...
Human cultural diversity is reflected in many different ways of knowing, being, and doing, each with specific histories, positionalities, and connections to ecosystems, landscapes, and the world. Such diversity results in plural knowledge systems. This white paper describes the characteristics and complexity of knowledge systems in the context of climate change. It notes the deficiencies of action to date on climate change, which has largely rested on scientific knowledge, and discusses the importance of drawing on other knowledge systems, particularly Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge. This paper synthesises evidence highlighting that Indigenous knowledge systems and local knowledge systems are dynamic, contemporary, and actively applied worldwide. Although Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge systems continue to be politically marginalised, the recognition of their role in climate governance is essential. We consider plural knowledge systems and the interactions and potential collaborations between them, with a goal of informing how they can most constructively, equitably, and inclusively be conceptualised and addressed when discussing and generating knowledge about and responses to climate change.
... The community-based experiences lead by collectives in Mexico, Colombia and Spain highlight how engaging with healing practices as multidimensional, structural and embodied provides a more nuanced understanding of climate justice across time and space; and how focusing on healing as an ambivalent process can help us to further consider environmental and climate justice as a multidimensional and non-linear collective emotional process. We discuss how this perspective contributes to an emerging field of research that focuses on the transformative potential of environmental and climate justice struggles (see Scheidel et al., 2018;Temper & Del Bene, 2016;Asara et al., 2015). ...
This paper seeks to discuss the political role of healing practices in the context of climate and environmental justice struggles. We rely on literature and practices that have identified healing as a means for liberation from structural oppression and physical and symbolic violence, to humans, non-humans and nature – namely emotional political ecologies, transformative and healing justice and communitarian feminism. We also briefly discuss the experience of three collectives in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain who develop healing strategies as a way to emotionally support local communities exposed to territorial, environmental, and climate impacts and injustice. We argue that by further addressing the political dimensions of healing in environmental and climate justice, researchers, activists, and practitioners could expand the conceptualisation of (a) the spatial and temporal scales of climate justice by further engaging with the inter- and intra-generational emotional implications of environmental injustice, and (b) environmental and climate justice as a multidimensional and nonlinear collective emotional process.
... Governments or developers may 'close down' urban policy and planning decisions, focusing on expert opinions and technical and scientific risk assessment rather than wider knowledge sources (Barbosa and Walker, 2020). Hierarchies may emerge in decision-making processes, where some kinds of knowledge and experience are seen as being more valid or relevant than others (Temper and Del Bene, 2016). Additionally, public and stakeholder knowledge may be introduced only at a stage where the technical details and the broad scope of the intervention to be adopted have been largely decided (Mabon et al., 2015). ...
There is increasing advocacy from academics, international agenda-setting organisations, and cities themselves for expert- and evidence driven approaches to multiple aspects of urban climate change and sustainability, including nature-based solutions. However, given growing interest in nature-based solutions research and practice towards questions of justice, it is important that the knowledge systems used to inform decisions about urban nature-based solutions are critically scrutinised. We use the lens of epistemic justice – justice in knowledge, with regard to how society defines a problem and the range of possible solutions – to assess nature-based solutions actions for climate adaptation and resilience across five cities: Amsterdam, Glasgow, Hanoi, Oslo, and Taipei. Our study finds common issues: the risk of quantifiable evidence about the distribution of NbS and its benefits closing down the aims of NbS strategies to meeting narrowly-defined indicators; the potential for self-defined communities of experts becoming de facto authorities on NbS; and the need for those tasked with implementing NbS ‘on the ground’ to have access to the fora and knowledge systems in which NbS strategies are developed. A key message is that more participation alone is insufficient to address epistemic justice concerns, unless it comes at a stage where a broad range of stakeholders (and their knowledges) can influence adaptation strategies and the role of NbS within them. Given the inter- and transdisciplinary nature of NbS scholarship, we argue attention must be focused on the potential for exclusion of key knowledge systems from policy and governance processes.
... The reconnection of these concerns in academic debates has produced trivalent understandings of environmental justice, in which environmental justice could be seen as consisting of recognition-based, procedural, and distributive dimensions (Schlosberg, 2009). Others have recently pointed out the centrality of an epistemic approach to environmental inequalities (Porto et al., 2017;San Martín, 2021;Temper and Del Bene, 2016;Vermeylen, 2019). Here we propose an approach to planetary justice that integrates and recentres procedural, recognition, and epistemic-based dimensions of justice. ...
The concept of planetary justice has received increasing attention within the field of earth systems governance. Although a significant epistemic shift, planetary justice discussions have primarily focused on western and (re)distributive notions of justice. By doing so, planetary justice is depriving current debates of crucial dimensions of what justice has meant for different communities and organisations. These trajectories spanning the realms of social activism, research, and institutional change have historically called for more than (re)distributional approaches to justice. We argue that recentring procedural, epistemic, and recognition-based notions of justice is critical in addressing the challenges of planetary justice in both research and practice of earth systems governance. Pluralising Planetary Justice (PPJ) requires a series of epistemic shifts in the way we research and practice the governance of environmental inequalities. These shifts demand attention to the links and gaps between justice movements and scholarship beyond the industrialised North. They also require scaling debates within climate justice and developmental ethics regarding peoples’ abilities to achieve well-being and the challenges of public deliberation across spatio-temporal scales. Finally, these shifts need to recognise long-lasting processes of epistemic colonialism and integrate intersectional, multispecies, intergenerational, and non-western notions of justice. We argue procedural, epistemic, and recognition-based justice are essential guiding principles and empirical standpoints to developing pluriversal and multiscale human-earth governance systems. Without appealing to procedural, recognition, and epistemic concerns, planetary justice cannot meaningfully engage with the necessary agents and trajectories or outline the normative ends to which it aims to advance in earth systems governance.
... Each EJAtlas case has been developed by activists, scholars, journalists, etc. following a structured form. Before publication, the EJAtlas team (a small team of researchers based at the Environmental Sciences and Technologies Institute of the Autonomous University of Barcelona) reviews the cases and asks for changes/clarifications if necessary (Temper et al., 2015;Temper and Del Bene, 2016). This research follows the definition of socio-environmental conflict adopted by the EJAtlas, as: "mobilizations by local communities, social movements, which might also include support of national or international networks against particular economic activities ... whereby environmental impacts are a key element of their grievances" (www.ej ...
This paper explores an intriguing case of environmental mobilisation in the world, Argentina´s anti-mining movement. This movement has contributed to the cancelation or suspension of about half of the contentious projects they have opposed and has led to the approval of regulations and laws restricting large-scale mining activities in 9 out of 23 national provinces. This process of mobilisation and institutional change is quite unique when compared to other Latin American and worldwide environmental mobilisation processes. This paper studies how the actors and the strategies mobilised in Argentinean mining conflicts have led to these and other mobilisation outcomes. With this aim we have developed, in collaboration with the Environmental Justice Atlas (www.ejaltas.org), a systematic identification and analysis of all public large-scale mining conflicts in the country from 1997 (when large scale mining began) to 2018. We conclude signalling three key interrelated features of anti-mining contention in Argentina: the diversity of actors and their strategies, some political opportunity structures (i.e. decentralised mining governance to provinces, mobilisation at early stages of projects) and the role of multi-scalar environmental justice networks acting on local, provincial and national scales.
... Researching 'transformation as praxis' involves addressing multiple understandings and perceptions of vulnerabilities, and uncertainties from diverse actors (e.g. state, researchers, activists, environmentalists, NGOs, urban and rural dwellers), with an aim of seeking epistemic justice for marginalised voices and people [52 ]. However, what counts as transformation or not is not straightforward. ...
This paper provides some of the conceptual and methodological underpinnings being developed in the ongoing TAPESTRY project which is part of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) Programme. We debate how the notion of transformation may be conceptualized from ‘below’ in marginal environments that are especially marked by high levels of climate-related uncertainties. We propose the notion of transformation as praxis — where the focus is on bottom-up change, identities, wellbeing and the recovery of agency by marginalized people and explore how ‘patches’ and the ‘marginal’ offer critical conceptual templates to examine whether and how systemic transformative changes are being assembled and effected on the ground by hybrid and transformative alliances. The article concludes by discussing potential challenges of such engagements, alongside pursuing a normative and political approach to T2S.
