The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics

Jeannie Sowers (ed.) et al.

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197515037.001.0001
Published: 2021 Online ISBN: 9780197515068 Print ISBN: 9780197515037

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CHAPTER

23 The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice 

Kemi Fuentes-George

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197515037.013.13 Pages 437–455

Published: 11 August 2021

Abstract
Although the terms “environmental justice” and “environmental racism” emerged due to race-based
mobilization in the United States, justice is a constant feature of environmental struggles around the
world. Pursuing social justice in environmental advocacy can be di cult, but case studies of activism
in places including New Zealand, Mexico, Jamaica, Brazil, and the United States show that it is
possible. Environmental injustice emerges when populations that are already politically and
socioeconomically marginalized disproportionately bear the costs of environmental consumption, and
they are often systematically excluded from the bene ts of this consumption. Although di erent
political systems vary in how they structure marginalization, this close association of social injustice
with environmental injustice characterizes cases like fossil fuel extraction in industrialized countries
and agricultural development in the Global South alike. While skeptics have argued that promoting
environmentalism is counterproductive to social justice, because environmental regulations often
constrain economic growth, combining the two can lead to more sustainable environmental practices.

Keywords: environmental justice, environmental racism, rights to nature, Indigenous communities, Global
South
Subject: Comparative Politics, Politics
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
 Introduction: What Is Environmental Justice?

JUSTICE has been a key part of the environmentalist movement within and across boundaries since the
1980s. However, the language and rhetoric of environmental justice and related terms (environmental
injustice, racism, and rights, among others) have origins that are largely American. One of the key
documents introducing the concepts of environmental racism and injustice is the 1987 report by the United
Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice on toxic waste and race (Commission for Racial Justice
1987). The impetus of this report was the social mobilization of black and Latinx communities, primarily in
the southern United States, that were concerned about the concentration of toxic waste sites in

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communities of color (Bullard 2000; Lester et al. 2001; Commission for Racial Justice 1987). The report
argued that this pattern, whereby black and Latinx communities overlapped closely with environmentally
hazardous toxic waste sites, was not accidental but rather the result of a program of both institutional and
explicit racism. The authors further argued that environmental movements should therefore engage with
racial disparities, as doing so would be not only morally just, but also a more comprehensive way of ghting
the accumulation of hazardous toxins on a national level within the United States (Commission for Racial
Justice 1987). As scholars later pointed out, institutional and deliberate racism made it easier for societies to
overproduce environmental harms, particularly if these harms could be made invisible, by externalizing
them to vulnerable but marginalized populations (Pellow 2006; Mohai et al. 2009; Agyeman et al. 2003). By
failing to engage with this, the “colorblind” mainstream environmentalism of the 1980s would be unable to
address the underlying social factors that drive environmental harm (Pellow 2006; Mohai et al. 2009;
Bullard 2000). In the decades since, it has become clear that environmental justice struggles are not just an

p. 438 American phenomenon. Environmental justice and injustice are deeply rooted in the trajectory of socio-
economic development and environmental stress in the postcolonial world. Similarly, as the activists and
scholars of US environmental politics have found, social justice movements in the postcolonial world can
also strengthen and create more sustainable environmental practices.

To understand the connection between environmental harm and social justice, it is necessary to understand
what some of these key terms mean. At its root, the challenges of environmental justice stem from the fact
that all of our social well-being, productivity, and reproductivity depends on consuming natural resources
directly (e.g., burning fossil fuels) and indirectly (dumping pollutants into water sources). Environmental
injustice is a condition in which (1) the bene ts of this consumption accrue primarily to socially privileged
populations, (2) the costs of this consumption are primarily borne by socially marginalized populations in
situations where (3) these marginalized populations are systematically excluded from shaping decisions
around how these costs and bene ts are distributed (Carruthers 2008; Pellow 2006; Kashwan 2017; Mohai
et al. 2009; Fuentes-George 2016a; Gellars and Je ords 2018; Walker 2012).

While injustice is a common feature of environmental struggles across countries, it should be noted that
di erent political systems will have particular versions of these core concepts: marginalization, systematic
exclusion, and environmental costs and bene ts. This is due not only to the di erent ways in which political
systems like single-party autocracies, military dictatorships, and patron-clientelist regimes structure
participation and decision-making, but also to di erences in the natural environment and composition of
environmental threats. For example, environmental bene ts could be access to water, land use rights, or
access to certain consumer goods. The “bads” could be exposure to toxic waste and chemicals or
dispossession and dislocation from generationally held lands. The marginalized populations could be
de ned by race, class, gender, ethnicity, or by some combination of these. There are variations on all these
metrics in environmental justice struggles from Australia, Brazil, China, Ecuador, and elsewhere, some of
which are discussed in this chapter. But in all cases, the pattern of environmental injustice is that the
privileged bene t, while the marginalized disproportionately bear the cost of continued environmental
 exploitation. Environmental injustice is therefore a product of the intersection between environmental
degradation and social marginalization.

