Abstract
This article illuminates the value of the concept of the region in political ecology and environmental justice studies by presenting three arguments about the role of regions in environmental justice social movements engaged in climate change mitigation in California's San Joaquin Valley. First, regional planning agencies and environmental justice advocates are engaged in conflicts over not only the content of regional climate change plans, but the very definitions of region and the authority used to put these regional visions into action. Second, regional organizing provides environmental justice movements with new opportunities to address regional economic patterns and to negotiate with regional planning agencies, both of which influence local manifestations of environmental injustice. Third, regional strategies raise significant dilemmas for these movements as they try to sustain engagement across extensive spatial territories and engage with a broad set of policy and economic protagonists. Together, this analysis demonstrates that a dynamic approach to regions, regionalism, and regionalization can assist political ecology and environmental justice scholars in their common aim of understanding the co-production of social and environmental inequity and collective action to change it.Key Words: Environmental justice, regional political ecology, climate change mitigation, regional planning, rural community development
Highlights
The concept of the region has occupied a central but unsettled place in political ecology and environmental justice scholarship
Understanding the central place of regions in social movement and state actions on climate change mitigation can help inform a robust field of regional political ecology and environmental justice studies
I return to the framing questions of the article: How can the concept of regions in the environmental justice and political ecology literature shed light on this case of regional planning in California's San Joaquin Valley? And how, vice-versa, can this concrete case shed light on the relationship between regions and the production of environmental and social inequality? Here I reference Paasi's useful analysis of the distinct, yet interrelated concepts of regions, regionalism, and regionalization, a framework elaborated by Neumann (2010) in his reflections on the role of regions in political ecology (Paasi 1986, 1991, 2004)
Summary
The concept of the region has occupied a central but unsettled place in political ecology and environmental justice scholarship. Debates over whether regions should be approached analytically as things, processes, identities or some combination of these have significant implications for the ways in which this concept can facilitate or impede the shared project of political ecology and environmental justice studies' to explain the relationships between social and environmental inequities. Since the publication of Pulido's and Bullard's seminal works, environmental justice scholars have focused considerable attention on the ways in which environmental injustice is produced and contested at multiple geographic and jurisdictional scales These cut across what can be termed regional, national, international and global levels (Bickerstaff and Agyeman 2009, Bulkeley 2005, Bulkeley et al 2013, Faber 2007, Harrison 2011b, Holifield 2012, Ikeme 2003, Pellow 2007, Sze et al 2009). Political ecology can provide environmental scholars with robust theoretical approaches to capital's complex logics while environmental justice studies can help ground political ecology in the lived experiences of those most affected and most invested in working to change these re-envision and reshape these political and economic systems
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