Global Environmental Justice Research Articles

One health governance of antimicrobial resistance seen through an Urban Political Ecology lens: a critical interpretive synthesis

ABSTRACT Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a threat to animal and ecosystem health, agriculture, water, and sanitation systems, posing risks not only to human health, but also to society and the systems upon which it depends. Global health governance draws on the One Health (OH) approach to combat AMR. However, the effective implementation of these approaches faces several constraints, including governance and implementation challenges arising from the interconnected nature of AMR with other global health threats, as well as local and structural socioecological factors that affect policy outcomes, that are often overlooked in governance approaches. This article aims to clarify how scientific literature has situated OH-AMR governance responses in relation to six socioecological dimensions: global health threats, broader concerns, governance frameworks, socioeconomic factors, health equity, and environmental justice. Informed by an Urban Political Ecology (UPE) lens and guided by the Critical Interpretive Synthesis (CIS) methodology of Dixon-Woods et al., our critical interpretive synthesis identified 18 articles situating OH-AMR arrangements within these socioecological dimensions. The role of global governance frameworks in shaping state governance arrangements has rarely been the object of analysis in the selected studies. The synthesis highlights the connections between urbanization, AMR risks, global health threats, and broader ecological challenges, calling for a reassessment of current global and state governance approaches. The study also offers a case for the adoption of a UPE lens to address AMR and related global health challenges.

Rising to the challenge: a systematic review of development of environmental justice in India

ABSTRACT Environmental justice has experienced rapid expansion in its scope and conceptualization in the last three decades. Literature on environmental justice narrates how individuals and communities mobilize to confront economic and environmental issues at the local, national, and global levels and how globalization, gender, racism, and class affect the environment. This article presents a systematic review of environmental justice in India, aimed at showing how the concept originated and came into common parlance and how it differs or actually resembles now a lot with the environmental justice discourse in the United States. The focus of this study is on various salient events that are crucial in the development of a well-established movement. The review contends that environmental justice may have only recently become a recognized concept in Indian environmental history, as a philosophy, it has been a mainstay of Indian environmental consciousness. India has an indigenous environmental justice movement, albeit not on the lines of the US. This review also suggests that the discourse on environmental justice in India is currently shaped by both global environmental justice movements as well as indigenous efforts and concerns about environmental challenges.

The Political Implications of Unequal Exchange: Towards a Common Agenda for Global Social Movements

ABSTRACT Unequal exchange in international trade lies at the crossroads of all the major contradictions of the current global capitalist system: class, spatial and ecological. Countering unequal exchange can offer the basis for a broad global social coalition demanding a new international economic and ecological order. It can unite the claims of social and ecological movements around a common agenda where global social justice meets global environmental justice. The objective conditions are provided by the common ground of concrete interests that binds together various political and social actors in the global South and North who are harmed by corporate neoliberal globalisation. Building the subjective conditions, however, requires overcoming theoretical reductionisms and political sectarianisms that contribute to the fragmentation of social struggles.

Does ICAO’s climate change mitigation policy based on international agreements reflect global environmental justice?

Does ICAO’s climate change mitigation policy based on international agreements reflect global environmental justice?

Global impacts of extractive and industrial development projects on Indigenous Peoples' lifeways, lands, and rights.

To what extent do extractive and industrial development pressures affect Indigenous Peoples' lifeways, lands, and rights globally? We analyze 3081 environmental conflicts over development projects to quantify Indigenous Peoples' exposure to 11 reported social-environmental impacts jeopardizing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples are affected in at least 34% of all documented environmental conflicts worldwide. More than three-fourths of these conflicts are caused by mining, fossil fuels, dam projects, and the agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and livestock (AFFL) sector. Landscape loss (56% of cases), livelihood loss (52%), and land dispossession (50%) are reported to occur globally most often and are significantly more frequent in the AFFL sector. The resulting burdens jeopardize Indigenous rights and impede the realization of global environmental justice.

