Actor-Network Theory as a Critical Approach to Environmental Justice: A Case against Synthesis with Urban Political Ecology

Abstract:  Recent critiques of environmental justice research emphasize its disengagement from theory and its political focus on liberal conceptions of distributional and procedural justice. Marxian urban political ecology has been proposed as an approach that can both contextualize environmental inequalities more productively and provide a basis for a more radical politics of environmental justice. Although this work takes its primary inspiration from historical materialism, it also adapts key concepts from actor-network theory (ANT)—in particular, the agency of nonhumans—while dismissing the rest of ANT as insufficiently critical and explanatory. This paper argues that ANT—specifically, the version articulated by Bruno Latour—provides a basis for an alternative critical approach to environmental justice research and politics. Instead of arguing for a synthesis of ANT and Marxism, I contend that ANT gives us a distinctive conception of the  social  and opens up new questions about the production and justification of environmental inequalities.     

Beyond Distribution and Proximity: Exploring the Multiple Spatialities of Environmental Justice

Abstract:  Over the last decade the scope of the socio-environmental concerns included within an environmental justice framing has broadened and theoretical understandings of what defines and constitutes environmental injustice have diversified. This paper argues that this substantive and theoretical pluralism has implications for geographical inquiry and analysis, meaning that multiple forms of spatiality are entering our understanding of what it is that substantiates claims of environmental injustice in different contexts. In this light the simple geographies and spatial forms evident in much "first-generation" environmental justice research are proving insufficient. Instead a richer, multidimensional understanding of the different ways in which environmental justice and space are co-constituted is needed. This argument is developed by analysing a diversity of examples of socio-environmental concerns within a framework of three different notions of justice—as distribution, recognition and procedure. Implications for the strategies of environmental justice activism for the globalisation of the environmental justice frame and for future geographical research are considered.     

Defining and Contesting Environmental Justice: Socio-natures and the Politics of Scale in the Delta

Abstract:  This article examines a contemporary process intended to "identify a strategy for managing the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta as a sustainable ecosystem that would continue to support environmental and economic functions that are critical to the people of California" ( Delta Vision 2008 , http://deltavision.ca.gov/AboutDeltaVision.shtml ). Environmental injustices in the Delta are exacerbated by connected conflicts between knowledge and power, over the scale at which "environmental justice" and the "Delta" are understood through public policy. The rejection of environmental justice and the socio-natural in the Delta Vision process represents how contemporary policy processes are recreating and reenacting the power/knowledge dynamics that have defined the Delta, placed it on a path to ecological collapse and injected high levels of social and racial injustice in its landscape over the past 150 years. Our article combines an ethnographic and a historical geographical approach that contributes to the literature on environmental justice and scale and links with the literature on water governance and power to advance the task of defining environmental justice from the academic and policy perspectives.     

Benevolent and Benign? Using Environmental Justice to Investigate Waste‐related Impacts of Ecotourism in Destination Communities

Abstract:  We contribute to the diversification of environmental justice (EJ) by using it to frame ecotourism-related solid waste management problems. Ecotourism is a service industry portrayed as benevolent (providing benefits), and benign (reducing negative impacts). We propose four characteristics shared by ecotourism-based communities in the Global South and communities struggling with more conventional EJ conflicts. We apply these characteristics to the solid waste crisis in Tortuguero, Costa Rica, a renowned ecotourism destination. First, we show that, despite their general absences from the EJ literature, service industries such as tourism and hospitality can create environmental injustices that disproportionately impact certain types of communities. Second, we highlight the roles of location and socio-economic marginality in siting ecotourism development, in complicating related environmental impact management, and in limiting local abilities to respond to environmental management shortcomings. Third, we provide an example of opportunities to introduce EJ concepts and theory into the study of tourism.     

Struggles for Environmental Justice in US Prisons and Jails

In this paper I ask how might environmental justice studies scholarship be recast if we consider the phenomenon of environmental injustice as a form of criminalisation? In other words, since environmental injustice is frequently a product of state‐sanctioned violence against communities of colour, then what are the implications of reframing it as a practice of treating those populations as criminally suspect and as deserving of state punishment? Moreover, how are the targets and survivors of environmental injustice/racism enlisted in generative ways that resist that criminalisation and support abolition? I answer these questions through a consideration of how struggles inside and outside of carceral spaces represent urgent and timely opportunities to rethink the possibilities of environmental justice theory and politics by linking them to practices and visions of abolition ecology and critical environmental justice.     