In the following sections, I explore what scholars and activists mean by the term “environmental justice.”
As currently conceptualized, there is a broad consensus that a society can move toward environmental
justice when it creates mechanisms through which marginalized people can participate meaningfully in a
political system and when the society adopts more environmentally sustainable practices. However, as the
cases presented here also indicate, there are still unsettled controversies, even among environmentalists,
about how to pursue justice. For example, as we have seen in some struggles for environmental
sustainability worldwide, increasing the ability of marginalized groups to participate politically may

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exacerbate, not decrease, pressure on natural resources. In those cases, it is not clear who should have the
nal say in determining what counts as “good” environmental policy. Furthermore, it is not clear whether
environmental justice and rights only apply to humans or whether they also apply to non-human living
species. Later, I indicate how the legacy of colonialism and imperialism has shaped these controversies by
constraining the agency of people who became marginalized because of the creation of the modern nation-
state. By centering colonialism, I return to a critique of “colorblind” mainstream environmentalism: as
p. 439 “colorblind” environmentalism can also propagate racist and ecologically unsustainable policies. I conclude
by focusing on the lessons to be learned from the successful cases of environmental justice struggles.

Defining Environmental Justice: A Contested Term

Balancing Procedural and Substantive Elements of Environmental Justice

Implicit in the discussion of environmental justice is the existence of environmental rights (Gellars and
Je ords 2018; also see Gellars and Je ords, this volume). As Hiskes explains, “as a matter of
[environmental] justice, all citizens … possess the environmental human rights to clean air, water, and soil”
(Hiskes 2009, p. 2). Broadly speaking, we can move toward a more just society to the extent that rights are
protected or if there is adequate redress when those rights are violated. Importantly, as Hiskes and others
point out, the call for justice is more than a call for morally good policies. The language of justice and rights
implies that there are, or at least should be, mechanisms through which violations of rights can be
redressed (Hiskes 2009; Anton and Shelton 2011; Humphreys 2017; Gellars and Je ords 2018; Villavicencio
Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018).

In the context of the environment, there are at least two dimensions to the language of rights and justice:
substantive, and procedural. First, those who argue for a justice-oriented frame to environmentalism are
clear that every living person has a substantive right to a clean environment. After all, if a person has no
access to clean air and water and is being poisoned by the accumulation of toxins in their immediate
environment, they will be unable to fully exercise other commonly recognized rights, like freedom of speech
or assembly (Hiskes 2009; Anton and Shelton 2011; Gellars and Je ords 2018). Second, to pursue
environmental justice, each person, particularly the most marginalized, should have a procedural right to
in uence how the environment is consumed in a society. This includes, but is not limited to, strong voting
rights and environmental regulatory institutions that are independent and accountable to public concerns.

As indicated later, many countries have created some mechanisms speci c to environmentalism and social
justice, including constitutional amendments protecting a right to nature, creating environmental agencies
with public environmental impact assessments (EIAs), and establishing organizations speci cally focused
on the rights of the marginalized. One notable example would be US President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Executive
Order requiring the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to engage in environmental justice in its
application of federal environmental laws. This Executive Order emerged directly out of the activism
 discussed earlier around environmental racism and the United Church of Christ report. In addition, the
post-apartheid government in South Africa established under the 1996 constitution a right to a healthy
environment (du Plessis 2011). Nevertheless, these developments are still nascent, particularly when
compared to the more developed eld of political and civil rights. In 2017, the Trump administration
p. 440
proposed defunding the environmental justice program of the EPA (Dennis 2017). Similarly, despite the
constitutional right to a healthy environment, environmental groups in South Africa launched a lawsuit
against the government in 2019, stating that it has consistently failed to protect black communities in the
Mpumalanga Highveld region from hazardous air pollution (Center for Environmental Rights 2019). The
existence of mechanisms that can be used to promote environmental justice is crucial but clearly not

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su cient (du Plessis 2011).

Tensions in Implementing Environmental Justice: Lessons from Case

Studies

In theory, environmental justice movements should combine procedural goals, where the voices of the
marginalized are heard, with substantive improvements in consumption and environmental use. In
practice, the procedural goals of greater participation sometimes con ict with the substantive goals of
better environmental protection. In Ecuador in the early 1990s for example, one of the major environmental
threats was oil exploration. In the Amazonian region, multinational companies like the Atlantic Rich eld
Company (ARCO) drilled for oil, leaving behind a mounting list of environmental problems, including water
pollution, denuded land, and oil spills (Sawyer 2004). The largely Indigenous communities who lived in
these areas had their land and water degraded to the point of nonviability, along with an increase in cancer
rates and respiratory and skin illnesses (Sawyer 2004).

Some Indigenous groups emerged to push for Indigenous rights, but importantly, not all were opposed to oil
extraction. The Intercommunitarian Directive of the Independent Communities of Pastaza (DICIP)
advocated speci cally for a greater share of revenue to those Indigenous communities that cooperated with
the government and oil corporations (Sawyer 2004). For anti-oil Indigenous groups, DICIP’s preferred
goals would have meant continued and unacceptable environmental degradation.

Similar dynamics have shaped land management in the Appalachian region of the United States. While
Appalachian residents are not ethnically or racially distinct from the dominant class in the way that
Indigenous people are in Ecuador, they are economically marginalized, with unemployment and poverty
rates well above the national average. In this region, one of the major environmental threats is mountaintop
coal mining, where explosives are used to remove the tops of mountains and extract coal. This is highly
polluting, as companies dump waste into valleys and streams, and dust and particulates released by mining
pollute the air and local water supply (Baller and Pantilat 2007; Bell 2017). Like the Indigenous in Ecuador,
residents in Appalachian mining communities disproportionately su er from a host of illnesses, including
organ and bone damage and increased rates of cancers, in addition to the loss of land and water (Baller and
Pantilat 2007). And yet, like the Indigenous in Ecuador, many of these most vulnerable residents have
supported coal mining and the industry, precisely because this fossil fuel extraction brings jobs and revenue
in exchange for environmental degradation (Bell 2017; Deaton 2018).