The Socio-ecological Question, the Global Environmental Justice Movement and Anti-systemic Environmentalism

Abstract This article makes two central arguments: i) we can understand the current phase of anti-systemic movements predominantly through the globally expanding forms of resistance centered on environment, food, climate, soil, water, and so on as a collective socio-ecological critique and confrontation of the global capitalist relations of production; and ii) we can conceptually specify the global environmental justice movement through the notion of anti-systemic environmentalism expressing “the second contradiction of capitalism,” i.e., the socio-ecological crisis of the capitalist world system. In making these arguments, it introduces the concept of the socio-ecological question, theoretically grounded in the value theory of nature, in establishing the world-historical relationality among diverse place-based socio-environmental movements.

The art of unnoticing

ABSTRACTIn China many petrochemical plants are adjacent to residential areas. Despite this, the people who live in these areas appear indifferent to the threat of toxic pollution and chemical explosions, even though they are aware of the danger. Building on historical and social studies of ignorance, I show how residents in a southern Chinese city live with the threat of petrochemicals by practicing what I call the “art of unnoticing,” a contrived form of ignorance that enables them to live with the reality of pollution and reclaim their agency in face of the unavoidable. In light of this, I reflect on the limit and complexity of the global environmental justice when willful ignorance is at work. The next step forward is to understand what it is that people are unnoticing, as well as what unnoticing can do to people's lifeworlds. [ignorance, toxicity, chemicals, risk perception, industrial pollution, fenceline communities, environmental justice, fatalism, China]

ESG Risks and the Value Relevance of Current and Historical Earnings

AbstractWe investigate whether independent, third‐party assessments of firms’ Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) risk exposures provide forward‐looking information content to capital market participants by evaluating whether these ESG risks have a moderating effect on the ability of earnings and the book values of equity to predict investors’ expectations of the present value of future cash flows. We find that firms’ higher ESG risk exposure increases the association between current earnings and firm values, while decreasing the relevance of book values of equity (i.e., historical earnings). We find that this effect is strongest for firms with the highest levels of risk exposure and following large changes to ESG risk exposures. In additional analyses, we disaggregate ESG risk exposure and while we find that each component of ESG has predictive power consistent with the main findings, governance risks dominant the results in head to head specifications. Taken together, our findings suggest that governance risk exposures provide forward‐looking information content to investors when they evaluate the ability of current earnings to predict future cash flows. Our results are robust to several measures of ESG risk exposure, entropy balancing specifications, and exogenous shocks to ESG attention following global environmental and social justice initiatives.

Fashion Justice

This special issue brings together scholars who have identified justice issues throughout the fashion system, encompassing how fashion is produced, consumed and discarded. While fashion systems have long been the focus of deep and varied perspectives on sustainability, from the environmental to social and cultural, we argue that characterising fashion justice as an environmental justice issue can usefully account for the multiple and intersecting ways in which fashion systems impact both human and more-than-human capabilities (Bick et al. 2018). Against the backdrop of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and SDG 12 in particular, which calls for sustainable consumption and production patterns, it is timely and appropriate to consider fashion systems as a broader global environmental justice concern.

Plastic pollution: A global challenge in need of multi-level justice-centered solutions

Plastic pollution is an immense challenge given the centrality of plastic today, the general failure of recycling to solve the problem, the rise in waste related to COVID-19, and shifts in the waste trade. Solutions must involve local actions, citizen and corporate commitment, and a new international treaty that reflects the need for local and global environmental justice.

Autonomous re-naturalization of cities in a context of degrowth

Planetary urbanization is considered to be one of the leading causes of the current global process of the degradation of nature, and a reduction in urban consumption becomes, therefore, a crucial goal for degrowth. Three fundamental premises underly an investigation of these issues. Firstly, territorial management underpins global environmental justice through the implementation of conservation policies; Secondly, degrowth narratives must operate in the urban context; and thirdly, there is a need for a paradigm shift at an economic, social and nature-relational level. This article presents two research approaches. Firstly, it sets out a theoretical framework in the field of 'urban degrowth', collecting arguments from political ecology, urban planning, deep ecology and degrowth thinking; and secondly, it proposes a preliminary line of investigation towards the process of urban de-occupation and re-naturalization through a bibliographic analysis of urban-ecological variables fostering natural recovery. The aim of the study is to stir up discussion about urban degrowth, as an essential mechanism to counter increasing land consumption, and global habitat and biodiversity loss. Anthropized landscapes require care for nature, conservation, collective action and initiatives at the practical and experimental level, and further research.

