Environmental justice in coastal systems: Perspectives from communities confronting change

Life in the Pacific is characterised by interconnected, fast and slow socio-ecological change. These changes inevitably involve navigating questions of justice, as they shift who benefits from, owns, and governs resources, and whose claims and rights are recognized. Thus, greater understanding of perceptions of environmental justice within communities will be crucial to support fair adaptation. We contend that an environmental justice approach offers a theoretical foundation to help illuminate key concerns and trade-offs as communities navigate global change. Here, we apply an empirical environmental justice lens to the use and customary management of coastal resources in Papua New Guinea. Through two case studies, we examine perceptions of distributional, procedural and recognitional justice. We find similarities and differences. There were common concerns about the injustice of unequal fishing pressure and destructive methods, but in one case, concerns about people’s material needs overrode concerns about non-compliance and unequal costs. In the other case, deliberative decision-making served as a platform for not only negotiating and re-defining the distribution of costs and benefits, but also airing grievances, thereby strengthening recognition of different people’s values and concerns. In addition, we find that recognitional aspects of justice, such as respect, can confer or undermine the legitimacy of procedures for governing resources and thus making fair decisions about distribution. The heterogeneity of justice criteria in our cases emphasizes the need to elicit and understand plural justice perceptions in different contexts.     

Carbon forestry in West Africa: The politics of models,measures and verification processes

In a context of neo-liberal environmental governance, imperatives for global climate change mitigation are motivating a new round of policy initiatives and projects aimed at carbon forestry: conserving and enhancing forest carbon stocks, and trading these values in emerging carbon markets. In this context modelling and measurement, always significant in framing and justifying forest policy initiatives, are of renewed importance, with a growing array of protocols focused on counting and accounting for forest carbon as a commodity. This article draws on perspectives from science and technology studies and environmental discourse analysis to explore how these modelling and measurement processes are being co-constructed with forest carbon policies and political economies, and applied in project design in local settings. Document analysis and key informant interviews are used to track and illustrate these processes in a pair of case studies of forest carbon projects in Sierra Leone and Ghana. These are chosen to highlight different project types – focused respectively on forest reserve and farm-forestry – in settings with multi-layered histories of people-forest relations, landscape change and prior project intervention. The analysis shows how longer established framings and assessments of deforestation are being re-invoked and re-worked amidst current carbon concerns. We demonstrate that measurement processes are not just technical but social and political, carrying and thus cementing particular views of landscape and social relations that in turn make likely particular kinds of intervention pathway, with fortress style conservation or plantations becoming the dominant approach. In the process, other possibilities – including alternative pathways that might treat and value carbon as part of complex, lived-in landscapes, or respond more adaptively to less equilibrial people–forest relations, are occluded.     

“Youth is not a political position”: Exploring justice claims-making in the UN Climate Change Negotiations

Youth articulations of climate change injustice are experiencing an unprecedented moment in the spotlight as, inspired by Greta Thunberg, young people around the world take to the streets demanding justice for their generation in the face of climate emergency. Formal opportunities for youth voices to be heard in environmental governance are slim, although the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) offers a rare opportunity for youth to share their perspectives as one of nine civil society constituencies: YOUNGO. Recent research in Global Environmental Change has called for empirical exploration of justice claims-making by different stakeholders to develop understanding of how justice is conceptualised and negotiated in climate change governance spaces. To date, climate justice claims from youth have not been explored in the academic literature. This paper draws upon rich, ethnographic, longitudinal data on the evolution of justice claims made by a group of youth participants in the UNFCCC to contribute to this empirical gap. In our research, a UK-based case study organisation and long-established member of YOUNGO was studied between 2015 and 2018, including observation of their participation at the 21st, 22nd and 23rd Conferences of the Parties. We find that youth participants first articulated injustices based on perceived future risks to their generation but, over time, switched to solidarity claims about injustices experienced by other groups in the present. Whilst laudable, this impedes their mandate as representatives of younger generations. We also make three theoretical contributions to environmental justice theory. First we expand participation justice theory to both the visible structures of participation (procedural justice) and the informal rules and discourses shaping participation (representation justice). Second we demonstrate the importance of both external and self-recognition for the articulation of justice claims. Third we clarify the relationship between power and justice claim-making, proposing that we must look beneath what is articulated to shed light on the exercise of ideological power that shapes the framing and claiming of justice in environmental governance spaces.     