... The unique approach of the EJAtlas is that data collection relies on a collaborative process and on grounded knowledge that has thus far involved more than 500 individuals and organizations worldwide over 10 years (Temper et al 2015, Temper andDel Bene 2016; see Supplementary Information for further information on the EJAtlas (available online at https://stacks.iop.org/ERL/15/123004/mmedia)). Each case study is entered by a scholar/activist 9 and later reviewed by one or more moderators for quality and accuracy. ...
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.
... (p. 122) The buzz-phrase "knowledge is power" and its implication for equity is one of the driving assumptions of the emerging fields/movements of energy democracy [61], environmental justice [62] and climate justice [63]. While these are topics about which equitable allocation of resources are critical, they also speak to issues of transparency. ...
We are in a rapidly changing world where new dynamics are stressing the knowledge-action landscape: a greater understanding that cross-scale interactions are critical; increasing pressure to more fully address issues of equity in sustainable development challenges; rapidly transforming digital technologies; and the emergence of a "post-truth world". These stressors are ripening at a time in which there is increased urgency in linking knowledge to action to solve some of the earth's most pressing human-environment problems. This paper explores to what degree one model of knowledge-action may be useful in the face of these stressors. This model relies on co-production of knowledge across boundaries, and the importance of knowledge in meeting criteria of salience, credibility and legitimacy. Tentative explorations suggest utility of this model in responding to the changing knowledge-action landscape.
... Researchers who want their work to be actionable for addressing conservation challenges can adopt a coproduced research model (Lemos and Morehouse 2005, Dilling and Lemos 2011, Moser 2016. Coproduced research also improves credibility and saliency over the loading dock model (Moser 2016, Page et al. 2016, and importantly, has the potential to result in more inclusive, just, and socially relevant research (Parsons et al. 2016, Temper and Del Bene 2016, Salomon et al. 2018. This is particularly important in the boreal forest context where scientific research has in many cases ignored or discounted the knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples [1] , disregarded their rights, resulted in unequitable sharing of resources, and negatively impacted their lives, livelihoods, cultures, and connections to the land (Wyatt 2008, Brunet et al. 2016, Indigenous Circle of Experts 2018. ...
Recent research on boreal birds has focused on understanding effects of human activity on populations and their habitats. As bird populations continue to decline, research is often intended to inform conservation and management policies and practices. Research produced under the typical "loading dock" model by Western-trained researchers often fails to achieve desired conservation outcomes. There is growing global consensus that science is most actionable when produced in collaboration between scientists, potential end-users of the science, and communities implicated in or affected by the research and its outcomes. A fully collaborative research process, which we call "coproduced research," involves partners in the design, execution, and communication of research. To coproduce research, it is first important to understand the sociocultural context of a research project. For boreal bird conservation in Canada, this context includes complex linkages between Indigenous communities, governments, and rights-holders, multiple levels of government, nonprofit organizations, companies, and industry consortiums, civic communities, and others. We explain this context, and give particular attention to best practices for coproduction of research between non-Indigenous researchers and Indigenous partners. We also introduce a self-assessment tool for researchers to gauge the strength of their relationships with potential partners.
We highlight the challenges of doing coproduced research, including cross-cultural communication and lengthy timelines to build relationships. We propose a guide for coproduced research in four stages: (1) identify potential partners; (2) build relationships; (3) identify mechanisms to inform policy and management; and (4) execute research and communications plans. We illustrate the stages with examples of "bright spots" to demonstrate successful coproduction partnerships. Although we focus on research to improve knowledge for boreal bird conservation and management, many of the lessons we share for adopting a coproduced research model would apply to terrestrial or marine wildlife, or any natural resource.
... temporal, legal, social, political, environmental) of energy policies in a post-conflict setting (Lappe-Osthege & Andreas, 2017). In the remaining six papers, we see: referencing lesser-used energy justice principles, such as: the 'affirmative' and 'prohibitive' principles (Banerjee et al., 2017); framing 'prudence' as an energy justice concern (Sovacool, 2016); the use of 'spatial justice' to critically analyse land acquisition for renewable energy development ; the use of a Rawlsian conceptualisation of justice/sustainable development in which developed countries support the worlds 'energy poor' via intermediate energy access using Appropriate Sustainable Energy Technologies (ASETs) (Guruswamy, 2011); drawing on theories from environmental and climate justice to inform an original use of energy justice (Baker, 2016); and a connecting to energy justice literatures under the banner of a wider environmental justice theoretical framework (Temper & Del Bene, 2016), evidencing further the strong and ongoing links to environmental justice. ...
Energy justice, building on foundations within both the field of environmental justice and wider justice scholarship , has grown rapidly as a research field over recent years. However, the dominant energy justice theoretical frameworks, and many of the field's core case studies, originate from work in developed countries, with energy justice research only recently spreading to new areas of the world. This paper thus systematically reviews the current state of 'developing economy' and 'economy in transition' literature in the energy justice field. In doing this we analyse the (1) methods, energy types and locations explored thus far, unearthing key gaps, as well as (2) the multitude of 'justice-led' theoretical frameworks used. We also identify core themes illuminated by energy justice research in the developing world, including: (3) decentralisation, access and sustainability, (4) exposing institutional instability and corruption, (5) acknowledging marginalised communities and gender inequalities, while extracting key (6) policy implications. Vital questions are raised for the continued advancement of energy justice research into new contexts and thus its conceptual evolution. Our review highlights the potential for energy justice-led attention to expand current institutional, contextual and empirical scope in specific ways, including greater attention to the poorest global regions, and certain energy technologies including nuclear and CCS. We suggest four ways in which future theoretical developments of the field might take place: (i) greater attention to spatial analyses of neglected regions; (ii) expanding the field to further include non-western philosophical traditions; (iii) more work on applying tenets, frameworks and principles specific to energy justice and (iv) systems approaches to developed-developing country relations, with an emphasis on how they relate to low-carbon transitions. Thus, while we explore past and present applications of energy justice in developing world contexts, we also offer guidance on the ways in which it could be applied in the future, alongside encouraging dialogue between different 'justice' fields.
... In light of this, we began to re-evaluate how the research project should continue. In thinking through how we wanted to move forward in the project, we came to see that we needed to immerse ourselves more fully in partnerships with community based organisations and local schools to create mutual goals and a knowledge sharing network -removing ourselves even further from the role of 'disinterested' researchers and at times even come to blur the lines between researchers and activists within the project (Temper & Bene, 2016). In doing this we hoped to achieve a project in which members of traditionally marginalised or oppressed groups 6 would be given opportunities, resources and platforms to interpret their experiences of the world for themselves and others and to share these interpretations with hearers who give such interpretations credence. ...
... Efforts to bring feminist perspectives into climate debates have initiated alliances between gender studies and the study of natural systems through studying different gendered perspectives of environmental knowledge and practice [32,33], sustainability [34] as well as emerging literature focusing away from women's vulnerabilities to emerging collaborative social action [35]. More forms of inclusiveness, "care-full" science and practices have also been emerging [36] pushing for societies, such as that of regenerative cultures, which refer to a cultural group's ability to transform in response to change [37]. ...
