Environmental Justice Framework Research Articles

Relationship between neighbourhood socioeconomic position and availability of public green space applying generalized linear models. An environmental justice analysis in a large German city

Introduction: The Environmental Justice Framework states that besides environmental burdens also resources may be social unequally distributed both on the individual and neighbourhood level. This s...

Reclaim Northside: An Environmental Justice Approach to Address Vacant Land in Pittsburgh.

Urban decline, disinvestment, and blight have not traditionally been addressed by the environmental conservation movement. In this article, we describe an environmental justice-focused intervention located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that aimed to increase community empowerment to address urban environmental injustices by training residents to reclaim vacant land. We use a case study approach to illustrate resident perceptions of the impact of vacant land and urban decay. The results suggest that these residents viewed vacancy as an important indicator of community well-being and social inequality. We use a social and environmental justice framework to describe results and implications for practitioners and researchers.

Procedural equity and corporeality: Imagining a just recovery in Fukushima

In March 2015, interim storage facilities began to operate in Fukushima, Japan and to receive waste, including soils and plants that were contaminated with radiation after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant's explosions four years ago. Two rural towns that host the plant accepted the operation in their territories, acknowledging that they had benefitted from the plant and they bore the burden as an outcome. The environmental justice framework suggests that such an acceptance reveals peripheralisation of rural villages that were forced to embrace the government-sponsored nuclear industry and to become ‘rural-nuclear towns’. An emphasis is often placed on participation of the affected citizens to address the peripheralisation and to seek justice through establishment of procedural equity. Using media reports, published policy documents and interview excerpts, this paper reconstructs historical process by which the peripheralisation occurred and argues that the current emphasis on procedural equity is susceptible to endorsing the ongoing promotion of public participation in disaster management, which fails to facilitate re-imagination of reconstructing rural-nuclear towns as rural towns in a post-nuclear world. The paper proposes a corporealist approach to set an analytical ground to establish a new social imaginary in which participation comes to mean creation of a new political process that envisions foundational change.

Analysis perspective on environmental (in)justice basis of fracking policy: take a Texas city for example

Adapting a distinction prominent in discussions of science policy, the main points should be applying environmental ethical point for local government's decision making. Shale gas development (SGD) via horisontal drilling and fracking is touted for economic benefits and spurned for health and environmental impacts. Despite SGD's socioeconomically salience, few peer-reviewed, empirical studies document the distribution of positive and negative effects. The City of Denton, Texas has 280 active gas wells and over a decade of SGD. Here we use an environmental justice framework to analyse the distribution of SGD's costs and benefits within Denton. Our results show that Denton's mineral wealth is widely distributed around the USA, residents own 1% of the total value extracted, and the city government is a large financial beneficiary. In addition to distributional inequities, our analysis demonstrates that split estate doctrine, legal deference to mineral owners and SGD's uniqueness in urban centres create disparities in municipal SGD decision-making processes. The environmental justice issues associated with fracking in Denton also provide one possible explanation for residents' November 2014 vote to ban hydraulic fracturing.

A Different Trolley Problem: The Limits of Environmental Justice and the Promise of Complex Moral Assessments for Transportation Infrastructure.

Transportation infrastructure tremendously affects the quality of life for urban residents, influences public and mental health, and shapes social relations. Historically, the topic is rich with social and political controversy and the resultant transit systems in the United States cause problems for minority residents and issues for the public. Environmental justice frameworks provide a means to identify and address harms that affect marginalized groups, but environmental justice has limits that cannot account for the mainstream population. To account for this condition, I employ a complex moral assessment measure that provides a way to talk about harms that affect the public.

Reducing The Health Impact Of Biodiversity Loss In Latin America. An Environmental Justice Framework

Around 22,413 biological species are on the verge of extinction. Biodiversity loss has a huge impact in human health but has not been addressed through environmental health policies in Latin Americ...