On the other hand, political systems sometimes pursue substantively good environmental policies with
minimal participation from marginalized peoples. This has long been one of the principal challenges to
conservation, particularly in countries in the Global South that have adopted a growing number of
p. 441 conservation areas aimed at arresting declines in biodiversity (West et al. 2008). In too many cases, the
substantive goal of environmental protection came at the expense of the procedural rights of marginalized
peoples who were given little say in the imposition of conservation-oriented restrictions on human activity.
 The precise way in which local people were procedurally excluded varies across cases. For example, during
the 1970s and 1980s, under one-party rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, the
Mexican federal government created three prominent conservation reserves at Calakmul, Montes Azules,
and the Monarch Reserve with little to no local consultation (Kashwan 2017). In those cases, constitutional
guarantees to Indigenous people and campesino communities through, among other things, the ejido system
(ejidos are plots of communally held land intended primarily for agriculture) combined with the very real
possibility of militant resistance against land grabs, sharply limited the government’s ability to ignore or
repress local land claims. Later in this chapter, I discuss other cases in the Global South in which
governments with di erent political makeups and less public accountability have been far more willing and

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able to use the economy of violence to carry out conservation programs. Even if these programs are entirely
e ective in halting or reversing biodiversity loss in their countries, no environmental justice scholar would
describe these situations as just.

Skeptics of environmental justice have used this tension to argue that social justice is inherently
contradictory with environmentalism (Lester et al. 2001; Walker 2012). There is logic behind this. Poverty
kills as surely as does environmental contamination, and preventing economic opportunities in
marginalized areas in the interest of environmentalism runs the risk of exacerbating local poverty (Clegg
2016; Blais 1996; Lester et al. 2001; Walker 2012). In fact, the narrative from governments in the Global
South is precisely that the immediate and certain needs of poverty alleviation trump the future and still
unknown losses of environmental degradation (Fuentes-George 2016a, 2013). As Pellow noted, this
narrative is often described in shorthand by the saying, “no smoke, no jobs.”(Pellow 2006)

Justice Between Species and Generations

Adjudicating between rights and justice claims among di erent people becomes more complex when we
expand our de nition of what constitutes a legal person. The concept of environmental rights and justice
has been interpreted in some cases, as in Australia; Bolivia; Ecuador; India; Toledo, Ohio; and New Zealand,
as necessitating the extension of rights and justice claims—and therefore legal personhood—to non-
animal living things. These include ecosystems like rivers, forests, and mountains (O’Donnell and Talbot-
Jones 2018; Westerman 2019; Humphreys 2017; Villavicencio Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018; Anton and Shelton
2011; National Geographic 2019).

Not everyone who writes about environmental justice agrees. Some, like Watson and Hiskes, are clear that
making rights and justice claims requires the principle of reciprocity among claimants (Hiskes 2009;
Watson 1979, 1983; Anton and Shelton 2011). While pets might be able to show a ection to humans, non-
human living things, especially non-animals, are not part of human society and therefore cannot
reciprocate behavior in the same way other humans can do so. Centering humans in this way creates an
explicitly anthropocentric approach to understanding environmental rights (Watson 1979, 1983; Katz and
Oechsli 1993; Norton 1984; Sterba 1994; Anton and Shelton 2011).

p. 442 However, proponents of non-human environmental rights counter that treating environmental justice as
strictly anthropocentric reduces all the complexity of nature to something purely instrumental for people.
The danger in doing so, they argue, is that it risks replicating the exact consumptive logic that is driving the
current environmental crisis. That is, if nature is to be valued purely for its utility to human beings, there is
a risk that fully participatory and inclusive societies might as a result overexploit the environment (Katz and
Oechsli 1993). From this perspective, opponents of the anthropogenic view of environmental rights state
that all living things have a right to life and that this right should not be idly dispensed with.

The idea that non-human living things have legally recognized rights and that these rights should constrain
the ability of humans to do as they wish with animals is not unprecedented. Currently, most countries in the
 world have some enforceable laws prohibiting human-caused animal su ering, even though these laws
vary widely in scope and severity (World Animal Protection 2020). Countries as diverse as Niger, India, and
the United States have laws against animal cruelty, for example (World Animal Protection 2020).

More explicit language about the right of non-human living things can be found in Chapter 7 of the
Ecuadorian Constitution, which states that “Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs,
has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles,
structure, functions and evolutionary processes” (Republic of Ecuador 2008). Although the 2009 Bolivian
Constitution does not recognize a right to nature, a subsidiary law passed in 2010, the Law of the Rights of
Mother Earth, does, calling on the state or “any individual or collective person” to defend these rights

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(Villavicencio Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018, p. 409). These arguments re ect the sentiments of American
scholar Christopher Stone who said, “the death that occupies each human’s imagination is not his own, but
that of the entire life cycle of the planet earth, to which each of us is as but a cell to a body”(Anton and
Shelton 2011; National Geographic 2019). Of course, neither Stone nor the constitutions of Ecuador, Bolivia,
or other systems with this approach say that natural resources should never be consumed. However, if
nature has a right to exist, society should respect the rights of nature to replenish itself, even if doing so
contradicts the interests of some human members of society.