Transitions toward a low-carbon future are not only technical and economical, but also deeply social and gendered. The gendered nature of energy transitions is often implicit and unexplored. As a corrective, this paper explores energy pathways by applying concepts from innovations and gender studies. We examine gender perspectives and niche energy innovations which could disrupt the regime. The regime represents the mainstream pathway that includes the dominant gender perspective and energy system. We explore different gender perspectives of energy transition pathways by applying an Alternative Pathways framework that includes: (1) on-stream pathways that exist within the mainstream pathway to promote equal opportunities for women and men, as well as niches for energy innovations without challenging the high-carbon energy regime; (2) off-stream pathways that depart from the mainstream and promote differences across different genders while creating niches outside the energy regime; and (3) transformative pathways that are fundamentally different from the previous mainstream and includes all gender perspectives in a new energy regime. Applying this framing, in Canada, we explored Indigenous perspectives in the oil sands sector; in Kenya, we studied largescale renewable energy impacting Indigneous communities; in Spain, we evaluate the movement away from fossil fuels and towards renewable technologies. The framework helped to identify that mainstream pathways represented the dominant male perspective while woman's perspective were largely left out. Such absence generate energy pathways that are disconnected from local realities, lack public buy-in and slow-down a sustainable energy transition.
... In fact, while previous studies offer insight on the various challenges faced during knowledge co-creation, they suggest different and sometimes incoherent stratagems for project design to address those challenges. Although TDR has gained popularity, there is still no common glossary, nor consensual coherent research framework (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2016;Temper and Del Bene, 2016;Thompson et al., 2017). Indeed, TDR has accumulated an exhaustive list of terms, including ''interdisciplinary participatory research" (Kwok and Ku, 2008), ''multidisciplinary participatory action research" (Graef and Sieber, 2018), ''community-based participatory research" (Kwan et al., 2017), and ''mode-2-knowledge production" (Thorén and Breian, 2016). ...
This paper presents a case study of a transdisciplinary research based on an ex-post assessment of the environmental and socio-behavioral contexts of solid waste management in Lebanese peri-urban communities. Lessons learned are compiled into the Transdisciplinary Interventions for Environmental Sustainability conceptual framework. The approach starts with building a team of researchers and non-academic partners, continues with co-creating solution-oriented knowledge, and ends by integrating and applying the produced knowledge. The co-created knowledge includes the environmental and socio-behavioral ex-post assessment’s results. The former reveals low air pollution levels, evidence of waste-related water contamination, and higher self-reported frequencies of ill-health symptoms and diseases closer to the landfill. The latter indicates that the community’s perception about waste production differs from the real accounting of generated waste. Nine lessons are identified: (1) inherent common interest between the researchers and the community, (2) flexible interdisciplinary research team, (3) representative citizen committee, (4) contextually-informed outreach coordinator, (5) iterative research process accounting for the shifting socio-political context, (6) common expectations of the research process, (7) boundary objects leading to spin-off activities in the same setting, (8) effective communication strategy, and (9) ex-post assessment of subsequent societal and scientific impacts. The non-phased framework links all nine pointers in a logical order to ease scalability. The study answers a global need for a unified, clear, broadly adopted framework for transdisciplinarity and a deeper understanding of factors ensuring full-circle knowledge co-creation in waste-related contexts in the global South. The study offers managerial and research implications and suggests avenues for further research.
... Telecoupling research has an inherently transformative power by highlighting processes that link distant responsibilities and claims. Telecoupling researchers should thus engage in research co-design and knowledge coproduction processes that require self-reflection on their roles in transforming injustices (Pohl et al., 2010;Temper & Del Bene, 2016). ...
Engaging with normative questions in land system science is a key challenge. This debate paper highlights the potential of incorporating elements of environmental justice scholarship into the evolving telecoupling framework that focuses on distant interactions in land systems. We first expose the reasons why environmental justice matters in understanding tele-coupled systems, and the relevant approaches suited to mainstream environmental justice into telecoupled contexts. We then explore which specific elements of environmental justice need to be incorporated into telecou-pling research. We focus on 1) the distribution of social-ecological burdens and benefits across distances, 2) power and justice issues in governing distantly tied systems, and 3) recognition issues in information flows, fram-ings and discourses across distances. We conclude our paper highlighting key mechanisms to address injustices in telecoupled land systems.
... Since its early stages, a consistent aspiration of this kind of participatory mapping has been to engage and empower marginalized groups in society through the use of spatial technologies, which have become a useful tool for environmental justice movements to transmit and report environmental conflicts, and uneven socio-ecological damage [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Founded in this theoretical context, the design, and elaboration of the webmap of water conflicts in Andalusia has been based on cooperative research and knowledge co-production through an integrative process of the "instrumental" and "empowerment" perspectives [23], while implementing an integrated participatory-collaborative mapping approach [3], as discussed in the following sections. ...
Addressing environmental governance conflicts requires the adoption of a complexity approach to carry out an adaptive process of collective learning, exploration, and experimentation. In this article, we hypothesize that by integrating community-based participatory mapping processes with internet-based collaborative digital mapping technologies, it is possible to create tools and spaces for knowledge co-production and collective learning. We also argue that providing a collaborative web platform enables these projects to become a repository of activist knowledge and practices that are often poorly stored and barely shared across communities and organizations. The collaborative Webmap of Water Conflicts in Andalusia, Spain, is used to show the benefits and potential of mapping processes of this type. The article sets out the steps and methods used to develop this experience: i) background check; ii) team discussion and draft proposal; iii) in-depth interviews, and iv) integrated participative and collaborative mapping approach. The main challenge that had to be addressed during this process was to co-create a tool able to combine the two perspectives that construct the identity of integrated mapping: a data-information-knowledge co-production process that is useful for the social agents-the environmental activists-while also sufficiently categorizable and precise to enable the competent administrations to steer their water management.
... Poverty or underdevelopment is therefore conceptualized as capability deprivation (Day, Walker, and Simcock 2016). The sovereignty or autonomy of indigenous peoples and other's communities are very important topics, along with the recognition of the knowledge capacity generated through EJ struggles that emphasizes the need for epistemic or cognitive justice (Temper and Del Bene 2016). ...
Environmental Justice (EJ) is a concept that connects environmental problems with social justice. It was constituted within the struggles against the unequal distribution of environmental burdens and benefits between different social groups. This concept was born in the United States of America (USA) in the 1980s to denounce the practice and policy leading to some individuals, groups, and communities receiving less environmental protection than others because of their geographic location, race, and economic status. In such cases, risk burdens are localized to specific, often marginalized groups, yet the benefits are generalized across all segments of society (Bullard 1994).
... Mode 2 knowledge production is associated with temporary formations of transdisciplinary expertise which is inclusive of community perspectives dedicated to the pursuit of democratising the coproduction of 'socially robust' knowledge (Nowotny, 2003). Despite multiple critiques (for one example see, Bernstein, 2015), the principles of the Mode 2 school of thought continue to influence multiple spheres of knowledge production (for examples, see Temper & Del Bene, 2016 with regard to environmental sciences; Thoren & Breian, 2016, with regard to sustainability science; Zapp & Powell, 2017, with regard to policy making and Soofi, 2018, with regard to the health sciences). ...
This article describes the rationale for the development of an engaged, Mode 3 research schema that aims to contribute to reducing the unintended consequences associated with medical pluralism in rural Limpopo Province, South Africa. The research schema re-frames medical pluralism from the perspective of resilience thinking, placing emphasis on resilience investment. The article critiques current efforts to reduce the unintended consequences of medical pluralism for being based on an imbalanced investment strategy. The imbalance is that current efforts to reduce the unintended consequences of medical pluralism typically focus on either ‘structure’ (healthcare systems) or ‘agency’ (health seeking practices) which tends to produce sub-optimal health-related outcomes. The research schema seeks to overcome this imbalance by reconceptualising the pluralistic healthcare environment in a way that is inclusive of both ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ — using indigenous decision making as the referential axis of enquiry. The research schema uses the Mauri Model decision making framework and intentionality as guiding heuristics which are activated using a research method called ‘AART (abduction, abstraction, retroduction and testing)’.
... However, equity can generate double or triple wins by enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of CCA (Stadelmann et al., 2014). 2. Other classifications of justice include structural (Devia et al., 2017) and epistemic (in)justice (also linked to recognition justice) (Chu & Michael, 2019;Temper & Del Bene, 2016). However, procedural, distributive and recognition justice are commonly used to describe climate justice in the existing literature. ...