Environmental Justice in Appalachia: Procedural Inequities in the Mine Permitting Process in Southeast Ohio

Abstract This paper examines the permitting process for a coal strip mine in Southeastern Ohio using a distributive and procedural environmental justice framework. A permit application to mine Joy Hollow, a site in rural Athens County, was submitted to the Ohio Division of Mineral Resources Management in 2011. The permit applicant promised the mine would bring jobs and environmental restoration to the Appalachian region already damaged by previous rounds of coal mining. Landowners in favor of the mine leased their property to the mining company, while others living near the proposed mine site opposed it. The opposing groups engaged in the familiar “economy versus environment” debate; however, both groups used ecological narratives to justify their positions. We used semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to determine that proponents and opponents of the mine both faced distributive injustice in the form of environmental damage to their hollow from earlier mining activit...

Sustainable Social Work: An Environmental Justice Framework for Social Work Education

Environmental degradation is not experienced by all populations equally; hazardous and toxic waste sites, resource contamination (e.g., exposure to pesticides), air pollution, and numerous other forms of environmental degradation disproportionately affect low income and minority communities. The communities most affected by environmental injustices are often the same communities where social workers are entrenched in service provision at the individual, family, and community level. In this article, we use a global social work paradigm to describe practical ways in which environmental justice content can be infused in the training and education of social workers across contexts in order to prepare professionals with the skills to respond to ever-increasing global environmental degradation. We discuss ways for social work educators to integrate and frame environmental concerns and their consequences for vulnerable populations using existing social work models and perspectives to improve the social work profession's ability to respond to environmental injustices. There are significant social work implications; social workers need to adapt and respond to contexts that shape our practice, including environmental concerns that impact the vulnerable and oppressed populations that we serve.

Fracking and environmental (in)justice in a Texas city

Shale gas development (SGD) via horizontal drilling and fracking is touted for economic benefits and spurned for health and environmental impacts. Despite SGD's socioecological salience, few peer-reviewed, empirical studies document the distribution of positive and negative effects. The City of Denton, Texas has ~280 active gas wells and over a decade of SGD. Here we use an environmental justice framework to analyze the distribution of SGD's costs and benefits within Denton. Using data on mineral property values from 2002 to 2013 and gas well locations, we ask: who owns Denton's mineral rights (i.e. the greatest financial beneficiaries) and how does this ownership pattern relate to who lives near gas wells (i.e. those who shoulder the nuisances and health impacts)? Our results show that Denton's mineral wealth is widely distributed around the U.S., residents own 1% of the total value extracted, and the city government is a large financial beneficiary. In addition to distributional inequities, our analysis demonstrates that split estate doctrine, legal deference to mineral owners, and SGD's uniqueness in urban centers create disparities in municipal SGD decision-making processes. The environmental justice issues associated with fracking in Denton also provide one possible explanation for residents' November 2014 vote to ban hydraulic fracturing.

Investigating Issues of Environmental Injustice in Neighborhoods Surrounding Parks

Parks are important resources for facilitating community health. Using an environmental justice framework, this study in Kansas City, Missouri examined disparities by income and race/ ethnicity for bordering land uses, densities of incivilities (e.g., vandalism, litter), unhealthy retail establishments in neighborhoods surrounding parks. Low and medium income and high minority park neighborhoods were more likely to be surrounded by higher densities of incivilities and to have a moderate density of FF restaurants. Low-income park neighborhoods were five times more likely to have a moderate density of other unhealthy establishments compared to parks in high-income areas. Future research and environmental justice efforts should explore policies that reduce unhealthy characteristics of park neighborhoods to encourage increased usage of these important community settings.

Justiça social e ambiental:

O reordenamento espacial do município do Rio de Janeiro, voltado para a adaptação da cidade aos megaeventos esportivos, demandou remoções, investimentos em infraestrutura, entre outras ações. O objetivo desse artigo é fortalecer o debate jurídico-político do direito à cidade para seus habitantes através de uma avaliação da extensão das intervenções urbanas propostas a partir do quadro atual de justiça ambiental e do histórico processo de segregação socioespacial materializado nas favelas cariocas. A análise da cidade olímpica será feita com base em metodologia quali-quantitativa de dados primários e secundários sobre saneamento e remoções ocorridas em razão dos megaeventos. Entre os resultados encontrados destaca-se o retrocesso socioambiental gerado pelas políticas públicas implementadas nesse ciclo de investimentos. Conclui-se tecendo considerações gerais e específicas voltadas para o fortalecimento dos processos de elaboração e avaliação de políticas públicas e para a construção de um modelo de cidade sustentável no município do Rio de Janeiro.

