Environmental justice as subtext or omission: Examining discourses of anti-incineration campaigning in Ireland

The incineration of waste is a controversial issue marked by a history of opposition from community groups and environmentalists around the globe. Opponents, particularly in the USA, have frequently adopted a discourse of environmental justice to challenge the legitimacy of incineration. In line with these broad geographies of resistance recent proposals to introduce municipal solid waste incinerators in Ireland have sparked a series of opposition campaigns. However an examination of the discourses of resistance adopted by campaigners in one specific site of resistance, the Galway region on the west coast of Ireland, indicates that the vocabulary of environmental justice has not been publicly articulated. This paper investigates this absence of environmental justice in the language of opposition. The research reveals an interwoven set of contingent conditions that conspire to inhibit the adoption of environmental justice discourses in Ireland. However these conditions are not static and a combination of pressures, both within and beyond Ireland, are creating a dynamic context that could promote the emergence of environmental justice discourses in the future.     

Vulnerability,resilience and development discourses in context of climate change

The paper discusses how the current climate change debate influences the way in which development is conceptualised, negotiated and implemented. The objective of the article is to explore some of the underlying controversies that characterise development discourses in the context of climate change. Adaptation to climate change goes along with a significant shift in discourses used to deal with what is normally called development. This is reflected in shifting research interests and perspectives, from vulnerability studies to resilience thinking. However, the paper argues, this shift is problematic for the normative contents of development and especially for a pro-poor and grass roots perspective.     

The new politics of pastoralism: Identity,justice and global activism

Concerns with the politics and practices of resource rights and access are integral to contemporary debates over environmental justice. Struggles over identity politics, especially the strategic articulation and deployment of particular identities at diverse geographical scales, have recently emerged as important mediators of justice claims in respect of resources rights, but also of recognition and procedural justice. To date, critical, multi-scalar analyses of identity-based claims for environmental justice have focused largely on the indigenous peoples’ movement. In doing so, they have failed to embrace an emergent dimension of identity-based, trans-scalar justice, namely the fledgling global pastoralists’ movement, the empirical focus for this paper. In the early years of the 21st century mobile pastoralists have begun to carve out new global spaces, through which diverse groups have attempted to negotiate common ground and forge common identities in their struggles for justice. In particular, mobile pastoralists have become increasingly visible in conservation politics and contests over land rights as they lay claim to both discursive and material ground as ‘custodians of the commons’ in an era of global climatic change. This paper draws on empirical work amongst pastoralists, NGOs and activists from Kenya, Mongolia and Spain to explore these identities, their implications for resource rights and access and the multi-scalar chains of accountability and legitimacy between global activists and their local constituents.     

Solar activity and Indian weather/climate

The literature on influences of solar activity on the Indian weather and climate is reviewed since the discovery of sunspot cycle. Fluctuations in solar activity are undoubtedly a factor affecting weather and climate. Although the results of some of the studies are conflicting, Indian weather and climate is, in general, inversely related to sunspots. However, the areal extent of floods in India seems to expand and contract in phase with the Hale double sunspot cycle, suggesting that the flood rhythm is in some manner controlled by long-term solar activity related to solar magnetic effects. All the evidences of solar influences on weather and climate may have practical implications in improving long-range forecasting of weather and climate, once the physical coupling mechanisms and their modification by other factors are clearly understood. Some of the promising plausible physical mechanisms for explaining solar effects on weather and climate are also discussed.     

Environmental democratization and water justice in extractive frontiers of Colombia