It is claimed that country ownership enables equitable adaption by ensuring that adaptation interventions address priorities of local level vulnerable populations. This paper uses a framings approach to understand whether country owned interventions are aligned with local level adaptation needs. Three framing - the rights and responsibility, capabilities and recognition framings-are used to identify principles of justice reflected in adaptation interventions and compares them to those expressed by local level communities expected to benefit from these interventions. A case study of a Least Developed Countries Fund-funded and Global Environment Facility-administered coastal adaptation project in Tanzania is used. The analysis finds differences between framings by the project and local communities. The project portrays a rights and responsibilities framing with emphasis on government-led technocratic adaptation. Local level communities prioritize the capabilities framing, where local natural resource management institutions are considered necessary for mediating between resource access by resource-dependent households and resource conservation for coastal adaptation. The findings suggest that country ownership may not necessarily be equitable as local level adaptation priorities can fail to be reflected in country owned interventions.
Access to the article: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1glqqyDvMPn0z
ABSTRACT:
“Co-design“ has become a widely used approach in land use science to address complex sustainability challenges. However, the term “co-design” is applied in quite different contexts, often implying different meanings and practices to implementation which leads to terminological fuzziness. Since an overview and synthesis of these different approaches is still missing, this systematic review aims at shedding light on the different meanings of “co-design,“ systematizing the body of literature on land use sciences, and exploring how scientists and experts implement co-design processes in practice. Applying a quantitative meta-analysis of 88 SCOPUS-listed publications, we identified two main objectives and types for conducting co-design research: Seventy-six studies aim at jointly developing problem-solving interventions for sustainable transformations (“intervention type”), whereas 12 studies seek to collaboratively develop research questions or agendas (type: “co-created research designs”). Using a qualitative in-depth analysis, we further divide the “intervention type” corpus into four subtypes: (a) “researcher-led and model-based” and (b) “social science-driven intervention” studies applying a rigorous pre-defined study design where scientists are the dominant actors. Subtype (c) includes studies that develop “design-led and practice-oriented interventions” and rather focus on practical outcomes than on scientific knowledge production. The subtype (d) “transformative transdisciplinary interventions and living labs” shows the strongest ties to transdisciplinary research philosophy, theory, methodology, and practice. Co-citation-network analyses reveal that these subtypes have partly evolved independently from each other by using different theoretical and methodological references. Generally, “co-design“ is applied in various ways, but without an agreement on what exactly “co-design” entails. It is often used intuitively across the subtypes, without carefully reflecting the existing theoretical and methodological foundations. Finally, we provide suggestions for supporting an integration of “co-design“ into future research projects in a more conscious and sound way.
HIGHLIGHTS:
"Co-design" aims at co-creating 1) interventions OR 2) research agendas/questions.
Reviewing empirical papers, we divided the “intervention type” into four subtypes.
Co-citation-networks show the different theoretical-methodological references.
"Co-design" is often used intuitively and vague regarding theory and methodology.
We provide suggestions for a more conscious and sound use of “co-design”.
In this chapter, we revise the trajectory and relevance of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas) as one of the main research projects and outcomes of the Barcelona Research Group in Environmental Justice Studies and Political Ecology. We first trace the origins, scope, and methodology of the EJAtlas as a unique participatory mapping project that is both global in scope and informed by the co-production of knowledge between academia and groups seeking environmental justice. We then highlight how the work of the EJAtlas reflects and contributes to a larger trend in the field of Environmental Justice that looks to integrate critical cartography and mapping practices into both research and activist efforts. Looking ahead, we reflect on the limits and unresolved challenges of the platform, as well as on the innovative uses of the tool for advancing a spatial, comparative, and statistical political ecology.
Increases in social metabolism drive environmental conflicts . This proposition, frequently found in the literature on ecological distribution conflicts, has stimulated much research at the interface of ecological economics and political ecology. However, under which conditions is this proposition valid and useful? This chapter briefly reviews the theoretical foundations underlying this proposition and discusses further socio-metabolic properties that may shape the dynamics of environmental conflicts. Furthermore, the chapter relates the socio-metabolic perspective to other ‘grand explanations’ of environmental conflicts, particularly, to the expansion of capitalism under a neo-Marxist perspective. The chapter argues that a socio-metabolic perspective has much to offer to understand some of the structural drivers of environmental conflicts. A socio-metabolic perspective links local environmental conflicts to the resource use profiles of economies as well as to global production and consumption systems, no matter whether these are capitalist societies, resource-intensive planning economies, autocratic monarchies, or illicit resource extractions occurring in the shadow economy. The chapter closes by recalling the need to integrate biophysical and social dynamics in a balanced manner for the nuanced study of environmental conflicts.
Joan Martínez Alier has made relevant contributions to the agrarian question by treating the southwestern Spanish latifundio and Latin American hacienda systems as capitalist ways of exploiting land and labour, not as backward feudal remnants. He has also invoked the resistance of Latin American tenant-labourers and other smallholder peasants as an explanation for the limited extent of wage labour. To that end, he helped rescue Alexander Chayanov and the former Narodnik movement from oblivion. With José Manuel Naredo, he paid tribute to Sergei Podolinsky, another member of this peasant neo-populist current, for pioneering the first calculation of energy balances and returns from agricultural systems. As agricultural and environmental historians, we have followed both paths to develop new proposals for a form of agrarian metabolism that, while contributing to ecological economics, is also aligned with agroecology. We summarize our contributions to these topics, developed together with Eduardo Sevilla Guzmán, Victor Toledo and Gloria Guzmán, as well as some of the researchers at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna and many other participants in the international project on Sustainable Farm Systems (SFS). Our teams have also started using these socio-metabolic accounts to take up the agrarian question of labour and gender exploitation through the unequal appropriation of natural resources from a historical point of view, as well as contribute to the next agroecology transition to a fairer food regime within planetary boundaries.
This chapter examines how the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), an online platform that was initially developed by ICTA-UAB—during the EJOLT international project—to make visible and systematize contemporary struggles against environmental injustice worldwide is becoming an attractive interactive tool to teach and learn about Environmental Social Sciences such as Political Ecology, Ecological Economics, Environmental Sociology, Human Geography, Critical Cartography; as well as Environmental Humanities, in Peace and Conflict studies. In this vein, the EJAtlas has unexpectedly become a tool for teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels that is already being used in diverse countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, China, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, the UK, or the USA. This chapter examines why and how the EJAtlas is used for teaching/learning Environmental Social Science–related contents. We analyze the main challenges and lessons around what is taught, to whom, and why. We discuss how The EJatlas has the potential to not only raise awareness on environmental sustainability but also to address some key concerns regarding the demotivating ‘remoteness’ students might feel due to distance from on-the-ground issues and activism, and the lack of diverse voices present in course material (particularly voices from the frontlines of environmental injustices and resistance movements), along with the difficult balance to strike between theory and practice. The Atlas offers a platform that students and educators can use to help bridge these gaps- by providing a way for students to tangibly engage with important environmental resistance movements, visibilizing diverse, frontline voices and experiences, and connecting the theoretical to the practical via a range of opportunities for promoting environmental justice work outside of the classroom including advocacy, documentation, networking, and solidarity-building.
Energy justice research tends to focus on inequalities that result from energy systems, including from fossil fuel extraction to production, distribution, and consumption. However, little research has investigated local effects of the disposal of waste products from fossil fuel extraction. To better understand these impacts, we employed a case study approach with qualitative interviews of residents of Kettleman City, a rural community in California's Central Valley (USA) that hosts a hazardous waste landfill which accepts predominantly waste from fossil fuel production. Informed by a novel feminist community-based participatory action research approach (CBPAR), interview data were collected from residents in the Summer of 2019 and analyzed using deductive and inductive coding strategies. Resident interviews highlighted the disproportionate distribution of pollution and environmental degradation shouldered by the community along with their experiences of adverse health and social impacts. Our analysis revealed the importance of incorporating an intersectional perspective to frame resident experiences of energy injustice. Our research highlights the untapped potential of feminist-informed CBPAR to catalyze change and challenge the production of energy injustice from energy waste disposal.