To be clear, there have been conceptual attempts to reconcile the anthropocentric approach of
environmental rights espoused by Hiskes with the non-anthropocentric approach of Christopher Stone and
the Bolivian Constitution. In short, this blended, or “weak anthropocentric” approach indicates that, in
many cases, the idea that nature is a living being can be found in the belief systems of Indigenous or tribal
people whose political and juridical systems were erased in the creation of the modern nation-state (Norton
1984; Humphreys 2017). In other words, respecting the “rights of nature” is another way of respecting and
recognizing those Indigenous and tribal systems that rst recognized and treated the natural environment
as a living being. For example, in New Zealand, the Maori community successfully pushed the government
to declare the Whanganui River a legal person by arguing that the Whanganui was an ancestor and a living
being essential to the Maori tribe. When New Zealand agreed, Gerrard Albert of the Whanganui tribal
collective stated that this was a national “recognition that the river is the ‘indivisible and living whole’ of
Maori understanding, and not the fragmented, inanimate components of water, bed, banks, tributaries, and
catchment that has been the European approach” (National Geographic 2019).

p. 443 The converse of this is also clear. If certain worldviews become associated with respect for and increased
participation of Indigenous or other marginalized peoples, there is a possibility that anti-Indigenous or
anti-marginalized regimes will seek to reverse the development of the “rights of nature” discourse. In 2019,
for example, after the Bolivian Indigenous president Evo Morales was ousted, the new regime under Añez
Chávez rejected the concept of Pachamama, with an Añez ally and protest leader saying on video that “the
Bible is returning to the government palace. Pachamama will never return” (Estes 2019). Although it is not
clear what this will mean for environmental policy per se, it does indicate a potential hostility to Indigenous
perspectives on environmental governance.

To be clear, declaring a river, forest, or mountain to be a legal person is not enough to move toward an
environmentally just society, without mechanisms in place to make newly recognized rights justiciable
(Hiskes 2009). Consequently, these systems have established, with varying degrees of power, entities that
have the standing to act on behalf of nature. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River, personi ed in the
concept Te Awa Tupua, has government-appointed guardians that legally have to be consulted before any
changes are carried out to the river (O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones 2018; Westerman 2019). Similarly, in the
Australian state of Victoria, local rivers are represented by the Victorian Environmental Water Holder
(VEWH), which has the ability to enter into contracts, sue, and be sued in its capacity as river guardian
(O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones 2018). The use of human beings to represent the rights of non-human living
things in judicial systems is not without precedent. After all, legal scholars have long noted that
 corporations are not human beings, yet themselves are also represented in courts by those who are, in
e ect, legal guardians (Anton and Shelton 2011; Hiskes 2009; Humphreys 2017; Wise 2016; O’Donnell and
Talbot-Jones 2018).

In contrast, some systems have passed laws or drafted constitutions with sweeping rhetoric but with limited
or no enforcement or implementation. Bolivia is an excellent example of this gap between promise and
reality. Although the Morales regime led to real improvements in the socio-economic well-being of
Indigenous people, there had been no signi cant change in the drafting or implementation of
environmental laws, and it remained an economy heavily dependent on natural resource mining and
extraction (Villavicencio Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018; Diaz-Cuellar 2017).

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Finally, proponents of extending the language of rights beyond living human beings have argued that, due
to the long-term e ects of environmental degradation, our excessive consumption will make the world
uninhabitable for our children and grandchildren. As a result, we should also extend the notion of rights and
justice to future generations (Hiskes 2009). However, in contrast to the extension of the legal personhood of
nature in the above-mentioned cases, among others, there has been no attempt as of the time of writing to
create an enforceable legal framework respecting the rights of future generations.

Environmental Justice as a Postcolonial Reality

Clearly, as the preceding cases indicate, moving toward environmental justice in contemporary political
p. 444 systems is complex. Still, despite the challenges in balancing procedural with substantive justice (made
more complex by the possibility of non-human environmental rights), it is important to recognize that
environmentalism and social justice do not necessarily con ict. In the rst place, strengthening
participatory rights and procedural justice for marginalized groups can and does produce substantively
good environmental outcomes in some cases.

Second, it is important to recognize that the apparent antipathy of low-income communities to

environmentalism is often due to structural conditions. In other words, it is not clear that marginalized
communities choose to subscribe to the “no smoke, no jobs” approach, but rather that “no smoke, no jobs”
describes the way in which their socio-economic marginalization constrains their choices. This is
particularly clear in the Global South, where the legacy of colonialism has shaped both the use of the
environment and the positioning of marginalized communities.