Public values for energy system change

In this paper we discuss the importance of framing the question of public acceptance of sustainable energy transitions in terms of values and a ‘whole-system’ lens. This assertion is based on findings arising from a major research project examining public values, attitudes and acceptability with regards to whole energy system change using a mixed-method (six deliberative workshops, n = 68, and a nationally representative survey, n = 2441), interdisciplinary approach. Through the research we identify a set of social values associated with desirable energy futures in the UK, where the values represent identifiable cultural resources people draw on to guide their preference formation about particular aspects of energy system change. As such, we characterise public perspectives as being underpinned by six value clusters relating to efficiency and wastefulness, environment and nature, security and stability, social justice and fairness, autonomy and power, and processes and change. We argue that this ‘value system’ provides a basis for understanding core reasons for public acceptance or rejection of different energy system aspects and processes. We conclude that a focus on values that underpin more specific preferences for energy system change brings insights that could provide a basis for improved dialogue, more robust decision-making, and for anticipating likely points of conflict in energy transitions.     

Environmental narratives and politics in Tanzania's Rufiji Delta: A reply to Burgess et al.

This reply is in response to Burgess et al.’s Commentary on our original article, “The REDD Menace: Resurgent protectionism in Tanzania's mangrove forests.” Their commentary, we argue, shifts the focus from WWF's past conservation work and environmental narratives in the Rufiji Delta North, the subject of our article, to its current forest carbon inventory work. We do not comment on WWF's new work. Our principal concern remains on the environmental narratives crafted by WWF that were used to justify attempts to remove Warufiji small-scale rice farmers from the mangrove forests in the Rufiji Delta North. We emphasize the political implications of designating forest areas for carbon forestry and REDD projects in terms of forest dependent people's land and livelihood rights. We argue from environmental historical and social justice perspectives that the Warufiji should be counted among the winners, not the losers, in the green value chains currently under construction.     

Nature unsettled: How knowledge and power shape ‘nature-based’ approaches to societal challenges

Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining traction in high-level, decision-making arenas as a response to global policy challenges. Claiming to be transformative and pluralistic, NbS aim to resolve societal problems through a focus on nature, which is understood to be a benign ally. This uncritical framing of nature may have unintended and inequitable consequences that undermine the emancipatory potential of NbS.In this paper, we highlight the need to pay attention to epistemic and power dimensions that tend to be hidden in NbS. We assume that nature is neither passive nor external to human society, but is instead expressed in frames (reifying modes of expression) that reflect both knowledge and power in social encounters where NbS are used. Drawing upon five cases, we analyse how particular ways of framing nature express and reinforce the power relations that structure people’s interactions. Each of the five cases relies on a nature-based frame to produce knowledge on climate adaptation, peacebuilding and justice.The analysis reveals how frames of nature are enacted in particular contexts, and how this conditions the potential for societal transformation towards sustainability and pluralistic knowledge. We demonstrate how frames of nature can constrain or enable opportunities for various groups to respond to environmental change. We discuss how the NbS paradigm might better incorporate diverse, situated knowledge and subjectivities, and conclude that this will require a more critical evaluation of NbS practice and research.     