Historical paths of environmental injustice: a century of placing industrial facilities in Helsinki, Finland

The article explores the historical process of creating unjust environmental conditions in one geographical area in the Finnish capital, Helsinki. The study traces back the decision-making processes about placing environmentally burdensome, communal facilities, such as power plants, waste disposal and other infrastructural facilities. Also the lack of environmental amenities is investigated. The study covers a time period from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the 1980s. The historical analysis of the development of land-use decisions in the city is based on documentary and archival sources about the decision-making processes and it is conducted in the framework of distributive and procedural environmental justice. Four different periods of siting policies are identified. The motives for land-use decisions at each phase reflect geographical, political and historical reasoning. The concept of path dependency is introduced to explain, how environmental injustices were reproduced because of past paths of siting policies locked in subsequent decisions and created a negative twist of accumulating environmental burden.

What is Environmental Justice?

This posting outlines the concept of as I recently described it for an encyclopedia entry in the field of Action Research. In this discipline, the term describes more than a outcome. It is a social movement, and a theoretical lens, that is focused on fairness in the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, and in the processes that determine those distributions. In both cases, an attention to environmental justice means amplifying the voices of poor, racialized and Indigenous communities in environmental and natural resource policy-making venues -- places that have typically produced decisions resulting in those communities bearing more than their fair share of environmental harms. It also means, increasingly, paying attention to the manner through which disadvantaged and historically oppressed peoples within those communities will often be disproportionately harmed, often along familiar social gradients of gender, class, sexuality, caste, and (dis)ability. Effective research in the environmental justice framework has tended to involve robust partnerships between local communities, organizations and/or groups of activists seeking to achieve environmental justice, and university-based researchers employing participatory-action methodologies. These collaborative efforts have proven to be very fruitful in many cases, but should not be understood as easy or straightforward to implement. New models are emerging that seek to combine and enhance the expertise, capacities and perspectives of the partners in order to meet primarily, the needs of communities, and secondarily, the aims of researchers.

Global labour unions and just transition to a green economy

Questions of justice in the transition to a green economy have been raised by various social forces. Very few proposals, however, have been as focused and developed as the “just transition” strategy proposed by global labour unions. Yet, labour unions are remarkably absent from discussions of the transition towards a green economy. This is surprising as labour unions are arguably the largest organizations in the world fighting for basic rights and more just social relations. This paper tries to advance the potential contribution of labour unions in this arena by asking: what is the full scope of “just transition” today and how have labour unions developed and refined it over the years to render the move towards a green economy both environmentally and socially sustainable? The concept of just transition is hotly debated within labour unions and has different interpretations, and hence different strategies. The last section assesses these interpretations by means of a normative framework, which seeks to fuse political economy and political ecology. Empirically, we add to the growing literature on labour environmentalism, as well as transitions more generally. Analytically, our goal is to place the various approaches to a “just transition” within a heuristic framework of environmental justice that is explicit about power relations when demanding justice, two themes central to this special issue.

From ‘criminals of the earth’ to ‘stewards of the environment’: The social and environmental justice of Fair Trade gold

The recent emergence of the Fairtrade certification of gold in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa promises a radical new direction for the environmental governance of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). In doing so, it aims to tackle the longstanding environment and development challenges of the sector which mainstream policy has failed to alleviate. The move towards more responsible ASM practices is premised on the strategic deployment of a Fair Trade discourse that argues for its operators to be recognized not as criminals, but as valued and formalized parts of their broader economies. It is argued in this paper that this development intervention should be read within a social and environmental justice framework, one which directly answers the call from political geography for ‘compelling accounts’ of positive representations of the sector.Through a discourse analysis of 10years of media reports, interviews and recorded life histories of key ASM and Fair Trade stakeholders in Tanzania, it shows how three strands of justice (conceptualized in terms of fairer distribution, procedure and recognition) are articulated by the Fair Trade gold movement and critically assesses the politics behind such a deliberate strategy. In particular, it argues that recognition is a key part of justice that has been underplayed by erstwhile analyses of Fair Trade. Through a case study of Tanzania, it is concluded that although significant progress has been made in terms of arguing for greater recognition for ASM operators, there remains a need to better link discourse with practice in establishing greater distributional justice.