Mechanisms of democratic participation have been activated in Colombia since 2006 for the purpose of protecting water sources, hydrosocial territories and peasant livelihoods. A chronological perspective on the numerous and varied cases illustrates their cumulative, transformative effect on judicial decisions taken by the high courts, which have endorsed these mechanisms of direct democracy and expanded the scope of democratization to socioenvironmental issues. The process of environmental democratization in Colombia has been gradual, starting with the creation of opportunities for citizen participation in the Constitution of 1991; followed in the first decade of this century by the activation of the mechanisms of democratic participation created; and culminating with the watershed Constitutional Court ruling T-445 of 2016, which confirmed the right of municipalities to consult with their citizens about mining and oil extraction in their territories. The cases are analyzed here through the lens of democratization and transformative and judicialized politics. The paper argues that the reconfiguration of power through the use and contestation of participatory mechanisms reveals an ambiguous state-formation process characterized by repressed democratization. It also demonstrates that the process of environmental democratization that started with the activation of the democratic participation mechanisms introduced in the Constitution of 1991 has been one of transformative democratic politics, in which a dynamic array of political actors have consolidated democratic participation on environmental issues through constitutional lobbying and activism.     

Contesting expertise: The politics of environmental knowledge in northern Indian groundwater practices

The world is facing a severe water crisis. According to the UN, by 2025 50% of the world’s population will face water scarcity. In India, where 70% of irrigation and 80% of domestic needs are met with groundwater, demand for this resource is expected to exceed supply by 2020. This has led to recent calls for groundwater governance reforms within India, and specifically within the state of Rajasthan, where no regulation exists today. The success of these reforms hinges on the interaction of the state and its agents with local users and managers of groundwater resources. Underpinning these encounters, though, are tensions between local and state forms of groundwater knowledges. The question analyzed here is in what ways do conflicting environmental knowledges adversely affect the management of overexploited groundwater resources in water-scarce India? To address this question, I examine the coevolution of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence groundwater and irrigation knowledges and technologies in Rajasthan, India to expose the ways that they are produced, contested, legitimated, and hybridized. The paper argues the following three claims. First, the relationship between the state and local producers of groundwater knowledge practices is non-linear and porous. For instance, the way that state subjects experience the state is uneven because within and in-between historical moments the state may attempt to assimilate, reorganize, plagiarize, or disparage local knowledge. Second, these attempts produce or exacerbate existing historically rooted tensions between farmers and state groundwater engineers. But in response, farmers often seek out non-state avenues of expertise, such as tubewell drilling firms. This results in the further hybridization of knowledge practices and also in the present-day marginalization of the state. Third, the relationship between farmers and the state is further strained because of a current lack of state visibility in the study area and also because the state continues to “see like a state”. These shifting meanings and power relations around groundwater and irrigation knowledges produce tensions that will undoubtedly negatively impact future groundwater governance strategies.     

Spatial justice and the land politics of renewables: Dispossessing vulnerable communities through solar energy mega-projects

This paper considers aspects of spatial justice in the processes of land acquisition for large-scale solar energy projects in the developmentalist context of India. It explores the case of one of the world’s largest solar park projects in Charanka, Gujarat. While the official rhetoric suggests an inclusive project for globally benign renewable energy production, the research reveals a more controversial land and power politics of renewable energy. It is argued, in particular, that the project increases the precariousness of vulnerable communities, who are exposed to the loss of livelihoods due to the enclosure of common land and extra-legal mechanisms through which land acquisitions for the project have reportedly taken place. This case exemplifies how solar mega-projects may manifest a regime of accumulation whereby low-carbon coalitions of interests can maximize their gains by dispossessing vulnerable social groups of their life-sustaining assets.     

Competing discourses of nature in exurbia

This paper explores different ways that the category of nature is used in addressing landscape changes associated with exurbia and exurbanization. Nature is an important category in the practices and representations that residents and planners use to construct and maintain exurban landscapes. However, common ways of mobilizing nature in exurban planning discourses often obstruct better discussion, rather than facilitate it. Invoking nature can make planning processes more difficult by providing a means for naturalizing planning decisions and also by exacerbating struggles over whose nature will be managed in what ways. More explicitly framing what is meant by nature in exurban planning may improve discussion of landscape problems associated with sprawl. The goal of this paper is to contribute to creating a framework for more actively contextualizing how “nature” is used in discourses relating to exurbanization. I suggest that such a framework would need to consider—and make explicit—themes such as the four that I discuss in this paper: (1) the centrality of the production of nature to exurban landscapes; (2) multiple meanings of nature that are often confused; (3) ways that normative statements about nature tend to be unquestioned in exurban planning; and (4) the simultaneous difficulty and usefulness of critiquing and “denaturalizing” both material and discursive nature. Explicit conversations about the role and representation of nature within residents’ and managers’ land-use practices and ideologies could create opportunities for dialogue between residents, planners, and academics about the valuation of and preferences for constructing particular landscapes, especially in addressing problematic aspects of the phenomena of “amenity migration” and “sprawl.”     