The concept of environmental violence (EV) explains the harm that humanity is inflicting upon itself through our pollution emissions. This book argues that EV is present, active, and expanding at alarming rates in the contemporary human niche and in the Earth system. It explains how EV is produced and facilitated by the same inequalities that it creates and reinforces, and suggests that the causes can be attributed to a relatively small portion of the human population and to a fairly circumscribed set of behaviours. While the causes of EV are complex, the author makes this complexity manageable to ensure interventions are more readily discernible. The EV-model developed is both a theoretical concept and an analytical tool, substantiated with rigorous social and environmental scientific evidence, and designed with the intention to help disrupt the cycle of violence with effective policies and real change.
This section maps out a Critical Energy Research agenda that analyzes energy relations in light of their role within broader systems of (re)production, (geo)politics, economics, and ecological regeneration. This requires moving beyond the popular ‘energy justice’ framework, both analytically and politically, and also continuing to engage with emergent branches of EJ such as Critical Environmental Justice studies and Multispecies Justice. Reorienting our work in these ways carries theoretical, methodological, and political implications. Accordingly, critical energy research also reconsiders the roles and responsibilities of those who write about injustice. Five key approaches constitute this agenda for critical energy research: (1) foregrounding the roles of EJ communities, Indigenous groups, and diverse social movements; (2) maintaining a critical focus on systems of production and extractivism (and on how ongoing processes of settler colonialism and multiple forms of exploitation interact and underpin energy-intensive systems of capitalist production); (3) reframing transitions as collaborative projects of justice; (4) drawing on restorative environmental justice to see justice as the restoration of mutually supportive relationships between beings of all kinds; (5) renewing practices of reflexivity by subjecting our own analyses, commitments, research relations, and notions of solidarity to ongoing political scrutiny.KeywordsCritical environmental justiceMultispecies justiceReflexivitySolidarityRefusalCritical energy research
This chapter confronts the binary thinking still prevalent in environmental justice discourses by drawing upon a controversy in the Finnish capital Helsinki. It concerns an exceptional green space, an island within city limits with a few residents but a mostly premodern infrastructure. The chapter describes activist efforts to stop the city from developing and builds on Isabelle Stengers’ plea to ‘regenerate’ and ‘civilise’ science, together with an understanding of environmental injustice; to argue environmental activism is already shifting epistemic politics. It discusses two artist-led events that were motivated by the threat to this exceptional, ecologically as well as culturally rich, green space. The events and the activism that developed alongside them challenged modern knowledge practises by engaging with the island’s landscape in ways that mixed science with art, and treated local problems as also global ones. The text builds on participation in the events to reflect on how science and activism have co-evolved and continue to do so in the context of environmental struggles. It argues that the kind of art-inflected activism apparent in this case is pushing towards new forms of environmentalism, ones that begin to undo the persistent tendency to oppose rational calculative ways of knowing against affective romantic knowing. They also complicate similarly entrenched but increasingly outdated mainstream conceptions, which too easily presume structural opposition and/or antagonism between middle-class activists and poor or otherwise vulnerable victims of environmental injustice.KeywordsArt-science-activismUrban planningEnvironmentalismHelsinkiGreen space
Convivial conservation has been put forward as a radical alternative to transform prevailing mainstream approaches that aim to address global concerns of biodiversity loss and extinction. This special issue includes contributions from diverse disciplinary and geographical perspectives which critically examine convivial conservation’s potential in theory and practice and explore both possibilities and challenges for the approach’s transformative ambitions. This
introduction focuses on three issues which the contributions highlight as critical for facilitating transformation of mainstream conservation. First, the different ways in which key dimensions of justice — epistemic, distributive, and participatory and multi-species justice — intersect with the convivial conservation proposal, and how potential
injustices might be mitigated. Second, how convivial conservation approaches the potential to facilitate human and non-human coexistence. Third, how transformative methodologies and innovative conceptual lenses can be used to further develop convivial conservation. The diverse contributions show that convivial conservation has clear potential to be transformative. However, to realise this potential, convivial conservation must avoid previous
proposals’ pitfalls, such as trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’ and being too narrowly focused. Instead, convivial conservation must continue to evolve in response to engagement with a plurality of perspectives, experiences, ideas and methodologies from around the world.
This article introduces a special issue on the contribution of social science to addressing transformations to sustainability. Articles underline the importance of embracing theoretically rooted, empirically informed, and collaboratively generated knowledge to address sustainability challenges and transformative change. Emphasis is placed on the role of the social sciences in elaborating on the politicisation and pluralisation of transformation processes and outcomes, helping situate, frame, reflect and generate societal action, while acknowledging the complexity of societal transformation in different contexts.
Opinion article on why planetary health science and thinking should include considerations on limiting biomedical solutions and economic growth imperatives for the necessary and urgent transitions required to enable the safe space of the life essentials and needs that people require, while respecting the planetary boundaries within which life can thrive.
In MTb - Climate Changemakers in Health.
https://www.nvtg.org/uploads/MTb-PDF/2021_MT_ClimateChangemakersInHealth.pdf
MT Bulletin of the Netherlands Society for Tropical Medicine and International Health ISSN 0166-9303
This essay introduces and invites contributions to a new Journal of Peasant Studies Forum on ‘climate change and critical agrarian studies’. Climate change is inextricably entwined with contemporary capitalism, but how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world requires deeper analysis. In particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change is a vital focus for both thinking and action. In this essay, we make the connections between climate change and critical agrarian studies and identify competing, although overlapping, narratives. These narratives frame climate change debates and the way that the dynamics of climate change shape and are shaped by the rural world, whether through state policies, international governance, corporate influence, or agrarian struggles. We use a simple framework to examine different logics and strategies for anti-capitalist struggles that might connect climate change and agrarian mobilisations. We conclude with some overall reflections and suggestions for broad, guiding questions for future inquiry as part of the JPS Forum.
The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. We bring a critical social science perspective to this framework through the notion of societal boundaries and aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of the social nature of thresholds. We start by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. We then focus on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controversial process-based on normative judgments, ethical concerns, and socio-political struggles-it has the potential to offer guidelines for a just, social-ecological transformation. Collective autonomy and the politics of self-limitation are key elements of societal boundaries and are linked to important proposals and pluriverse experiences to integrate well-being and boundaries. The role of the state and propositions for radical alternative approaches to well-being have particular importance. We conclude with reflections on social freedom, defined as the right not to live at others' expense. Toward the aim of defining boundaries through transdisciplinary and democratic processes, we seek to open a dialogue on these issues.
Conservation and political ideology were closely interlinked in apartheid South Africa: forced removals in areas considered important for conservation was a common practice. Post-Apartheid reforms sought to address the injustices of the past, and at the level of policy, the Land Restitution Act of 1994 recognizes the injustices suffered by specific groups during Apartheid providing a framework to address their claims. However, the land claims process is still marked by various injustices. Drawing on life history interviews conducted with 31 members of the Likhayalethu Community, South Africa, as a case study this paper presents an analytical discussion of how the Land Restitution policy framework in South Africa attempts to address the epistemic injustices in the case of claims in protected areas. The paper raises concerns about the capacity of this policy framework to prevent epistemic injustices from continuing to occur through the current land restitution process.