Rethinking environmental justice in the Anthropocene: An anthropological perspective

This article encourages a closer dialogue between contemporary anthropological reflections on nature and the environment and environmental justice (EJ). We can revise the environment concept by adopting a more nuanced view of the ontological relations between humans and non-humans. The idea of ‘assemblage’ as reworked in the Anthropocene debate enriches EJ with a multispecies perspective and a new ‘temporal awareness’. Ethnography grounded in the confluence of human/geophysical agency and temporality can help us understand past eco-social dynamics and possible futures and overcome environmental inequalities and discrimination.     

国外人文地理学尺度政治理论研究进展

尺度政治理论产生于生产方式的变革与全球化的深入发展、新自由主义的兴起与治理方式的转型以及西方人文地理学的尺度转向等实践和理论背景中。其研究经历了由重点关注尺度的政治建构到重点关注行动者的话语和实践的转变。以此为基础,从结构-行为-行动者视角可以总结出尺度政治研究的三个方向:作为政治过程的尺度结构转变、跨尺度的政治行为与策略以及跨尺度的政治行动者联系网络。随后,本文回顾了当前研究中的三个案例以进一步阐明尺度政治理论的实践应用以及上述三个方向之间的区别与联系。最后,基于国内语境,本文从理论和实证两方面出发初步探讨了国内下一步研究应重点关注的问题。     

World Justice,Global Politics and Nation States: Three Ethico-Political Problems

This paper identifies three sets of problems of a specific ethico-political type, generated by the interrelationship between ethics and politics in the areas of world justice and global politics. One instance in which this interrelationship is tested is that of the conflict of duties and values as it appears in the particular domain of the relations amongst sovereign nation states as well as between them and other social groups. Following the general Introduction, the main body of the paper contains the following three sections. (1) Without elaborating on the detailed mechanics of Kant's theory of perpetual peace, Section II discusses criticisms against the Kantian version of world peace in the context of which the first problem is encountered. The problem identified here is the ambiguity as to whether the establishment of a federated kind of peaceful co-existence between sovereign nations depends on the moral improvement of mankind or whether it is the other way round--i.e. whether ethical progress is a necessary presupposition or, rather, a consequence of political peace. That is, what is here identified as worrying is that the direction of dependence is not clear in such a proposal. Furthermore, such an approach, when applied to certain cases of inter-state differences, yields a rather alarming result as to the de-politicization of national states (Section II.2). (2) Yet such a type of international federalism requires a certain, peculiar, kind of legal enforcement of order without recourse to a supra state. So a re-examination of the notion of a legal order in general is needed. Given these requirements, Section III moves on to discuss moral conflict from the standpoint of relativism as it appears in the ethical and in the legal spheres. The second of our problems, identified in this section, is that, before discussing world justice we must first acknowledge the special relation and asymmetry between ethical standards and legal rules required by such a world order. (3) Finally, Section IV asks whether, given the above two problems, it is possible to envisage theoretically the logical possibility of moral conflict-resolution by postulating unchanging and encompassing super-norms of conduct. These special norms, if possible, would be able to direct action unequivocally when confronted with ethical or other dilemmas of duties (involving equally valid but conflicting demands among sovereign nations). This is the third problem. The Conclusion offers an evaluation of the whole discussion. These three ethico-political problems are shown to be interrelated. The overall thrust of the discussion is that it points to a number of philosophical difficulties in understanding the changing role of national states in a globalized political, economic and cultural environment. Accordingly, such difficulties have repercussions for any moral criticism of issues of world justice and global politics. I must make clear at the outset, though, that the discussion does not concern international relations theories per se.     

Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen: Antagonism,the Commons,and Solidarity

Abstract: 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.     

Justice and Injustice in the City

Following a recent growth of interest in questions of justice and the city, this paper considers how the work of contemporary critical urbanists compares with earlier accounts of urban justice and injustice. Our purpose in making this comparison is to consider how scholars concerned with justice and injustice in the city might better articulate the conceptual relationship between justice‐thinking and (in)justice‐documenting in their writings about the contemporary planned city. Using a selection of influential texts as evidence, our comparative commentary on past and present approaches focuses on three issues we think are crucial to this relationship. First, with the rise of analyses of the politics of difference, concepts of justice stressing procedure, process, and the hearing of multiple voices have come to the fore recently, especially in urban planning. Second, contemporary writers about geographies of justice have queried the value of using pre‐formulated, philosophical justice norms to judge outcomes and processes in particular contexts, seeing justice, rather, as intuited in the enactment of social conflicts and practices in those actual situations. Third, questions about the spatiality of justice and injustice have been aired recently asking whether justice and injustice have primarily a social rather than a spatial ontology. The conclusion of our evaluative review is that similar issues are being named and investigated now as were four decades ago, in investigations of justice and injustice in cities, but that concerted debates about theory and epistemology have elaborated the conceptual focus of discussion. We call for grounded investigations of enactments of justice as well as of injustice.     