Environmental inequalities in New Zealand: A national study of air pollution and environmental justice

Research has established that many socially deprived, low income and ethnic minority communities are exposed to disproportionately high levels of outdoor air pollution. Whilst there is a burgeoning literature documenting these environmental disparities, most previous studies have taken place in North America and few researchers have examined local scale variations across an entire country. Further, there has been little work systematically evaluating disparities in the local exposure to air pollution from different sources. In this New Zealand research we use mean annual estimates of outdoor particulate air pollution for different sources for neighbourhoods across urban New Zealand to evaluate whether air pollution varies between local areas of differing socioeconomic circumstances. We find that outdoor pollution levels are higher in socially deprived areas (using a neighbourhood measure of disadvantage) and neighbourhoods with a high proportion of low income households. However, although ethnicity was also related to mean total pollution, levels were elevated in areas where the proportion European was higher and other ethnic groups (including Māori) were lower. We also find that the disparities in pollution levels are specific to the pollution source. The results are discussed in the context of the policy framework in New Zealand, including the tensions fashioned by the Resource Management Act 1991, which have effectively ‘desocialised’ environmental concerns. We argue that the regulatory framework is fixated on ‘environmental bottom lines’ rather than social concerns that are integral to the environmental justice framework. Some priorities for future research into environmental justice in New Zealand are also considered.     

The politics of barstool biology: Environmental knowledge and power in greater Northern Yellowstone

Critical researchers of underdevelopment have established a well-known record celebrating the environmental knowledges of subsistence communities in contested wildlife conservation zones. Similar battles are being fought over science, uncertainty, and wild animals in the American west, however, with far less attention to local epistemologies. Often dismissed as “barstool biology”, the ecological knowledges of local hunters in the Northern Yellowstone ecosystem are rooted in environmental experience and situated politics. How does local hunter knowledge diverge or converge with that of state officials, environmentalists, ranchers, and other constituencies, and to what effect on wildlife management policy? This paper seeks to answer that question, reviewing recent research amongst local resource users, managers, and activists in Montana. By rendering empirical the question of local knowledge around America’s oldest national park, rather than trying to “read it off” political affiliation, education, or livelihood, a clearer picture of power, knowledge, and conservation emerges. The results suggest that emerging management policies have developed from the discursive alliance of landowners, outfitters, and environmentalists, shifting priorities towards enclosure and exclusion in wildlife at the expense of other silent constituencies.     

Assessing the impacts of changing land cover and climate on Hokersar wetland in Indian Himalayas

Monitoring the spatiotemporal changes in wetlands and assessing their causal factors is critical for developing robust strategies for the conservation and restoration of these ecologically important ecosystems. In this study, the spatiotemporal changes in the land cover system within a Himalayan wetland and its catchment were assessed and correlated using a time series of satellite, historical, and field data. Significant changes in the spatial extent, water depth, and the land system of the Hokersar wetland were observed from the spatiotemporal analysis of the data from 1969 to 2008. The wetland area has shrunk from 18.75 km² in 1969 to 13 km² in 2008 with drastic reduction in the water depth of the wetland. The marshy lands, habitat of the migratory birds, have shrunk from 16.3 km² in 1969 to 5.62 km² in 2008 and have been colonized by various other land cover types. The land system and water extent changes within the wetland were related to the spatiotemporal changes in the land cover and hydrometeorological variables at the catchment scale. Significant changes in the forest cover (88.33–55.78 km²), settlement (4.63–15.35 km²), and water bodies (1.75–0.51 km²) were observed in the catchment. It is concluded that the urbanization, deforestation, changes in the hydrologic and climatic conditions, and other land system changes observed in the catchment are the main causes responsible for the depleting wetland extent, water depth, and biodiversity by adversely influencing the hydrologic erosion and other land surface processes in the catchment. All these causes and effects are manifest in the form of deterioration of the water quality, water quantity, the biodiversity changes, and the decreasing migratory bird population in the wetland.     

