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Is the tri-partite Environmental Justice Framework exhausted to provide answers to the current challenges of urban environments? Critical environmental justice has emerged to question how current ideas of justice, rights, and recognition acknowledge human and ecological annihilation and can produce liberating environments for all. This emphasis should be complemented by environmental justice conceptualisations that can effectively bridge thought and action to address the looming challenges of resource exploitation and populism.
How can we work with environmental justice beyond current definitions? Can we de-define environmental justice to strip it from the impositions of its roots in anglophone, liberal philosophy and articulate more diverse points of theoretical and methodological departure, build new alliances, and mobilise new energies in the current situation? Perhaps environmental justice simply needs a refreshment, a return to its grassroots and activist vocation.
These questions are particularly urgent in urban environments because of the range of decisions that are taking place daily, shaping popular economies and inhabitation practices. Over four decades, EJ has become an umbrella term that defines a set of community struggles around the environment and as a field of study. EJ has opened the environment to discuss several spatial, place-based conflicts around health, housing, mobility, work, and life. In theory and practice, Environmental Justice (EJ) has provided a useful point of entry to reframe sustainability action in cities and urban areas.
EJ has made at least three major contributions to urban sustainability. First, EJ has helped identify and map the spatial injustices generated by environmental exploitation, contamination, and change. Second, EJ has enabled a salient critique of current approaches to environmental governance and sustainable urbanism, and the extent to which they enable the articulation of a wide set of voices across society, including those most impacted by exploitation, contamination, and change. Third, EJ has shifted attention to how civic groups and their allies are mobilising towards more just and inclusive responses to environmental and climate impacts.
Some evidence suggests that current environmental justice frameworks, based on the traditional three-legged distribution, recognition and participation framework, may not target the roots of current environmental challenges. On the one hand, dominant EJ frameworks are built on Anglophone liberal philosophy traditions, which do not reflect the concerns of non-Western conceptions of relationality, fairness and justice. In response, sScholars seeking to decolonise environmental knowledge have called for engagement with alternative frameworks emerging from non-dominant geographies and experiences with different philosophical or legal roots, and different trajectories and forms of urbanisation. At the same time, EJ seems to be short of propositions to address the acceleration of global environmental challenges (climate change and the sixth mass extinction) while tackling the growing inequalities accompanying urbanisation worldwide. Finally, current EJ frameworks overlook the concerns of a disaffected majority whose discontent with current environmental policies has translated into active opposition to environmental policy and a growing engagement with conspiracy theories that deny the urgency or importance of current challenges.
The challenge for current EJ scholars is multifold, from developing context-specific frameworks to engaging with the politics of scale and what it means to situate environmental action somewhere, and reflecting on EJ’s normative dimensions. For example, this has been visible in climate justice debates, as youth-led movements to reclaim global responsibilities have not been translated seamlessly into localised urban debates. Instead, populist forms of resistance have elevated discourses of conspiracy, such as those that have inspired demonstrations against relatively benign planning concepts such as the 15-minute city. What these dynamics point towards is the increasing disconnect across scales of understanding and action and the discomfort with the recognition of multiple forms of knowledge, which in practice results in the retrenching of global inequalities, rising nationalism, place-based manifestations of fortress capitalism and the mobilisation of green discourses in subtle and not so subtle forms of neo-colonialism. The challenges for EJ have thus morphed into a mythological ouroboros, the serpent that eats its tail, being consumed by its success to question expertise and mobilise citizens in cities and urban areas.
In this context, we invite contributions from environmental planning, environmental sociology, urban studies, urban geography, science and technology studies, and legal studies to map out pathways for the next generation of EJ scholarship.
We invite articles that map the future of environmental justice thought in urban environments and demonstrate this by articulating their contribution in relation to the traditional canon of environmental justice and moving beyond it.
In short, regardless of the contributing article’s argument, it must explicitly consider how it challenges the canon of environmental justice and how the paper departs from this canon. However, the editors will not prescribe what is the ‘canon of environmental justice,’ recognising and celebrating the multiplicity of literatures that have developed in different geographies.
Some suggestions of novel ideas to develop in articles to be submitted to the SI:
Professor, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, UK
Associate Professor, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs; Associate Faculty Director, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, USA
Department Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Senior Researcher, Institute for Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain
ICREA Research Professor, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain
Professor, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University Melbourne, Australia
Assistant Professor, Sciences Po, Centre for the Sociology of Organisations, France
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