If environmental injustice is the accumulation of environmental harms in marginalized populations, then

the issues that lead to environmental injustice are inseparable from the broader processes of social
marginalization: racism, sexism, anti-indigeneity, xenophobia, and classism. In other words, we cannot
understand how environmental injustice operates without understanding the historical and structural
development of marginalization in political systems and the ways in which this constrains the choices of
people. As the cases indicate, the construction of environmental threats and the construction of
marginalized identity is closely linked in the postcolonial world, such that “the exploitation of humans and
the environment is a uni ed practice” (Pellow 2006, p. 5).
 Examples of Environmental Justice Issues in Comparative Perspective: Crucial
Case Studies
The connection between environmental stress and social inequality is particularly clear around land use
patterns in the Global South. The global spread of colonialism created racialized peoples who were
considered “wild,” or savage, backward, and undeveloped in comparison with the post-Enlightenment
European descendants. These “wild” people also had “wild” socio-political systems in an equally “wild”
and savage land. Thus, it was the racial duty of colonizers and settlers to “civilize” the land and its people.
Ecologically, this meant erasing prior land-use patterns and transforming preexisting ways of using natural

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resources to t with the goals of modernization—usually, large-scale agriculture and urbanization.
Socially, this also meant structural and systematic violence against people who became non-white or
racially Othered in the process. Politically, the newly created systems further perpetuated this racialized
alienation from the land by creating de jure and de facto social, economic, and cultural barriers to full
participation and recognition of the Indigenous peoples. All of this was done as the founding logic of
creating the nation-state (Pellow 2006).

In the United States, John Locke justi ed the seizure and conversion of Indigenous lands as necessary to
turn the “wild woods and uncultivated waste of America” into productive usage and away from the practices
of the “wild Indian, who (knew) no enclosure” (Kashwan 2017, p. 38). In India under British colonialism,
the native Indians who were “‘jungly people’ living in ‘jungly landscapes’ forfeited the natural right of
p. 445 property in land because they failed to produce its highest possible value” (Kashwan 2017, p. 39). In
Mexico, the incorporation of the state of Quintana Roo into the federal system was justi ed on the basis
that, despite the presence of Indigenous people, the land was in essence a blank space (Fuentes-George
2016a). In the Brazilian Amazon, the expropriation of land from Indigenous people and the conversion of
natural forest to urbanized settlements and large-scale industrialized agriculture was also rationalized by
portraying indigenes as backward, savage, and standing in the way of progress (Khagram 2004).

In some cases, the explicitly racist language linking environmental exploitation with Indigenous oppression
is still apparent. Jair Bolsonaro, elected president of Brazil in 2018, came to power promising to bring
“development” to the Amazonian region. Of the Indigenous people who lived there, Bolsonaro stated that
they were “evolving, more and more like humans,” but that their territories were still “an obstacle to agri-
business” (Survival International 2020). The underlying threats to dispossess Indigenous peoples from
their land in the interest of development have not just been rhetorical. The Bolsonaro Administration
undermined Indigenous control over local land uses by, among other things, taking away oversight over the
demarcation of Indigenous lands from the Department of Indigenous A airs (FUNAI) and shifting it to the
Department of Agriculture (Raftopoulos and Morley 2020). Even though FUNAI has not always been able to
defend Indigenous land rights against large-scale agro-industry and urbanizing development, it is still far
closer to Indigenous interests than the agricultural sector, which historically has seen Indigenous claims as
an obstacle to economic growth (Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Khagram 2004). Consequently, under
Bolsonaro, mining, logging, and large-scale clearing of the Amazon have increased as Indigenous land
rights have been rolled back (Casado and Londoño 2019; Raftopoulos and Morley 2020). While it is worth
reiterating the point that di erent trajectories of political development have led to di erent forms of
postcolonial institutionalization and land use development, Brazil, India, and Mexico all share similar
patterns where race was used as a founding principle to shape environmental management as well as socio-
political participation (Khagram 2004; Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Fuentes-George 2016a; Kashwan 2017).

Furthermore, in the postcolonial era, environmental injustice has been driven not just by explicitly racist
practices, but more often from racially neutral policies built on an underlying structure of injustice.
Marginalized people, by de nition, lack political power. The tendency of political systems is to shift the
environmental and social costs of development to those people who are less likely to push back. Even when
 policy-makers and planners do not deliberately target racial and ethnic minorities as a speci c goal of
development, as occurred during colonialism, the same kinds of racialized patterns can emerge.

The construction of large dams illustrates how harms can be distributed to vulnerable populations absent
deliberate malice. Large dams, like many projects funded by the World Bank and international agencies in
the 1980s and 1990s, were intended to bring modernization to the Global South (Khagram 2004; Braun
2011). These projects were supported by Global South governments and, in contrast to the explicitly racist
language of settler colonialism in the Amazon, were not aimed at dispossessing ethnic or racial minorities.
That is, proponents of dams did not justify the construction of dams as necessary to take away land from the
“jungly Indian.” In practice, however, the social and environmental costs of large dam construction have

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been dispersed along racial, ethnic, and class lines as surely as if they had been done so deliberately.

p. 446 Although they are sometimes described as a source of “clean energy,” emitting less greenhouse gases than
fossil fuel plants, large dams nevertheless can cause signi cant social and environmental problems. Dams
require the ooding of large areas of land upstream from construction and the transformation of a river’s
hydrology and ow. As a result, prior land uses in newly submerged areas are literally washed away, and
people who formerly depended on the land may be dislocated as a result of dam construction. Sometimes
this dislocation occurs because previously important agricultural or cultural land is lost, sometimes it
occurs because residential land is appropriated for construction (Khagram 2004; Braun 2011).