Performative justice: New directions in environmental and social justice

New explorations of justice are arising in the wake of post-structuralist and feminist critiques of abstract, generalized notions of justice in Western liberal democracies. These interventions are opening new avenues of study on discursive practices and performances that contest social and environmental injustices in everyday life. Feminist scholars argue for greater attention to the local and the particular, the embodied, gendered, emotion-based, ethnic subject of justice and injustice. Yet, limited research has been conducted on performative and performance-based relationships to justice, despite its potential to inform matters related the use and conservation of public goods and common spaces in everyday life. This critical review examines the notion of performativity and its application to justice, aiming to clarify and advance understanding and theorizing of a potentially valuable direction in environmental and social justice at the local level. We draw on Hobson’s articulation of performative justice, as it offers some useful insights into how injustices related to the appropriation of public green spaces agendas are being identified and new meanings are being constituted through local-level citizen practices. We argue, however, that such attempts appear to be identifying injustices and demonstrating the ‘what is’ of environmental and social justice, but not ‘what ought to be’. Directions for future research are offered, which include clarifying the application of performative theories to the study and practice of justice at the local level.     

Changing climate discourse and politics in India. Climate change as challenge and opportunity for diplomacy and development

This article contributes to the study of changing climate discourse and policy in emerging powers through a case study of climate discourse in India since 2007. Based on interviews with key actors in Indian climate politics and textual analysis, three general climate discourses – the Third World, Win–Win and Radical Green discourses – are identified. The discourses are characterised by different constructions of India’s identity, interests, climate change exposure and climate policy orientation. At the most general level, the article finds that there has been a general discursive shift from the Third World discourse to the Win–Win discourse, and that the latter discourse is in broad agreement with the dominant international climate change discourse of ecological modernisation and thus supports an alignment between Indian and international climate politics. We also find, however, that India’s domestic climate politics is marked by co-existence and tensions between the three climate discourses, producing a complex and at times contentious discursive politics over climate change, identity and development. The case study presented in this article moreover demonstrates how national interests are socially constructed and how changes in policy reflect changes in the dominant discourse.     

Power and politics in climate change adaptation efforts: Struggles over authority and recognition in the context of political instability

Throughout the world, climate change adaptation policies supported by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have provided significant sources of funding and technical support to developing countries. Yet often the adaptation responses proposed belie complex political realities, particularly in politically unstable contexts, where power and politics shape adaptation outcomes. In this paper, the concepts of authority and recognition are used to capture power and politics as they play out in struggles over governing changing resources. The case study in Nepal shows how adaptation policy formation and implementation becomes a platform in which actors seek to claim authority and assert more generic rights as political and cultural citizens. Focusing on authority and recognition helps illuminate how resource governance struggles often have very little to do with the resources themselves. Foundational to the argument is how projects which seek to empower actors to manage their resources, produce realignments of power and knowledge that then shape who is invested in what manner in adaptation. The analysis adds to calls for reframing ‘adaptation’ to encompass the socionatural processes that shape vulnerability by contributing theoretical depth to questions of power and politics.     