Despite widespread recognition of the need to transition toward
more sustainable production and consumption and numerous initiatives to
that end, global resource extraction and corresponding socio-ecological
degradation continue to grow. Understanding the causes of this persistent
failure is a necessary step towards more effective action. This article
contributes to that understanding by synthesizing theory and evidence
that links unsustainable production-consumption systems to power and
inequality. While sustainable consumption and production research and
action mostly focuses on technological or behavioral change, the socioecological
inequalities driving production-consumption systems built into
the organization of our global political economy, remain largely
overlooked. In response, we propose a structural political economy
orientation that seeks explicitly to reduce these inequalities and
advance environmental justice and, thus, create the conditions for
sustainable production-consumption systems. We then propose three
important arenas of research and action towards sustainable productionconsumption
systems: justice, governance, and co-production of knowledge
and action. These arenas, collectively and individually, can serve as
entry points to study and act on the dynamics of (un)sustainable
production-consumption systems. This can be done at the micro level, with
respect to specific commodity chains or systems of provisioning, or at
meso and macro levels with respect to national and global production
networks. Our proposed orientation helps distinguish research and
practice proposals into those emphasizing management and compensation
resulting often in persistence of unsustainability, from those proffering
structural changes in unsustainable production-consumption systems. We
invite critique and collaboration to develop this research and action
agenda further.
Book review of "Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.", by Nick Estes.
Women and Environments international magazine, issue 100/101, pages 90-91 (http://www.weimagazine.com/)
p>Apoyándose en experiencias anteriores desarrolladas a diferentes escalas, este artículo propone la investigación colaborativa entre académicos y sociedad en general como el enfoque necesario para entender en profundidad los conflictos ambientales en una perspectiva regional. Con este objetivo, el artículo presenta, en primer lugar, la metodología y el proceso de construcción del Mapa colaborativo de los conflictos del agua en Andalucía (Mapa-RedNCA) y describe su diseño y desarrollo incardinado en organizaciones sociales preexistentes; en segundo lugar, presenta sus resultados iniciales y valora sus potencialidades como herramienta útil para académicos y organizaciones comprometidas con la justicia ambiental. El artículo finaliza argumentando que el Mapa-RedNCA puede contribuir a mejorar el conocimiento sobre los conflictos ecológicos distributivos, transcendiendo los estudios de casos individuales, ofreciendo una visión sistemática y apoyada empíricamente sobre las tipologías de los conflictos y actores involucrados, las formas de movilización, los aspectos relacionados con información y participación, y la dimensión cultural y patrimonial que caracterizan las luchas por la justicia ambiental a escala local y regional.</p
The Brazilian coastal community of Picinguaba is facing socio-economic and ecological changes that have brought women to the fore in local decision-making. This article, based on our qualitative research and interviews with local people, tells the story of how cultural diversity plus collaborative discussion are producing opportunities for improved ecological govern-ance.
One of the causes of the increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. There are conflicts on resource extraction, transport and waste disposal. Therefore, there are many local complaints, as shown in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and other inventories. And not only complaints; there are also many successful examples of stopping projects and developing alternatives, testifying to the existence of a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Moreover, since the 1980s and 1990s, this movement has developed a set of concepts and campaign slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include environmental racism, popular epidemiology, the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous, biopiracy, tree plantations are not forests, the ecological debt, climate justice, food sovereignty, land grabbing and water justice, among other concepts. These terms were born from socio-environmental activism, but sometimes they have also been taken up by academic political ecologists and ecological economists who, for their part, have contributed other concepts to the global environmental justice movement, such as ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ or the ‘ecological footprint’.
The theoretical framework of
Epistemologies of the South
was proposed by Boaventura de
Sousa Santos as a way to recognize other different manners to understand the World. This
offers a much more relevant role to non-Western views about our existence. Under this
framework the present article describes the concept of relational ontologies, which implies
different theoretical fundamentals for those who no longer want to be complicit with the
silencing of popular knowledges and experiences by Eurocentric knowledge. Responding to
the monolithic idea of World or Universe, this article presents a transition towards the zapatist inspiration of pluriverse, a world where many words fit. The article describes several
examples of indigenous reactions against the mining practices, which were extended into
the ontological occupation of the land. This article also argues that the knowledge offered
by the Epistemologies of the South is much deeper for the context of social transformation
than the one that usually originates in the academy.
El marco teórico de las Epistemologías del Sur fue propuesto por Boaventura de Sousa Santos como una vía para reconocer la diversidad de formas de entender el mundo y dar sentido a la existencia por parte de diferentes habitantes del planeta. Trabajando sobre este marco el presente artículo describe el concepto de ontologías relacionales, ilustrando otro tipo de herramientas teóricas para quienes ya no quieren ser cómplices del silenciamiento de los saberes y experiencias populares por parte de la globalización eurocéntrica. Frente a la idea monolítica de «Mundo» o «Universo», este texto plantea la transición hacia la inspiración zapatista de «Mundos donde quepan muchos mundos» o «Pluriverso». El texto se ilustra sobre algunos ejemplos de reacciones indígenas hacia la extracción minera, que no solo implican ocupación física sino también ocupación ontológica de los territorios. El artículo realiza a su vez el planteamiento de que los saberes derivados a través de las Epistemologías del Sur ofrecen mayor profundidad que los saberes hasta ahora surgidos en el ámbito académico en el contexto de la transformación social.
As marginalized neighborhoods benefit from cleanup and environmental amenities often brought by municipal sustainability planning, recent trends of land revaluation, investments, and gentrification are posing a conundrum and paradox for environmental justice (EJ) activists. In this article, I examine the progression of the urban EJ agenda—from fighting contamination to mobilizing for environmental goods and resisting environmental gentrification—and analyze how the EJ scholarship has reflected upon the complexification of this agenda. I argue that locally unwanted land uses can be reconceptualized from contamination sources to new green amenities because of the displacement they seem to trigger or accelerate.
Open-pit coal mining in Cesar, Colombia increased by 74% between 2000 and 2012, generating environmental and social damages unacknowledged by companies and the state. This study aims to identify and value socio-environmental liabilities from coal mining at different stages of the coal life cycle. Environmental liabilities can be operationalized under three types of responsibilities: moral, legal, and economic. The identification of environmental liabilities allocates moral responsibility; the legal responsibility is needed for effective reparation; and the economic valuation provides arguments to claim compensation, seek remediation, and mitigation of damages. To identify socio-environmental liabilities, interviews were conducted and environmental mining conflicts were analyzed. To estimate monetary values, data were linked to existing literature on costs associated with damages. Results show that the economic values of socio-environmental liabilities per ton of extracted and exported coal are higher than the market price of coal. The main socio-environmental liabilities arise from pollution, local health deterioration, water table depletion, land and ecosystem services losses, damages from transportation and shipping, and coal reserve loss. A comparison with studies in China and the United States indicates that values increase when other health impacts and climate change on a global scale are included.
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
To complement a recent flush of research on transnational environmental justice movements, we sought a deeper organizational history of what we understand as the contemporary environmental justice movement in the United States. We thus conducted in-depth interviews with 31 prominent environmental justice activists, scholars, and community leaders across the US. Today’s environmental justice groups have transitioned from specific local efforts to broader national and global mandates, and more sophisticated political, technological, and activist strategies. One of the most significant transformations has been the number of groups adopting formal legal status, and emerging as registered environmental justice organizations (REJOs) within complex partnerships. This article focuses on the emergence of REJOs, and describes the respondents’ views about the implications of this for more local grassroots groups. It reveals a central irony animating work across groups in today’s movement: legal formalization of many environmental justice organizations has made the movement increasingly internally differentiated, dynamic, and networked, even as the passage of actual national laws on environmental justice has proven elusive.
Workers and environmentalists in the United States have often found themselves on opposite sides of critical issues. Yet at the WTO meeting in Seattle in November 1999, they came together in a historic protest many see as a watershed in the formation of a new blue-green Seattle Coalition. However the two camps are again in con?ict over substantive issues, and in the changed political climate of post 9-11, the question arises of the coalitions durability. The paper ?rst brie? y reviews the history of labor-environment interactions in the United States. It then examines a series of problems and potential areas of promise for the movements: di?culties of coalition-building, expectations of reciprocation, local vs. national connections, and the question of di?ering class cultures and interests. Finally, three areas of potential research and action are suggested: new roles for the mainstream environmental groups, just transition alliances and climate justice alliances. We propose that the environmen-tal justice and environmental health wings of the green movement are more suited to making long-term coalitions with labor than are habitat-oriented green groups.