In Lesotho and India, ooding and land clearing associated with the construction of dams displaced tens to
hundreds of thousands of residents in rural communities. Again, there are important di erences in cases. In
India, the displaced had the additional misfortune of being classi ed as adivasis, or tribal Indigenous
peoples, whereas the rural Basotho in Lesotho were not ethnically distinct from mainstream Lesotho
citizens, although they were substantially poorer. Nevertheless, the responses of the state and federal
governments of India and the national government of Lesotho to displaced peoples were remarkably
similar.

In both cases, national governments worked with international agencies to design compensation packages
for those displaced peoples. However, in compensating families, development agencies largely distributed
payments to the heads of households, which almost always meant men, and only in those cases where land
tenure could be formally established. This had the e ect of marginalizing those people whose land tenure
was based on traditional or common law holding and making women heads of households more land
insecure (Kashwan 2017; Khagram 2004; Braun 2011). Furthermore, in Lesotho, the employment
opportunities around the construction of large dams were strati ed across race and gender. As agriculture
and subsistence production was curtailed due to construction, the new engineering and supervisory
positions created around the dam disproportionately went to foreigners (largely whites from South Africa),
construction opportunities went to Basotho men, and Basotho women were left with few opportunities
outside of domestic labor (Braun 2011). As often occurs with women pressured into domestic work due to
economic dislocation (Enloe 2014), some of these women began working as sex workers for the (mostly
white) development professionals working on the dam project (Braun 2011). Thus, even without being
speci cally designed to victimize Black women, the economic and physical dislocation of dam construction
overlay existing economic, political, and racial marginalization of Black Lesotho women so that the burdens
of dam construction and environmental degradation were distributed along these same lines.

Finally, because of the systemic nature of socio-political marginalization, environmental injustice can even
emerge in ways where environmental hazards are not deliberately apportioned at all. Climate change has
been one of the fundamental drivers of environmental stress. The dangers of climate change have already
been well-documented and include rising sea levels, thawing permafrost (which can damage buildings and
transportation in Arctic areas), droughts, ooding, and increased storm intensity (IPCC 2014). Unlike the
placing of a dam or the conversion of pastoral land to urban settlement, the location and timing of
 hurricanes and droughts are not subject to the same kinds of calculations of political elites. Nevertheless,
domestic political systems can produce local conditions of injustice in response to global environmental
problems (Anguelovski and Roberts 2011).

p. 447 For instance, in the United States, federal, state, and local governments historically used economic and
political incentives to deliberately promote racial segregation (Kendi 2017). As white people abandoned
areas that became majority Black, they took with them a stable tax base and community investment which,
combined with a shrinking social safety net, left Black and Latinx communities tremendously underfunded
(Fuentes-George 2016b). In places like New Orleans, this meant Black communities had to confront poorly
maintained infrastructure, which left them more environmentally vulnerable to storms and hurricanes, but

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also a lack of investment in public and private transportation. Consequently, when storms like Hurricane
Katrina hit the United States, Black and brown people are more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe
due to the legacy of these racialized policies (Rydin 2006; Cutter et al. 2003; Fuentes-George 2016b).

This section has focused largely on environmental justice struggles involving the rural marginalized in
Appalachia, the Ecuadorian and Bolivian Amazon, and the Whanganui River Basin in New Zealand, among
others. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the narrative of environmental justice emerged out of
urban struggles for representation and environmental health. Therefore, in much the same way that we can
see similar (but not identical) patterns of marginalization and environmental hazards between Indian
adivasis and Bolivian Indigenous populations, we can see similar patterns between the concerns of urban
Black and Latinx communities in the southern United States during the 1980s and marginalized urban
communities among countries in the Global South.

In Kingston, Jamaica, for example, during British colonialism the urban Black proletariat was concentrated
in the inner-city slums near Kingston Harbor, while the white and light-skinned brown economic elite
resided primarily in the “uptown” areas of Upper St. Andrew and the outskirts of the city. Even though
Jamaica did not have the same kind of codi ed racism as did the Jim Crow South of the United States, racist
attitudes against dark-skinned Blacks by the white and light-skinned population meant the urban Black
poor have been geographically and racially segregated in ways similar to Black Americans (Dodman 2004;
Gray 2003; Thame 2011). This exacerbates the fact that one of the major environmental crises facing the
urban Black poor is the steady ow of Kingston’s municipal waste to the inner-city, collecting in poorly
managed, open-air dumps at places like Riverton, which then leach chemicals and bacteria into the local
environment, attract disease vectors like ies and rats, and often catch re (Dodman 2004). Despite the
documented hazards associated with the Riverton dump, there has been no change in its management, and
the societal acceptance of the continued air and water pollution occasioned by the dump mirrors the
acceptance of the United States of the externalization of toxic waste sites to urban Black and Latinx
communities.