Group Companies and Climate Justice

Abstract A string of corporate litigation cases in the United Kingdom highlights the role of corporate group structures in complicating efforts to impose liability on parent companies for the activities of their subsidiaries, particularly where those subsidiaries are located in the Global South. Corporate group structures serve to insulate parent companies against liability for actions of their subsidiaries. This is the case even where economic benefits accrue to parent companies, which are often incorporated in the Global North. These group structures cabin liability for environmental and climate harms within subsidiary companies through reliance on company law principles such as limited liability and separate legal personality. These company law principles allow parent companies to enjoy corporate profits from the activities of their subsidiaries but disavow liability for any environmental damage resulting from such activities. This dichotomy has obvious equity implications, which are exacerbated in the extractive industries and in the context of climate change. Negative climate impacts are and will be felt predominantly in the Global South. In addition, environmental damage removes avenues of climate adaptation for vulnerable populations. But company law principles are not impervious to these equity challenges. These principles have never been absolute and courts have consistently found exceptions to them, although those exceptions have fluctuated in effectiveness and frequency over the years. Recent decisions by the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court in the United Kingdom imposed duties on parent companies for environmental damage caused by their subsidiaries. Cases following the decision in Chandler v Cape Industries illustrate tension between company law as interpreted in the Global North, and climate and environmental justice as experienced in the Global South. Climate change forces a reconceptualization of company law, including transnational corporate liability. This paper argues that these reconsiderations are not only appropriate, but given the contested histories of many of these companies in the Global South, long overdue.

How Far Dare an Evaluator Go Toward Saving the World?: Redux, Update, and a Reflective Practice Facilitation Tool

In 2004, Robert Stake published a provocative article that asked: “How Far Dare an Evaluator Go Toward Saving the World?” This question raises the issue of what role evaluators’ values play in the conduct of evaluations. Following review of Stake’s premises, I present value statements from a diverse group of 40 evaluators working with philanthropic foundations. The results update and revise Stake’s list of “six advocacies common in evaluation.” The findings capture changes in evaluation language and substantive concerns over the last 15 years regarding evaluators’ values and engagement. The conclusion affirms Stake’s original overarching principle. In closing, I offer an additional concern toward saving the world not on Stake’s list or that of the evaluators sampled: global sustainability and environmental justice in the face of the global pandemic and climate emergency. This process of inquiry generated a facilitation tool for use by evaluators, presented here, to support reflective practice about evaluators’ values.

Resistance as governance: Transformative strategies forged on the frontlines of extractivism in Canada

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.

What Islamic contributions have been made to climate change action and how useful are they in promoting environmental justice?

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore Islamic contributions to discussions on climate change action and environmental justice. The author argues that Islamic approaches to this issue provide a unique cultural and religious perspective which can effectively address the issue of climate change.Design/methodology/approachBeginning with a discussion of the concepts central to this essay, the author moves to discuss why she has chosen to move away from approaches founded in criminal law, instead of arguing that it is important to focus on culturally specific approaches to environmental justice. The author then explores some of the approaches taken by mainstream Muslim organisations working towards environmental justice. In particular, the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change and responses from Islamic Relief Worldwide, considering both the benefits and flaws of these approaches.FindingsThe author concludes by arguing that Sharīʿah has potential for developing Muslim environmental justice further, using Islamic legal rulings from Indonesia as an example. In this way, Islamic contributions can further aid global environmental justice. The author finds that culturally specific approaches to climate change, founded in legal mechanisms such as the Islamic juridical process (fiqh), have vast potential in securing environmental justice across the globe.Originality/valueIslamic contributions to climate change are often relegated to the background, while approaches from the perspective of legal mechanisms and criminal law have been favoured. The author believes that an Islamic approach is not only a starkly different approach, but also one which can provide an impetus for change. This is particularly true for the contributions of Islamic jurists.