Theories of practices: Agency, technology, and culture : Exploring the relevance of practice theories for the governance of sustainable consumption practices in the new world-order

Within the environmental social sciences, theories of practices are used by an increasing number of authors to analyze the greening of consumption in the new, global order of reflexive modernity. The use of practices as key methodological units for research and governance is suggested as a way to avoid the pitfalls of the individualist and systemic paradigms that dominated the field of sustainable consumption studies for some decades. With the help of practice theory, environmental governance can be renewed in three particular ways: First, the role and responsibilities (not) to be assigned to individual citizen-consumers in environmental change can be specified. Secondly, objects, technologies and infrastructures can be recognized for their crucial contribution to climate governance without lapsing into technological determinism. Third, the cultural framing of sustainability can be enriched by looking into the forms of excitement generated in shared practices of sustainable consumption. We conclude by discussing the need to investigate the globalization of practices from a post-national perspective in both science and policy.     

Values shift in response to social learning through deliberation about protected areas

Salient, long-term solutions to address global environmental change hinge on management strategies that are inclusive of local voices and that recognize the array of values held by surrounding communities. Group-based participatory processes that involve deliberation of multiple stakeholders with varying perspectives—particularly social learning—hold promise to advance inclusive conservation by identifying and creating a shared understanding of the landscape. However, few studies have empirically investigated how the value basis of stakeholder deliberation changes over time in relation to social learning. This study provided a novel platform for local stakeholders from Interior Alaska to deliberate on landscape change and associated management practices in ways that shifted their value orientations. In particular, we used a pre-test, post-test experimental design involving mixed methods to measure how different types of values changed as a result of social learning through an online discussion forum. We found evidence that social learning: 1) activated shared values that were previously hidden through building a relational understanding of others, and 2) shifted values that spanned three levels of psychological stability. As hypothesized, social values that represented expressed preferences for landscape change were most likely to shift in association with social learning. Conversely, shifts in individual values towards self-transcendence required learning to go beyond the discussion forum and be situated within the participants’ broader communities of practice. Overall, this longitudinal study highlights how social learning facilitated through deliberation presents opportunities to identify shared values and spark value shifts across stakeholder groups, thus incorporating diverse viewpoints into decision-making about global environmental change.     

Contesting climate justice in the city: Examining politics and practice in urban climate change experiments

Debates about climate justice have mainly occurred at the international scale, and have focussed on the rights and responsibilities of nation-states to either be protected from the effects of climate change, or to take action to reduce emissions or support adaptation. In this paper, we argue that it is both productive and necessary to examine how climate justice is being pursued at the urban scale, which brings into focus the need for attention to issues of recognition as well as rights and responsibilities. Building on work from environmental justice, which has conceptualized justice as trivalent, we propose that climate justice can be understood as a pyramid, the faces of which are distributions, procedures, rights, responsibilities and recognition. We then apply this conceptual framework to examine climate change interventions in five cities; Bangalore, Monterrey, Hong Kong, Philadelphia and Berlin. Arguing that the politics and practices of urban climate change interventions are constantly engaging with and refracting the idea of justice, we examine how justice was articulated, practiced and contested across our cases. The perspective of recognition emerges as a particularly useful entry point through which to explore the types of rights, responsibilities, distributions and procedures required to respond justly to climate change. We conclude by reflecting on our framework, arguing that it is useful both as an analytical device to interrogate climate justice and to shape the design of climate change interventions which seek to ensure climate justice.     

Mapping narratives of urban resilience in the global south

In the context of global environmental change much hope is placed in the ability of resilience thinking to help address environment-related risks. Numerous initiatives aim at incorporating resilience into urban planning practices. The purpose of this paper is to open up a conversation on urban resilience by unpacking how diverse science methods contribute to the production of different narratives of urban resilience mobilizing different experts and forms of evidence. A number of scholars have cautioned against uncritical approaches to resilience and asked what resilience means and for whom, also pointing out the normative dimension of the concept. Building on this emerging scholarship we use insights from science and technology studies (STS) and critical social sciences to look at the knowledge infrastructures and networks of actors involved in the development of resilience strategies. Drawing on fieldwork in Manila, Nairobi, and Cape Town, we map different narratives of urban resilience identifying the ways in which science serves to legitimate or alienate particular perspectives on what should be done. We discuss the multiple roles that science methods have for resilience planning. Whereas urban resilience is often portrayed as consensual, we show that a range of narratives, with diverse socio-material implications, exist at the city level. In this way we unearth the conflict that lies beneath an apparent consensus for resilience policy and outline future research directions for urban sustainability.     

