Environmental Justice

Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans and Rachel Stein, eds. 2002. The Environmental Justice Reader. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press.

Agyeman, Julian, Robert Bullard and Bob Evans, eds. 2003. Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Martinez-Alier, Joan. 2002. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Westra, Laura and Bill Lawson, eds. 2001. Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice, 2nd edition. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield.

The subject of environmental justice has received increasing attention in the field of global environmental politics in recent years, both as a social movement to be studied and also as a conceptual issue. Although there is no literature in IR as such dealing with environmental justice, it has permeated the field as a concern in the study of ecological security, in critical global political economy/ globalization writings and in theoretically and conceptually oriented texts. None of the books reviewed here are IR texts, but they all have an important message for the study of global environmental politics and offer a challenge to the recent slowdown of conceptual advancement in the discipline.

The study of international environmental politics has essentially split into two camps: those dealing with institutions and the actors behind institutions and those dealing with changes in the global political architecture in terms of the rise of new actors and changing social relations. The books reviewed here have something to offer to both camps. To the institutionalists, they offer food for thought and show that although institutions are undeniably important, the issue of environmental racism shows, for example, in an exemplary fashion that political organization is about power even at the grassroots level. The study of environmental justice shows that there are certainly disempowered groups out there whose health and environment suffer as a consequence. This is a challenge that has to be addressed by institutionalists because it shows weaknesses in the ability of institutions to address questions of equity and justice.

Likewise, the notion of environmental justice has implications for the study of new social movements, critical approaches to global political economy, and environmental violence. However, the books reviewed here give ample starting points for bringing the notion of environmental justice more explicitly into this body of literature as it is a foundational concept that unites these writings: a concern with the distribution of, and access to, resources, knowledge, power, representation and a clean, healthy living environment.

In order to address the challenges to all schools of thought in global environmental politics, we need a definition of what constitutes environmental justice. None of the books reviewed here engage in a conceptual or theoretical or legal discussion of what constitutes justice—or indeed, as I will argue below, whether environmental justice is the best term for such a concept. Rather, the subject matter is addressed in an empirical setting. However, a common concern with equity permeates all the books. Thus the notion of justice is rather loose, which is both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because there is a concern with real-world problems at the grassroots level and thus a focus on what equity and justice problems actually are about and what challenges policy-makers are facing. It is a weakness because these problems are typically discussed in an anecdotal fashion, with no attempt to conceptualize the socially constructed, culturally and politically determined definition of what justice is or ought to be. Thus some of the readings generate a sense of outrage but do not actually help to generate analysis and understanding.

This becomes clearest in Adamson et al.'s Environmental Justice Reader and Westra and Lawson's Faces of Environmental Racism. Both books are a composite of case studies, some of them found in both books. They address the same concerns but one book uses the term environmental racism while the other talks about environmental justice. Both books focus largely, but not exclusively, on case studies within...