The Role of Environmental Justice in Biodiversity Conservation: Investigating experiences of communities near Kruger National Park, South Africa

This paper uses an environmental justice framework to examine the experiences of marginalized communities near Kruger National Park. While biodiversity conservation has been predominantly understood as a neutral and ahistorical objective, a critical perspective reveals that a range of power relations inform its definitions and processes. Further, the spaces in which conservation efforts are undertaken are vulnerable to reproducing inequalities of the larger society in which they are situated. I establish biodiversity conservation in Kruger as an environmental justice issue and frame the discussion regarding communities near the Park within the categories of (a) land ownership and resource use, (b) community participation in park management and decision-making, and (c) justly shared economic and socio-cultural benefits. While improvements have occurred, the maintenance of Kruger requires integrating an environmental justice perspective to its programs and a more meaningful partnership with surrounding marginalized communities to ensure equitable use and benefits of the Park.

A new means of governing artisanal and small-scale mining? Fairtrade gold and development in Tanzania

This paper offers a critical analysis of the most contemporary development intervention concerned with ameliorating the problems of Artisanal and Small-scale Mining (ASM) in sub-Saharan Africa, namely the emergence of Fairtrade Gold. Through an analysis of Fairtrade Gold in Tanzania, this paper argues that despite Fairtrade׳s promises to ASM operators of better prices, its potential efficacy is compromised by the informality of local gold markets and a deeply-rooted mistrust of development intervention more broadly. However, its greatest contribution may lie elsewhere in the drive for a social and environmental justice framework that privileges increased recognition for small-scale gold miners in the global South.

Do medical marijuana centers behave like locally undesirable land uses? Implications for the geography of health and environmental justice

As of 2013, medical marijuana is legal in 20 US States and the District of Columbia, but few studies have investigated the impact of the retail centers that sell the drug. We draw upon the social construction literature to frame our research and help us determine whether medical marijuana centers in Denver, Colorado, are considered locally undesirable land uses (LULUs). The geography of health and environmental justice frameworks lead us to hypothesize that marijuana centers are more likely to be opened in Hispanic, Black, and poor neighborhoods than in non-Hispanic White and affluent neighborhoods. We also hypothesize that marijuana centers will tend to increase the minority composition and poverty of the neighborhoods in which they are located. Contrary to expectations, we find no empirical support for these two hypotheses. Instead, results suggest that marijuana centers are likely to be situated in neighborhoods with higher crime rates and more retail employment. Thus, despite the view by many planners and law enforcement officials that these centers are problematic, they do not take on LULU characteristics in siting and demographic changes. This finding, while limited to Denver, has important implications for policymakers who are considering similar marijuana policies.

Gardening in green space for environmental justice: food security, leisure and social capital

This ethnography examines the origins and growth of a rural community garden in the context of food security, leisure and social capital within an environmental justice framework. Community residents, including low-income populations, people with disabilities and senior citizens, banded together with the assistance of local leaders in order to grow healthy produce based on concerns of produce cost and commercial growing practices. Results indicate that participants did enter into the garden activity mainly for food security, but soon realized leisure benefits such as socializing and meeting new people. Moreover, the external social networks that facilitated the gardens resulted in the creation of internal social capital, including increased gardening knowledge and shared ability. Finally, we discuss implications to community/recreation leaders in the context of building social networks in rural areas, creating access and bringing together diverse populations within a leisure-based community garden.

Growing a just garden: environmental justice and the development of a community garden policy for Hamilton, Ontario

The proliferation of community gardening, and the increasing recognition of its benefits, has led many municipalities to develop community garden policies. Using the process of drafting a community garden policy in the city of Hamilton, Canada, as a case study, this paper illustrates how an environmental justice framework could inform the creation of an effective, inclusive community gardening policy. At the same time, barriers within the policy process could mitigate against the meaningful incorporation of environmental justice concerns. The paper concludes with a discussion of how greater inter-departmental and community collaboration in policy development, as well as the more routine application of an environmental justice lens, could mitigate the ill effects of the inequitable distribution of environmental and other resources.