Citizens, consumers and sustainability: (Re)Framing environmental practice in an age of climate change

Recent moves by national and local policy makers have sought to encourage individuals to engage in a wide range of pro-environmental practices to address both discrete environmental problems and major, global challenges such as climate change. The major framing device for these developments is the notion of ‘citizen–consumers’, which positions individual ecological responsibilities alongside consumer choice logics in a Neo-liberal socio-economic framework. In the environmental social sciences, there have been recent moves to interpret the citizen–consumer through adopting a social practices approach, which advances the notion that in understanding environmental commitments, a deeper appreciation of underlying norms, values, identity politics and consumption is required to uncover the complex processes that lead to environmental practices in specific contexts. This paper argues that whilst these approaches have considerable utility in tracing the normalisation of established and discrete environmental practices in particular contexts, the issue of climate change represents an independent and over-arching discursive conflict between new and embedded practices that challenges the ability of citizen–consumers to act as agents for change. Accordingly, the data presented in this paper suggest that climate change can be seen as an unsettling and dynamic issue that generates discursive conflict in its own right around fundamental issues of knowledge, responsibility, scale and place. The paper therefore argues that a new and more critical perspective is required within environmental social science to understand (conflicting) discourses of sustainable living between the ‘passive’ normalisation of conventional environmental practice and the ‘contested’ ambiguities of climate change.     

Disrupting path dependency: Making room for Indigenous knowledge in river management

Scholars frequently identify how path dependency serves to constrain the process of climate adaptation and is a key feature of maladaptation. Most studies, however, centre on theoretical, rather than empirical-based discussions of what path dependency is, how it occurs, and what factors assist in breaking path dependency. This paper provides a case study for the creation, maintenance, and attempts to break path dependency within the management of rivers in the Rangitāiki Plains of Aotearoa New Zealand from the 1890s until 2017. We deploy a historical institutionalist theorising on path dependency and institutional arrangements, while also incorporating ideas from indigenous and postcolonial scholarship, which extends current understandings of the factors that contribute towards path dependency at a local level. Through archival research, we demonstrate how successive generations of government policies and actions directed with a specific goal and underpinned by the hegemonic social values created a profoundly path dependent system of managing rivers and flood events. Increased flood vulnerability is one of the direct consequences of the plethora of freshwater engineering interventions which were (and are still) undertaken on the Rangitāiki Plains over the last century. The foundation of this path dependency, we argue, resides with the processes of indigenous dispossession and the marginalisation of Māori values from environmental governance and policy. Efforts to break path dependency, therefore, involve the formal recognition of Māori governance, values, and knowledge within policies, and the translation of Māori values into tangible actions that seek to destabilise Western command-and control approaches to flood risk management.     

Maladaptation and development as usual? Investigating climate change mitigation and adaptation projects in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

Based on research into multiple types of climate change mitigation and adaptation (CCMA) projects and policies in Cambodia, this paper documents intersecting social and environmental conflicts that bear striking resemblance to well-documented issues in the history of development projects. Using data from three case studies, we highlight the ways that industrial development and CCMA initiatives are intertwined in both policy and project creation, and how this confluence is creating potentials for maladaptive outcomes. Each case study involves partnerships between international institutions and the national government, each deploys CCMA as either a primary or supporting legitimation, and each failed to adhere to institutional and/or internationally recognized standards of justice. In Cambodia, mismanaged projects are typically blamed on the kleptocratic and patrimonial governance system. We show how such blame obscures the collusion of international partners, who also sidestep their own safeguards, and ignores the potential for maladaptation at the project level and the adverse social and environmental impacts of the policies themselves.