札达盆地晚中新世河湖相沉积物环境磁学特征与印度季风演化

晚新生代印度季风的演化一直以来是地学研究的热点问题,然而目前对印度季风的研究多集中在海洋沉积物上。磁学参数作为指示气候的重要指标,已被广泛应用于黄土高原等地区的古气候重建中,对揭示东亚季风的演化历史和驱动机制做出了重要的贡献,但利用磁学指标对印度季风变化历史的研究还很稀少。文章运用磁学方法对藏南札达盆地的河湖相厚225.5 m、年龄范围在9.4~6.0 Ma的沉积物进行分析,发现磁学参数值在8.6 Ma前后发生了明显变化,对应沉积环境和岩相的改变（由河流环境和粗颗粒沉积转变为潮上环境和较细的沉积）。8.6 Ma前磁学参数值较高,磁化率（χ）高的原因可能是风化生成的细颗粒含量多导致的,而HIRM高是由于风化形成赤铁矿增多引起的。鉴于研究剖面的沉积速率在8.6 Ma发生了快速的增加以及以前的研究揭示这段沉积物风化程度较低,我们把8.6 Ma后所有的磁学参数值的降低归因于季风增强造成沉积剥蚀搬运速率增加从而导致沉积物来不及风化,细颗粒的亚铁磁性矿物和赤铁矿没有大量生成。考虑到札达盆地记录的气候变湿时间与阿拉伯海叶蜡碳同位素记录的南亚干旱化得以缓解的时间一致,我们认为这些记录共同指示了印度夏季风的增强。在综合分析青藏高原隆升、特提斯海退缩、南北半球冰量变化和印度洋表水温度变化的基础上,我们把印度夏季风的增强归因为南极冰盖的增加或者是青藏高原的向东北扩张。这一研究加深了对印度季风变化历史和驱动机制的认识。

     

Hindu nationalism, neo-traditionalism and environmental discourses in India

One of the defining changes India has experienced over the last decade has been the social and political consolidation of the Hindu Right. Critics point to its chauvinist ideologies, the discrimination and violence against religious minorities, and the neglect of the poor. This paper examines the parallels between the discourses of the Hindu Right and those of neo-traditionalist environmentalists. Similarities include gendered and social conservatism; superficial hermeneutic analyses of ancient texts; partial and ‘romantic’ histories; and the essentialisation of science and of East and West. The paper concludes by suggesting that environmental scholars and activists cannot afford to be innocent of the implications of their ideas and assumptions given the social and political contexts of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India.     

A social justice framing of climate change discourse and policy: Adaptation,resilience and vulnerability in a Jamaican agricultural landscape

It is now widely recognized that climate change is likely to have detrimental impacts across the Caribbean region, with the burden likely to fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable segments of society. It is therefore an appropriate time to ask whether the frameworks that lie behind climate change discourse and policy are consistent with the demands of social and environmental justice. In this paper, we use climate justice as a lens for evaluating three prominent frameworks for addressing climate change, those of adaptation, resilience, and vulnerability. Each of these discursive frameworks, we argue, can contribute to our understanding of climate change, but they do not all incorporate justice concerns to the same degree. In order to illustrate this, we examine the justice implications of using each of the three frameworks to assess a case study of agricultural transformation in Southwestern Jamaica. Farmers in this region have adapted to changing climate conditions in a variety of ways, including the use of new agricultural technology. The ability of many farmers to take advantage of such innovations, however, is constrained by the underlying landscape of vulnerability within the region. After interpreting this example from the perspectives of adaptation, resilience and vulnerability, we conclude that all three paradigms are capable of calling attention to climate justice issues, but only in the vulnerability perspective are such issues intrinsic. We believe, therefore, that a greater attention to vulnerability within Caribbean climate policy holds the potential to advance the goals of climate justice within the region.     

Enacting environmental justice in Singapore: Performative justice and the Green Volunteer Network

Environmental justice research has of late expanded beyond its’ original focus on the distribution of environmental ‘bads’ to debate injustices at a wide array of sites and scales. Despite this expansion, the applicability of an environmental justice framework to seemingly apolitical and banal expressions of environmental concerns remains open to question. This paper argues that environmental justice struggles can be located in the mundane environmental politics of Singapore, by employing a performative rather than rights-based approach to both justice and politics. It draws on qualitative research into volunteers’ practices in one Singaporean environmental organisation, and asserts that through their focus on experiential learning and re-inscribing ‘developmental’ spaces as spaces of care and justice, volunteers seek to redress the social, political and environmental injustices replete within the spatial politics of Singapore.