Internationalization of environmental education for global citizenship

ABSTRACT We present a teaching-and-learning case study of a 2018–2019 university-based summer institute in Beijing, China that concerned environmental education in support of global citizenship, involving Chinese and international faculty from education, social work, and related disciplines. The case study identifies: (1) the context of the summer institute; (2) its goals, design, and basic content; and (3) lessons learned for social work education. Specific attention is paid to: the importance of connecting university-based ecosocial work education with community-based practice in a Chinese context; addressing global social and environmental justice concerns through rural collaborative problem-solving; and navigating disciplinary boundaries involving social work education and other disciplines and professions.

Global Environmental Justice Documentaries

Global Environmental Justice Documentaries is a curated collection of 25 diverse, interdisciplinary documentaries produced by Face to Face Media, which plans to expand the collection over time. Offering creative responses to contemporary environmental issues, these films are insightful and will enhance students’ environmental literacy and inspire advocacy through artistic film imagery and authentic human stories. The environmental and social impacts of such global and local issues as consumerism, industrial development, colonization, and climate change provide dramatic insight into human stories and universal values.

Tying Climate Justice to Hydrological Justice

To date, climate justice has been modeled on global justice, giving rise to such notions as ecological space, ecological debt and carbon debt. I worry that global justice fails to compel compliance and ignores hydrological systems’ role in cooling atmospheric temperatures. I thus opt to tie climate justice to hydrological justice, a form of global environmental justice that requires transparency and kinship, and proves more coercive since both burdens and targets are local. To demonstrate this view, I first distinguish global justice from global environmental justice. I next show the limits of Simon Caney’s forward-looking approach to global justice, which commits diverse parties to just burdens to reach just targets in order to facilitate climate justice. I conclude by noting that modeling climate justice on hydrological justice proves compatible with the goals of the Katowice Climate Package, passed in 2018.

El Tren Maya: un escenario de conflictividad socioambiental en el posneoliberalismo mexicano

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government in Mexico is self-denominated as a «postneoliberal» and «leftist» regime. However, its core strategic projects clearly belong to the former mainstream of extractivist and neocolonial geopolitics which tend to generate socioenvironmental conflicts and territorial defense by local stakeholders. This paper, as a result of interdisciplinary research carried out by the Intercolegial Research Group on Political Ecology of Mexico City’s Autonomous University, address the Maya Train case, a land-use planning project that promotes predator extractivist capital advance towards relatively isolated territories, even protected by environmental laws. It is also described the Consejo Regional Indígena y Popular de Xpujil’s (CRIPX’s) resistance as a clear demonstration of «ecologism of the poor» and the global environmental justice movement.

The Transnational Mining Justice Movement: Reflecting on Two Decades of Law Reform Activism in the Americas

AbstractThis article tracks the activism of the mining justice social movement since the late 1990s. As a starting point, this movement is conceptualized as a transnational political project that seeks to transform the terms of corporate resource extraction pursuant to the political and legal arrangements of neo-liberal economic globalization. In this context, the author reflects on the movement’s most significant human rights-oriented law reform projects in the Americas: Indigenous peoples’ right-to-consultation legislation in several Latin American countries and a series of non-judicial grievance mechanisms in Canada in response to the right to remedy norm in international law. Drawing on existing research, the author concludes that in both cases the state has responded with law and policy reforms that fall far short of achieving advocates’ objectives. The author argues that these shortcomings are due in part to the persistence of three liberal/neo-liberal ideologies in the reforms in question: formalism, voluntarism, and privatism. To better understand and explain these findings, the author turns to three critical theories of human rights legal activism: pragmatism, left critique/critical legal liberalism, and counter-hegemony. Examining the work of a range of scholars writing under the banner of each theory, the author identifies key debates and insights that may be instructive as the mining justice movement, and related social and environmental justice movements, continue to aspire towards a law reform agenda capable of addressing pressing global environmental and social justice issues.