Throughout the industrialized and industrializing world, we can see multiple examples of societies shifting
environmental hazards, either deliberately or through institutionalized habits, to the urban poor. Although
the racial composition di ers across cases, society has tended to treat the accumulation of waste and
environmental hazards as “invisible” if it happens to the right people, whether in the Mexican cities of
Oaxaca (Moore 2008) and Torreón (Díez and Rodríguez 2008); Kingston, Jamaica; or in Durban, South
Africa (Anguelovski and Roberts 2011). Since environmental injustice can occur in rich and poor countries,
across urban and rural areas, a ecting di erently raced demographics, it is important to recognize that the
term “the Global South” refers to a state of marginalization that is not reducible to any one kind of country
p. 448 or location (Pellow 2006; Anguelovski and Roberts 2011). Rather, it is a global process of marginalization
that is mediated by di erent local political and social exigencies.
 Injustice Embedded in Environmental Solutions

Ironically, injustice can also be produced through the same mechanisms that countries take to solve
environmental problems. I return here to the discussion of conservation in the Global South. Given the
increasing rate of anthropogenic biodiversity loss, international society, including UN organizations,
conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the Secretariats of environmental agreements,
have pushed governments to conserve the natural environment (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological
Diversity 2014). Unfortunately, these actors have often used the same kind of colonialist approach in
constructing conservation programs as were used to justify settling and “racing” the nation-state

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(Kashwan 2017; Sand 2012; Dowie 2005; Brockington 2002; Fuentes-George 2016a; Chapin 2004). As
indicated in the following paragraphs, conservationist programs and organizations far too often treat
Indigenous and rural communities as too “backward” or uneducated to be involved in conservation
planning. The similarities between the attitudes toward the marginalized held by colonizers and those held
by conservationists do not end there. Although settler colonialism and postcolonial conservation di er in
their stated goals about the environment, both involve further extension of control over land that has been
“insu ciently” included under state authority (West 2006; Kashwan 2017; Peluso 1993).

Where the modernizing logic of settlement meant that the “wild” or “jungly” Other stood in the way of
progress, there is a strain of conservation that sees the “unruly” Other as interfering with the “proper” way
to do conservation. Under this logic, governments desiring good conservation programs create
management protocols with explicitly exclusionary practices using top-down hardline policies to prevent
people from using natural resources in the interest of environmentalism. These burdens are generally felt
most acutely by those who historically live near and depend on natural resources in the newly conserved
areas. In the Global South, this has largely meant the rural poor and subsistence communities, which, again,
are disproportionately racially or ethnically marginalized (West 2006; Kashwan 2017; Fuentes-George
2016a; Hochstetler and Keck 2007).

The rationale for excluding rural and marginalized people is also tied to their marginalization. Conservation
and biodiversity management are certainly technically complex, and rural, low-income people generally
lack the same formally recognized technical training and expertise as university-educated researchers. This
does not mean that the rural marginalized lack environmental knowledge, although it does mean that their
knowledge has not been widely recognized as valuable by conservation-oriented governments (Park et al.
2008). In the post-1970s, this pattern of exclusionary conservation was so widespread in the Global South
that it became known as fortress conservation (Brockington 2002; Sand 2012; West et al. 2008; Peluso 1993).

In the mid-2000s, scholars of conservation, including Mark Dowie and Mac Chapin, publicly pushed
p. 449 conservationist NGOs to be more attentive to the fact that conservation could bring serious costs for
marginalized people at risk of being dislocated from their land (Dowie 2005; Chapin 2004). Yet, in 2019,
there were reports that the conservationist NGO the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) supported
governments in Nepal and Cameroon to implement brutal conservationist measures, including shoot-to-
kill policies, even as these governments systematically engaged in extrajudicial killings and torture in their
park management activities (Warren and Baker 2019). The complicity of Westerners in brutal conservation
programs is not just a feature of the 2000s, of course. In fact, famed conservationist Dian Fossey referred to
Black Rwandans with the racist term “woggiepoos” and, as with the WWF today, is reported to have
engaged in torture of suspected poachers (Montgomery 1991; Shoumato 1986).

This is not to say that conservation programs are necessarily exclusionary. In fact, both Mexico and Jamaica
have protected areas at the Parque Nacional de los Arrecifes de Xcalak and the Blue and John Crow
Mountains National Park, respectively, that were designed with ground-up participation from the rural
marginalized (Fuentes-George 2019; 2016a; Kashwan 2017). To be sure, hardline fortress conservation can
 certainly lead to environmental improvements and saving species. But even if this were sustainable, this
kind of hardline conservation is contrary to the goals of environmental justice.

Conclusion: Why Study and Pursue Environmental Justice?

Given these challenges, attaining an environmentally just world seems unreachable. Doing so would require
addressing the myriad ways in which people have been raced, classed, and otherwise Othered;
understanding how these overlap with gender, ethnicity, and culture; and comprehending how all that has

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been shaped by the particularities of political development in di erent contexts. Furthermore, it would
require ensuring that environmental solutions are crafted with wide participation to avoid the kind of top-
down exclusionary practices that have characterized fortress conservation and similar policies. With such a
looming task, it is not surprising that mainstream environmental organizations sometimes treat justice-
based activism as an obstacle to environmentalism, breaking ties with justice-oriented organizations in the
process (Hadden 2015).

However, the trajectory of consumption and development indicates that sustainable environmentalism will
only be possible through the pursuit of environmental justice. In the rst place, social injustice has driven
the environmental catastrophe. For example, the cost of fossil fuels to the privileged has been kept
arti cially low because governments and corporations have been able to extract these fuels without paying
for the social and environmental costs of their extraction. In oil-exporting countries, when local people
protest against pollution and environmental hazards, social marginalization has made it easier for
governments to repress, rather than redress their concerns. There are multiple cases where state violence
has depressed the cost of extraction among the marginal Other, including among Indigenous people in
Ecuador, the Ogoni people in Nigeria, and First Nations people in Canada (Okonkwo 2020; Sawyer 2004).
Similarly, the ability of people in the industrialized world to consume electronic goods is facilitated by the
p. 450 fact that many of the minerals used in high-end electronics are mined in places like the Congo, where
repressive governments and racialized social strati cation have created an underclass that can be used to
extract ore cheaply, with little consideration to local environmental or human rights abuses (Eichstaedt
2011; Pellow 2006). These logics are repeated for large-scale agriculture, as indicated earlier. Thus, it is
di cult to meaningfully address crises like climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, and
resource overconsumption without addressing the social inequities that make those processes so a ordable.