Key policy insights

• Initiatives to mitigate or adapt to climate change look very much like the development projects that caused climate change: Extreme caution must be exercised to ensure policies and projects do not exacerbate the conditions driving climate change.

• Safeguards ‘on paper’ are insufficient to avoid negative impacts and strict accountability mechanisms must be put in place.

• Academic researchers can be part of that accountability mechanism through case study reports, policy briefs, technical facilitation to help ensure community needs are met and safeguards are executed as written.

• Impacts beyond the project scale must be assessed to avoid negative consequences for social and ecological systems at the landscape level.

     

Equity,environmental justice and sustainability: incomplete approaches in climate change politics

The diversity of the different takes on the ethical concepts of equity and environmental justice in the environmental literature requires that a unifying framework, to properly map their theoretical and conceptual loci in environmental ethics, is defined. Specifically, the concepts of equity and environmental justice have often been conflated into one even though they rest on different philosophical foundations and have different denotations, connotations and implications. The inconsistent use of these constructs is perverse in both scholarly discussions and global environmental policy formulation and detracts from conceptual clarity and their analytical usefulness. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to provide a mapping of the different takes to the moral aspects of global environmental decisions. Attempt is made to clarify the conceptual and philosophical denotations of environmental justice and equity from the point of view of philosophy, law and moral ethics. Our analysis leads to the construing of environmental justice as a broad overarching concept encompassing all justice issues in environmental decision-making, including both procedural and distributive justice, which is what is usually meant by equity. The resulting framework allows us to grasp the competing, conflicting and incomplete approaches to environmental justice as captured in the North–South conceptions of the construct more effectively. It is our hope that our conclusions would be valuable to researchers of global environmental change and politics.     

Indigenous frameworks for observing and responding to climate change in Alaska

Despite a keen awareness of climate change, northern Indigenous Peoples have had limited participation in climate-change science due to limited access, power imbalances, and differences in worldview. A western science emphasis on facts and an indigenous emphasis on relationships to spiritual and biophysical components indicate important but distinct contributions that each knowledge system can make. Indigenous communities are experiencing widespread thawing of permafrost and coastal erosion exacerbated by loss of protective sea ice. These climate-induced changes threaten village infrastructure, water supplies, health, and safety. Climate-induced habitat changes associated with loss of sea ice and with landscape drying and extensive wildfires interact with northern development to bring both economic opportunities and environmental impacts. A multi-pronged approach to broadening indigenous participation in climate-change research should: 1) engage communities in designing climate-change solutions; 2) create an environment of mutual respect for multiple ways of knowing; 3) directly assist communities in achieving their adaptation goals; 4) promote partnerships that foster effective climate solutions from both western and indigenous perspectives; and 5) foster regional and international networking to share climate solutions.     

Opening space for equity and justice in resilience: A subjective approach to household resilience assessment

While resilience has grown to become a well-established goal of policy and practice, assessing resilience remains an outstanding problem. To date, measurement has largely relied on the identification of proxy indicators, inevitably shaping what is measured in ways that reflect underlying assumptions, generalisations and approximations, and raising the question of whose values are being embedded into resilience. These concerns reflect recent interest in the role of recognition justice in resilience, and in particular how marginalisation from meaning-making processes creates the conditions for the inequitable distribution of outcomes in practice. Here, we propose a two stage, subjective approach to resilience assessment, starting with rapid household interviews that invite participants to assess the likely impact of multiple shock and stressor storylines. In a second step, participatory qualitative methods are employed to support inductive investigation of resilience focused on the factors that differentiate those reporting relatively high and low resilience. We illustrate this using fieldwork data from 569 households in Bangladesh. This subjective approach enables households to engage in the production of knowledge about their resilience, revealing two core features of situated heterogeneity: the forms of difference, and the underlying causes. Underlying causes arise from interactions and feedbacks between social, political, economic and institutional conditions that are highly context specific, while significant forms of difference include intra-community and scalar heterogeneity; vulnerability to specific or generalised shocks; and the role of undesirable practices in securing resilience. The results underline the need for resilience to be assessed in relation to local understandings of precarity, and through the expression of senses of justice that inform local conceptions of wellbeing. This means moving beyond positivist approaches and placing epistemic diversity at the centre of resilience assessment, enabling the production of a situated understanding of how and why resilience is differentiated, and offering an analytical starting point from which policy and practice can drive towards equitable resilience.     