Teaching Global and Social Justice as Transgressive Spaces of Possibility

Abstract: In this article I reflect on introducing critical pedagogy into social justice teaching in an elite UK university as part of the Nottingham Critical Pedagogy Project. I de‐essentialise Freire's conceptualisation of the human subject and her desire for transcendence with the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari's politics of desire. This enables an adaption of critical pedagogy from its original context of popular politics to the individualised elite setting of our project. Our pedagogical objectives become the opening of spaces of possibility which decentre the dominant regime of truth of the neoliberal university and enable imagining and becoming “other”. This involves disrupting normal patterns of classroom performativity in terms of student as consumer and lecturer as producer of commodities, transgressing dualisms between mind/body, intellectual/emotional and teacher/student. Our pedagogical praxis is therefore inherently political as by radically disturbing commodified subjectivities we foster processes that lead to unanticipated, maybe even unspeakable, transgressions.     

Environmental injustice in America and its politics of scale

Environmental burdens, such as proximity to hazardous sites, tend to be inequitably borne by poor Americans in general, and by Americans of color in particular. So argues a loose coalition of grassroots organizations and public-interest groups known as the Environmental Justice (EJ) movement. Prompted by that movement, the national government and some state legislatures have established policies to address future inequity. Those policies assume that the scope of environmental injustice spans the country, with many hazardous facilities dotting the landscape in communities of color and/or of the poor. However, various industries and also some social scientists call into question the argument that inequities occur on a national, or even state-wide, scale. Their counter-arguments typically espouse a market-based explanation that localizes the problem: any inequitable risks result from the impersonal forces of the marketplace functioning within individual communities. The politics of EJ pivot around defining the scales of inequity and its resolution. This paper examines the debates over environmental justice in terms of the tension between the scale(s) of the problem itself and the scale(s) at which the problem is to be resolved (or at least ameliorated) via government policy. The paper also sketches several theoretical and political implications of the debates. Theoretically speaking, market-based explanations tend to privilege the local scale, thereby ignoring vital factors that help us to understand environmental inequity as a phenomenon operating at a multitude of scales from the local to the national and international scales. Politically speaking, if the inequities were particular to discrete locales, then extensive governmental involvement would be unnecessary.     

Environmental Justice and American Indian Tribal Sovereignty: Case Study of a Land–Use Conflict in Skull Valley, Utah

This paper examines environmental justice in the context of questions of American–Indian tribal sovereignty through an analysis of a land–use dispute over the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians' decision to host a high–level radioactive waste facility on their reservation in Tooele County, Utah. The case study entails a far more intricate story than that presented in the majority of existing literature, which is dominated by analytical frameworks of environmental racism and distributive environmental justice. By elucidating the historical geography of Skull Valley and politics of tribal sovereignty, I argue that a prolonged process of historical colonialism has produced a landscape of injustice in which the tribe's choices have been structurally limited. The historical colonialism, intertwining with the capitalist political economy, has geopolitically isolated the tribe to suffer procedural environmental injustice. At the same time, the tribe has struggled to pursue self–determination through the retention of sovereignty and Goshute identity in the arenas of tribal environmental management and the environmental–justice movement. Conflict over the definition and practice of tribal sovereignty at different geographical scales reveals the social, historical, and political–economic complexity of environmental justice.     

The Politics of Recognition and Redistribution: Development,Tribal Identity Politics and Distributive Justice in India's Jharkhand

This article illustrates how the potential of recognition‐based politics to achieve distributive justice is determined by political structures and the power relations that constitute them. In response to Nancy Fraser's framework of social justice, it shows that the meaningful coordination of identity‐based claims with distributive justice is constrained — not only by the content of the claims themselves, but also because redistributive demands are subverted through competing pursuits for power and legitimacy between rival political factions. The article describes how the separate‐state movement for Jharkhand in Eastern India was de‐radicalized by three instruments, namely, the reservation system, cultural nationalism and state development discourse. This explains why distributive measures do not feature prominently in the Jharkhand state and why recognition politics has taken a disciplined form in the electoral mainstream while distributive politics continues to be pursued through violent and extra‐parliamentary means.     