Second, proponents of environmental solutions need to recognize that environmental mechanisms like
conservation need local support to be sustainable. It is certainly possible, at least in the short term, to
design environmental policies in a top-down manner. Furthermore, governments can take the approach of
Nepal and Cameroon (among others) and create hardline environmental policies reinforced by the explicit
threat of violence in those cases where rural people reject conservation programs. However, functional
governments do not have an in nite capacity for violence, and environmental programs without local
support are likely to fail (Fuentes-George 2019, 2016a).
 The Way Forward

Fortunately, the eld of comparative environmental politics indicates that, although di cult, there are
pathways for advocates within countries to push for environmental justice. Among some of the success
stories of environmental justice globally include the previously mentioned establishment of community-
based protected areas in Mexico, legal personhood over the Whanganui River in New Zealand, resistance to
the construction of large dams in India, protection of the Amazon in Brazil, and the creation of a
community-supported World Heritage Site in Jamaica (Khagram 2004; Fuentes-George 2019; Hochstetler
and Keck 2007; Kashwan 2017). While there are no guarantees (and even in these cases, there were setbacks)

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the success stories all share similar outlines.

First, countries need to develop robust mechanisms through which environmental rights can be justiciable.
At a minimum, this includes standard measures of democracy, such as voting rights and political
representation for minority groups. Although democratization is not synonymous with environmental
justice, it is necessary to a just sustainability (Agyeman et al. 2003; Kashwan 2017; Gellars and Je ords
2018). More importantly, this also includes autonomous and accountable mechanisms speci cally oriented
around participation in environmental a airs. For example, organizations like FUNAI in Brazil, the Center
for Indigenous Rights (CDI) in Mexico, and the Forestry Department in Jamaica (Fuentes-George 2016a;
Kashwan 2017; Hochstetler and Keck 2007)helped marginalized communities get information about
proposed land use changes and advocate for local autonomy in the face of these changes.

Additional mechanisms to promote and democratize information, like environmental impact assessments
(EIAs) and mechanisms for marginalized participation, are essential. To be clear, calling for marginalized
participation in policy-making is a potentially radical action insofar as doing so might challenge the
dominant worldview not only of states, but also of formally trained scientists in the environmental
movement (Park et al. 2008). As noted earlier, in the discussion of legal personhood, Indigenous and tribal
people in New Zealand, Ecuador, and Bolivia made the explicit argument that their desired policy was
p. 451
rooted in a conception of the self and nature that was not, to that point, recognized by the modern nation-
state system. Thus, real participation could require changing the value system through which action is
evaluated, and, at times, governments and conservationists alike have resisted this call (Schlosberg and
Carruthers 2007).

Second, it is just as crucial for those interested in studying environmental justice to recognize the
transformative potential of alternative worldviews in rethinking what we consider to be an “appropriate”
relationship between nature and society. As Neville and Clouthard point out, Indigenous scholars have been
writing “for decades” on the e ect of “di erent ontologies of land, environment, development, and
sovereignty” on how we understand and live in the natural environment (Neville and Clouthard 2019, p. 3).
Nevertheless, in much the same way the mainstream environmental movement has historically overlooked
the importance of race and identity in shaping environmentalism (Bullard 2000; Pellow 2006; Mohai et al.
2009), so, too, has the study of comparative environmental politics often failed to recognize the e ect of
di erent frameworks and epistemologies (Neville and Clouthard 2019).

Third, although globalization may complicate how we understand accountability in environmental

injustice, it can provide avenues for globally networked advocates to push recalcitrant governments toward
more just sustainability. In cases where governments have been unwilling or unable to create responsive
environmental mechanisms for vulnerable people, transnational networks have been occasionally
successful at pushing for greater justice. The mechanisms have varied across cases but have included
actions like pressing international nancial agencies to make access to funds conditional on local justice,
promoting informational awareness and mobilization among local communities, or serving as observers to
international society (Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Pellow 2006; Khagram 2004).
These tactics have contributed to moments of success, such as the post-1980s mobilization for justice in the
Brazilian Amazon and subsequent protection of Indigenous lands, improvements in waste disposal in sub-
Saharan Africa, and restitution for adivasis in India displaced in the construction of dams.

Of course, environmentalists also need to ensure that their proposals, particularly around issues of
protected areas, are designed with the participation of and respect for marginalized peoples. As Chapin and
Dowie have noted, this has not always been easy for conservationist groups to accept, particularly as
marginalized groups in general do not have the same kind of access to formally recognized training and
education (Dowie 2005; Chapin 2004; Park et al. 2008). Nevertheless, there are enough examples of
transnational groups and governments creating conservation programs and other environmental protocols

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with authoritative participation of marginalized peoples to indicate the possibility of progress toward
environmental justice. The many political and social obstacles to an environmentally just world do not
preclude that.
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