REDD+ projects and national-level Readiness processes: a case study from Kenya

The Bali Action Plan and Cancun agreements on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, plus forest conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) have encouraged demonstration activities as part of Readiness and a step towards national approaches. This has enabled important growth in pilot and demonstration projects. Yet an understanding about how these projects are connected and contribute to national-level technical, policy, and institutional preparedness (Readiness) for REDD+ is lacking. This article examines the linkages between national processes and the private-sector-driven Kasigau Corridor REDD+ project in Kenya. The study reveals interesting cross-scale interactions that have increased over time and have high potential for harnessing national-level processes through lessons from the project level. Key innovations from the Kasigau Corridor Project include the implementation of REDD+ in dry forests, operationalization of conservation easements in the context of REDD+, and demonstration of potential ways of obtaining upfront finance for REDD+. The study also provides a number of key recommendations for Kenya and REDD+ in general, including official endorsement of stand-alone REDD+ projects under national Readiness schemes and exploring jurisdictional and nested REDD+ approaches. Additionally, more accommodating national-level frameworks for attracting private-sector engagement and investments, and for integrating, scaling-out, or scaling-up lessons from such projects, would be needed to enhance national REDD+ Readiness.     

Public understandings of air pollution: the ‘localisation’ of environmental risk

Recent perspectives on public understandings of global environmental risk have emphasised the interpretation, judgement and ‘sense-making’ that takes place, modes of perception that are inextricably tied to aspects of ‘local’ context. In this paper we offer a current picture of the ways in which residents think about the problem of urban air pollution. To do this we utilise elements of a wider research project involving a survey and in-depth interviews with members of the public. In this way — and drawing upon the prior air pollution perception literature and recent work in the field of environmental and risk perception — we present a more analytical interpretation than has hitherto been approached. Conclusions are drawn which stress the localisation of people's understandings within the immediate physical, social and cultural landscape and also through a trust in personal experiences over any kind of information-based evidence. From this position, and with the development of implications for policy, we demonstrate the need to study public perceptions if the objectives of air quality, and more generally, environmental management are to be achieved.     

The crucial role of policy surveillance in international climate policy

An extensive literature shows that information-creating mechanisms enhance the transparency of and can support participation and compliance in international agreements. This paper draws from game theory, international relations, and legal scholarship to make the case for how transparency through policy surveillance can facilitate more effective international climate change policy architecture. I draw lessons from policy surveillance in multilateral economic, environmental, and national security contexts to inform a critical evaluation of the historic practice of monitoring and reporting under the global climate regime. This assessment focuses on how surveillance produces evidence to inform policy design, enables comparisons of mitigation effort, and illustrates the adequacy of the global effort in climate agreements. I also describe how the institution of policy surveillance can facilitate a variety of climate policy architectures. This evaluation of policy surveillance suggests that transparency is necessary for global climate policy architecture.     

Assessing model-based and conflict-based uncertainty

Assessment panels need to communicate scientific uncertainty, and often face choices about how to simplify or synthesize it. One important distinction is between uncertainty that has been modeled, and that which derives from disagreement among experts. From an economic decision-making perspective the two are in many ways logically equivalent, yet from psychological and social perspectives they are quite different. An experiment on the communication of climate change uncertainty suggests that the two framings of uncertainty differentially influence people's estimates of likelihood and their motivation to take responsive action. It is recommended that assessment panels pay close attention to the social features of uncertainty, such as conflict between experts.