Environmental Justice Storytelling: Angels and Isotopes at Yucca Mountain,Nevada

Abstract: This paper discusses the productive role of storytelling in community struggles for environmental justice. The individual and collective task of environmental justice storytelling highlights where the politics of pollution intersect with geographical imaginations. Storytelling takes on a productive role in transforming localized and individual emotions and experiences of environmental injustice into public knowledge that is performed in the world. This paper draws on a case study of nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. I focus on how storytelling enacts scenarios of environmental witnessing and transformation that hold together a plurality of presences, absences, action and imagination, past histories and hope for the future.     

Indigenous Environmental Justice: Comparing the United States and Canada’s Legal Frameworks for Endangered Species Conservation

Canada and the United States are both committed to the protection of endangered species. This article examines how the legal frameworks created around the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Canadian Species at Risk Act (SARA) intersect with Indigenous environmental justice (EJ). Specifically, the distribution of benefits and burdens is examined since critical habitat designations can limit activity on Native American and First Nation tribal lands. Legal documents and recent court cases also give insight into Indigenous inclusion and recognition in conservation approaches in North America. Overall, it is argued that Canada’s approach comes closer to EJ, but neither legal framework meets the criterion of genuine EJ for Native Americans and First Nations.     

Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice

This article introduces a notion of socio‐ecological justice based on theoretically informed empirical research on community struggles against run‐of‐river hydropower plants in Turkey. Framing this particular case as representative of a broader movement for environmental commons, and adopting an action‐theoretical perspective, it translates the emergent justice claims produced by grassroots environmental movements to the conceptual vocabulary of the theory of justice. Using Fraser's tripartite model as a starting point, it explores possibilities of expanding the borders of justice as a concept. Maintaining the intrinsic relationship between social and ecological phenomena, it calls for rethinking “sociality” and “social justice” in the light of a relational ontology of human and non‐human worlds. The notion of socio‐ecological justice, thus, extends the community of justice, framing the relational existence of human and non‐human ecologies as a matter of justice.     

Moving Towards Transformative Democratic Action Through Archaeology

Archaeologists have explored how politics affect the way we see the past. They have investigated how constructions of the past naturalize present political conditions, and have explored uses of the past in current politics. Few have examined how politics in archaeology can relate to the future. In this article I develop ideas on a transformational politics in archaeology that focuses on critiquing oppressive relations in the past and present, and works towards building more just relations for the future. I examine how we can achieve this through building more democratic relations in the places we work.     

Urban Agriculture in the Food‐Disabling City: (Re)defining Urban Food Justice,Reimagining a Politics of Empowerment

Recent literature has pointed to the role of urban agriculture in self‐empowerment and learning, and in constituting ways to achieve food justice. Building on this work the paper looks at the potential and constraints for overcoming the residual and contingent status of urban agriculture. The first part of the paper aims to expand traditional class/race/ethnicity discussions and to reflect on global, cultural, procedural, capability, distributional and socio‐environmental forms of injustice that unfold in the different stages of urban food production. The second part reflects on how to bring forward food justice and build a politics of engagement, capability and empowerment. Three interlinked strategies for action are presented: (1) enhancing the reflexivity and cohesion of the urban food movement by articulating a challenge to neoliberal urbanism; (2) converging urban and agrarian food justice struggles by shaping urban agroecology; and (3) regaining control over social reproduction by engaging with food commoning.     

Regulatory Enforcement,Riskscapes, and Environmental Justice

Does environmental regulation vary over poor and minority communities? An uneven governmental response may follow from regulators' varying incentives to negotiate enforcement challenges. We argue that regulators confront two in particular. Regulators can pursue political enforcement, responding to mobilized interests, regardless of environmental risk, or they can pursue instrumental enforcement, responding to at‐risk communities, regardless of political mobilization. To examine these competing strategies, we use an original dataset from the EPA's Risk‐Screening Environmental Indicators model to develop a geographic “riskscape” combined with census tract community data and facility‐level enforcement data. We find that state regulatory agencies pursue a mixture of political and instrumental enforcement, but that these tactics are applied unevenly across traditional environmental justice communities. Specifically, state agencies devote more attention to facilities in communities with relatively higher risk, but less attention in the area of punishment for violations for facilities located in Hispanic communities. Importantly, this lack of attention to Hispanic communities is not mediated by the relative level of risks that they face, but it is to a significant extent in communities in which environmental justice advocacy organizations operate.