Just translation? A socioecological justice lens on EU environmental governance and urban mobility transitions

Abstract

EU environmental policies such as the Ambient Air Quality Directive 2008/50 are highly relevant in this age of the looming climate crisis and interconnected sustainable transitions. However, implementation efforts such as low-emission zones, road pricing, and driving bans affect citizens in heterogenous situations and in ways that evoke questions of socioecological justice. This has resulted in an increasingly polarized reluctance to respective governance across Europe. The EU policy implementation literature often omits these less clearly operationalized norms that EU policies transport and pays little attention to how stakeholders in cities discursively and practically translate EU directives. Constructivist norm research underlines the importance of ‘localizing’ by highlighting that justice does matter for norm translation. The environmental justice concept has, however, not been systematically introduced and referenced in the norm research literature. This article offers a heuristic to address this research gap by combining a translation perspective from International Relations norm research with an environmental justice lens. Following the journey of the Air Quality Directive 2008/50, we ask how urban implementation configures the Directive’s environmental justice dimension and why this is important for effective and sustainable EU governance. Empirically, we focus on action plans and participation processes regarding Directive 2008/50 in Brussels, Glasgow, and Hamburg. As a result, we show that EU environmental governance unfolds at the local level as a dynamic contestation of different distributive justice claims that then translate into concrete policies. The analysis indicates that those policies must procedurally integrate local knowledge and identity formation to enable comprehensively just sustainable transformations.