The confluence of energy supply- and demand-side dynamics links vulnerable communities along the spectrum of energy production and consumption. The disproportionate burden borne by vulnerable communities along the energy continuum are seldom examined simultaneously. Yet, from a justice perspective there are important parallels that merit further exploration in the United States and beyond. A first step is to understand links to vulnerability and justice along the energy continuum by way of theoretical constructs and practical applications. The present article posits energy as a social and environmental justice issue and advances our current understanding of the links between energy and vulnerability, particularly in the U.S.
Context:
Drawing on several emerging concepts including, "energy sacrifice zones," "energy insecurity" and "energy justice," this article lays a foundation for examining critical sacrifices along the energy continuum. To conclude, four basic rights are proposed as a starting point to achieve recognition and equity for vulnerable populations in the realm of energy.
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time: to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow- moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects. We then consider strategies for slowing scholarship with the objective of contributing to the slow scholarship movement. This slowing down represents both a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service and a collective feminist ethics of care that challenges the accelerated time and elitism of the neoliberal university. Above all, we argue in favor of the slow scholarship movement and contribute some resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.
This article discusses the role of populations affected by environmental injustice situations in the production of knowledge about environmental health stemming from inequalities and discrimination in the distribution of risks and benefits of economic development. Special attention is given to the epistemological and political limits to producing knowledge and alternatives that enable advances in building more just and sustainable societies are highlighted. Based on a broader view of health, the limits of scientific approaches are called into question by acknowledging the importance of local knowledge are discussed, either to analyze environmental risks or their effects on health, including epidemiological studies. These limits are linked primarily to the concealment of conflicts and uncertainties, the lack of contextualization of exposure to risk and effects on health, as well as the difficulties of dialogue with the communities. The article also presents contributions and advances presented by environmental justice movements. The conclusion is that a constructivist, procedural and democratic perspective of confronting forms of knowledge and practices can guide the scientific production to benefit of environmental justice.
This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system. There has been a growing recognition of the role of finance in the global food system, in particular the way in which financial markets have become a mode of accumulation for large transnational agribusiness players within the current food regime. This paper highlights a further political implication of agrifood system financialization, namely how it fosters ‘distancing’ in the food system and how that distance shapes the broader context of global food politics. Specifically, the paper advances two interrelated arguments. First, a new kind of distancing has emerged within the global food system as a result of financialization that has (a) increased the number of the number and type of actors involved in global agrifood commodity chains and (b) abstracted food from its physical form into highly complex agricultural commodity derivatives. Second, this distancing has obscured the links between financial actors and food system outcomes in ways that make the political context for opposition to financialization especially challenging.
The 2010 Nagoya Protocol under the Convention on Biological Diversity and recent changes in the policies of major international conservation organizations highlight current interest in revisiting the moral case for conservation. Concerns with equity and human rights challenge well-established notions of justice centred on human responsibility towards nature, the common good or the rights of future generations. This review introduces an empirical approach to the analysis of justice and shows how conservation scientists can apply it to ecosystem services-based governance (or in short, ecosystem governance). It identifies dominant notions of justice and points out their compatibility with utilitarian theories of justice. It then discusses the limited appropriateness of these notions in many contexts in which conservation takes place in the Global South and explores how technical components of ecosystem governance influence the realization of the notions in practice. The review highlights the need for conservation scientists and managers to analyse the justice of ecosystem governance in addition to their effectiveness and efficiency. Justice offers a more encompassing perspective than equity for the empirical analysis of conservation governance.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Deliberation is increasingly embraced as a mode of policy-making, and this paper focuses on how facilitators of deliberative policy processes become critical, pragmatic practitioners of their complex craft. We analyze how deliberation facilitators learn to do their work through ethnographic study of an approach to facilitation known as the Art of Hosting and Harvesting Conversations that Matter. We identify three ways in which people learning to facilitate transform knowledge so that they become skilled facilitators. They do so by metabolizing hosting techniques to understand and incorporate or eschew them their repertoire; by situating hosting knowledge to apply or adapt it in particular contexts; and by coproducing knowledge of hosting with a community of practitioners. We demonstrate how these learning processes support public policy deliberations through illustrations and discuss the potential contributions of the Art of Hosting for enhancing societal capacities for deliberative policy-making.
The search for alternatives to the currently dominant, unsustainable and inequitable model of 'development' should take us to the myriad grassroots and conceptual initiatives that are taking place around the world, pointing to a combination of radical (direct) democracy, an economics mindful of ecological limits and focusing on localisation, people's global governance, struggles for social justice and equity, respect for cultural diversity, and other pathways and values..... a framework here called Radical Ecological Democracy.
Environmental justice has been a central concern in a range of disciplines, and both the concept and its coverage have expanded substantially in the past two decades. I examine this development in three key ways. First, I explore how early work on environmental justice pushed beyond many boundaries: it challenged the very notion of ‘environment’, examined the construction of injustice beyond inequity, and illustrated the potential of pluralistic conceptions of social justice. More recently, there has been a spatial expansion of the use of the term, horizontally into a broader range of issues, vertically into examinations of the global nature of environmental injustices, and conceptually to the human relationship with the non-human world. Further, I argue that recent extensions of the environmental justice frame move the discourse into a new realm – where environment and nature are understood to create the conditions for social justice.
This article provides a framework for understanding water problems as problems of justice. Drawing on wider (environmental) justice approaches, informed by interdisciplinary ontologies that define water as simultaneously natural (material) and social, and based on an explicit acceptance of water problems as always contested, the article posits that water justice is embedded and specific to historical and socio-cultural contexts. Water justice includes but transcends questions of distribution to include those of cultural recognition and political participation, and is intimately linked to the integrity of ecosystems. Justice requires the creative building of bridges and alliances across differences.
In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide array of concepts and slogans related to environmental inequities and sustainability, and explore the connections and relations between them. These concepts include: environmental justice, ecological debt, popular epidemiology, environmental racism, climate justice, environmentalism of the poor, water justice, biopiracy, food sovereignty, "green deserts", "peasant agriculture cools downs the Earth", land grabbing, Ogonization and Yasunization, resource caps, corporate accountability, ecocide, and indigenous territorial rights, among others. We examine how activists have coined these notions and built demands around them, and how academic research has in turn further applied them and supplied other related concepts, working in a mutually reinforcing way with EJOs. We argue that these processes and dynamics build an activist-led and co-produced social sustainability science, furthering both academic scholarship and activism on environmental justice.
There has been increasing recognition of the severe environmental and social impacts it entails, during both routine operations and spectacular accidents. In the face of the widespread yet elusive power of transnational corporations, civil society nonetheless continually pressures companies to reduce environmental and social impacts from their activities. Demands from regulators, investors, and civil society have coalesced into a growing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement. Meanwhile, their relative powerlessness obliges them to forge an array of shifting alliances and innovate a range of adaptive strategies. While many studies have examined environmental social movements, few have closely explored the controversies and complexities of grassroots groups' relationships to governments, corporations, NGOs, or the communities the activists claim to represent. While Marx has often been accused of a lack of environmental concern, recent scholarship has pointed to his arguments about the ecological dimensions of inequitable class relations, often grounded in unequal access to natural resources such as land or firewood.
This article provides an environmental and institutional history of the highly politicized and contested process of setting a Net Present Value (NPV) for forests in India, in a context of increasing conflicts over land for development, conservation and indigenous rights. Decision-making documents in the Supreme Court and in one specific case of a bauxite mining conflict involving Vedanta in the Niyamgiri hills are studied to come to conclusions about how economic valuation of forests has moved through the political process. We argue that establishing NPV for forests is neither conducive to conservation nor to environmental justice for the following three reasons. The technical and political process of setting prices deepens and reproduces structural inequalities with negative distributive effects. NPV encourages economistic decision-making procedures that exclude participation. Finally NPV does not recognize or take into account cultural difference or plural values. We thus conclude that economic valuation of forest products and services has not managed to “save” forests in India and is not an effective or viable strategy for expressing the value of forests or for environmental conservation and environmental justice activism.
International tensions around water are rising in many of the world’s most volatile regions. The policy recipe pursued by the West, and imposed on governments elsewhere, is to pass control over water to private interests, which simply accelerates the cycle of inequality and deprivation. California, as well as China, South Africa, Mexico and countries on every continent already face a crisis. This book exposes the enormity of the problem, the dangers of the proposed solution and the alternative, which is to recognize access to water as a fundamental human right, not dependent on ability to pay.
From 2002 to 2012, 68 community consultations/referenda on large-scale mining activities have been conducted in Latin America challenging centralized decision-making procedures. These consultations are fostered by communities and social movements and usually supported by local governments. Around 700,000 people have participated, expressing a massive rejection of mining activities in Peru, Guatemala, Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador. Community consultations have contributed to ease local tensions temporarily, slowing down or stopping mining projects in some cases. This paper analyses the process of emergence and spread of such consultations exploring how they challenge the governance of mining activities. We claim that community consultations are being institutionalized in the context of mining conflicts in Latin America. Consultations are not isolated experiences but constitute a strategy diffused and transformed in the midst of multi-scalar social learning processes where social movements exchange strategies and discourses and a hybridising process occurs in relation to political and cultural local features. We sustain that community consultations are a hybrid institution where non-state and state actors and formal and informal institutions are mobilized. Consultations are a strategic tool of social movements and a contested emergent institution – as different state bodies support or reject their validity – that reclaim the right of affected populations and indigenous peoples to participate, in empowering forms, in high-stake decisions that affect their territories, livelihoods and future.
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The narrative of environmental justice is powerfully and passionately advocated by researchers, practitioners and activists across scale and space. Yet, because these struggles are multifaceted and pluralistic, rooted in complex, evolving “socio-material-political interminglings” the concept is difficult to grasp, and even harder to realise. Recent literature raises concerns as to what makes for environmental injustices, how injustices are defined, classified as urgent and/or critical, by whom and why, how they gain political attention, etc. This paper draws attention to these issues by contrasting the largely untold, nonetheless entrenched and enduring “old” water supply injustices in the Darjeeling region of the Eastern Himalaya in India with articulate contestations relating to the speedy advancement of “new” hydropower projects here. Water supply problems in the Darjeeling region are particularly wicked – nested in fractious ethnicity–identity political conflicts. These complex local realities tend to obscure the everyday challenges relating to water as well as render these problems spatially anecdotal. What happens – or does not – around water here is certainly unique, yet comparison to other struggles in other settings show that locational and environmental politics provide critical evidence to question the several implicit universalisms in relation to water justice.
Introduction“Green economy” has gathered significant attention as a guiding principle and/or aspiration for organizing national and global economic activity. The popularity of the concept soared when it was adopted as a key organizing theme for the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio + 20) in Brazil, June 2012. Since then it has remained a growing focus of global environmental politics scholarship as well as various institutions for international environmental governance such as the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), all of which have recently come together to set up a new partnership for action on green economy.A clear and dominant definition of “green economy” is yet to emerge, but the central ideas appear to include resource efficiency, decoupling economic growth from environmental externalities and the notion of producing more with less ...
The Gezi Park demonstrations that took place from June 2013 onwards across Turkey generated widespread interest and coverage. The collective spirit at Gezi Park confirmed once again that online activism complements traditional means of protests well and as such renders citizen activism more powerful. At Gezi Park, it was crucial to have activists pour into the center, followed by social media efforts that carried the protests beyond the Park, beyond Istanbul, and even beyond Turkey, all within hours. The Turkish police force is well known for its brutality in dealing with demonstrations unwelcomed by the government, and so Gezi protestors had to deal with various forms of repression, such as extreme violence and arrests. On June 15, the park was cleared of all protestors by brutal police force, ultimately bringing an end to the peaceful occupation. Finally, the Gezi protests went beyond environmental resistance, and played an instrumental role in bringing social movements from diverse backgrounds together for the first time, enabling them to get to know one another better and raise a strong, united voice against the current political-economic system. It reminded people that democracy is not only about elections and majoritarian principles but also about fighting for the democratic rights of all. This whole process marked perhaps the beginning of a collective alternative social imaginary that is largely missing in Turkey, and demonstrated that there is still hope and potential for change beyond the capitalist and neoliberal imperatives.
China's Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) pays millions of farmers to convert cropland in upper watersheds to tree plantations. It is considered one of the world's largest payments for ecosystem services (PES) scheme for its reliance on financial incentives. This paper examines the outcomes of the SLCP by way of a case study from the Yangliu watershed in Yunnan province. It focuses on the notions of justice embedded in state policy and held by villagers and local state officials in order to understand the observed outcomes in terms of people's participation in the implementation of the SLCP, land use changes and livelihood effects. Villagers, local state officials, and state policy share a primary concern about distributive justice despite significant differences in their specific notions. The shared concern underlies the villagers’ positive reactions to the SLCP, which among other factors, have led to the intended expansion of tree plantations and a livelihood transition in Yangliu since 2003. The insights from Yangliu suggest the need to consider justice for a fuller understanding of the dynamics and outcomes of the SLCP and other PES schemes worldwide as the notions of justice applied by the involved actors may influence land use and livelihood dynamics in addition to the other factors considered in research this far.
The ecological debt concept emerged in the early 1990s from within social movements driven by rising environmental awareness, emerging Western consciousness of responsibility for past colonial subjugations, and a general sense of unease during the debt crisis. First developed organically, mainly in locally-scaled, civil contexts, ecological debt has since gained attention in academia and international environmental negotiations. Now, the concept of ecological debt requires further elucidation and elaboration, especially in light of its historical interconnection with environmental justice. In this paper, the development of the concept of ecological debt in both activist and academic circles is described, proposed theoretical building blocks for its operationalization are discussed and three brief cases illustrating its recent utilization are presented. Ecological debt is built upon a theoretical foundation that draws on biophysical accounting systems, ecological economics, environmental justice and human rights, historical injustices and restitution, and an ecologically-oriented world-system analysis framework. Drawing on these building blocks, the concept of ecological debt has been used as a biophysical measure, a legal instrument and a distributional principle. In theory and in practice, it has much to offer the environmental justice movement. We conclude by reflecting on some of the pros and cons of the ecological debt concept as a tool to be used in fulfilling some of the goals of environmental justice movements in the world today.
Environmental justice is a major movement and organizing discourse in the environmental politics arena, and both the movement and the idea have had a large influence on the way that climate justice has been conceptualized. While most discussions of climate justice in the academic literature focus on ideal conceptions and normative arguments of justice theory, or on the pragmatic policy of the more elite environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), a distinct discourse has developed out of the grassroots. In these movement articulations of climate justice, the concerns and principles of environmental justice are clear and consistent. Here, climate justice focuses on local impacts and experience, inequitable vulnerabilities, the importance of community voice, and demands for community sovereignty and functioning. This review traces the discourse of environmental justice from its development, through the range of principles and demands of grassroots climate justice movements, to more recent articulations of ideas for just adaptation to climate change. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.
: Articulations of climate justice were central to the diverse mobilisations that opposed the Copenhagen Climate Talks in December 2009. This paper contends that articulations of climate justice pointed to the emergence of three co-constitutive logics: antagonism, the common(s), and solidarity. Firstly, we argue that climate justice involves an antagonistic framing of climate politics that breaks with attempts to construct climate change as a “post-political” issue. Secondly, we suggest that climate justice involves the formation of pre-figurative political activity, expressed through acts of commoning. Thirdly, we contend that climate justice politics generates solidarities between differently located struggles and these solidarities have the potential to shift the terms of debate on climate change. Bringing these logics into conversation can develop the significance of climate justice for political practice and strategy. We conclude by considering what is at stake in different articulations of climate justice and tensions in emerging forms of climate politics.