The Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas): ecological distribution conflicts as forces for sustainability

Sustainability Science, Apr 2018

Leah Temper, Federico Demaria, Arnim Scheidel, Daniela Del Bene, Joan Martinez-Alier

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The Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas): ecological distribution conflicts as forces for sustainability

The Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas): ecological distribution conflicts as forces for sustainability Leah Temper 0 1 2 Federico Demaria 0 1 2 Arnim Scheidel 0 1 2 Daniela Del Bene 0 1 2 Joan MartinezA‑lier 0 1 2 0 Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) , Buenos Aires , Argentina 1 Research & Degrowth , Barcelona , Spain 2 Handled by Osamu Saito, UNU-Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability , Japan 3 Federico Demaria Vol.:(011233456789) Introduction The environmental movement may be “the most comprehensive and influential movement of our time” (Castells 1997: 67) , representing for the ‘post-industrial’ age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial period. Yet while strike statistics have been collected for many countries since the late nineteenth century (van der Velden 2007) ,1 until the present no administrative body tracks the occurrence and frequency of mobilizations or protests related to environmental issues at the global scale, in the way that the World Labour Organization tracks the occurrence of strike action.2 Thus until the present it has been impossible to properly document the prevalence and incidence of contentious activity related to environmental issues or to track the ebb and flow of protest activity. Such an exercise is necessary because if the twentieth century has been the one of workers struggles, the twenty-first century could well be the one of environmentalists. This Special Feature presents the results from such an exercise—The Global Atlas of Environmental Justice— a unique global inventory of cases of socio-environmental conflicts built through a collaborative process between academics and activist groups which includes both qualitative and quantitative data on thousands of conflictive projects as well as on the social response. Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain This Special Feature applies the lenses of political ecology and ecological economics to unpack and understand these socio-environmental conflicts, otherwise known as ‘ecological distribution conflicts’, (hereafter EDCs, Martinez-Alier 1995, 2002) . The contributions in this special feature explore the why, what, how and who of these contentious processes within a new comparative political ecology. The articles in this special issue underline the need for a politicization of socio-environmental debates, whereby political refers to the struggle over the kinds of worlds the people want to create and the types of ecologies they want to live in. We put the focus on who gains and who loses in ecological processes arguing that these issues need to be at the center of sustainability science. Secondly, we demonstrate how environmental justice groups and movements coming out of those conflicts play a fundamental role in redefining and promoting sustainability. We contend that protests are not disruptions to smooth governance that need to be managed and resolved, but that they express grievances as well as aspirations and demands and in this way may serve as potent forces that can lead to the transformation towards sustainability of our economies, societies and ecologies. This special feature The articles in this collection contribute to a core question of sustainability science—why and through what political, social and economic processes some are denied the right to a safe environment, and how to support the necessary social and political transformation to enact environmental justice. While there exists broad consensus about the existence of the sustainability crisis (World Economic Forum 1 We are like social historians who record in an EJAtlas contemporary socio-environmental struggles as others recorded peasant uprisings or labor union strikes around the world http://www.laborbooks .com/Item/strikewrld. 2 See http://laborsta.ilo.org/). 2018), everything else is a source of dispute. Scholars debate among market-based solutions, technological innovations and top-down policies. Yet the mainstream techno-managerial solutions proposed tend to overlook relations of power and issues of distribution, and to dismiss or minimize the import of political dissent. There are calls for a transformation towards sustainability, yet as Swyngedouw (2011 : 76) points out “the techno-managerial eco-consensus maintains we have to change radically, but within the contours of the existing state of the situation […] so that nothing really has to change!”. Sustainability discourses often remain stuck in what is called a post-political space: a political formation that forecloses the political, the legitimacy of dissenting voices and positions. Such an approach risks falling into the trap of “everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same”3. At the same time communities around the world are organizing and coming out to the streets en masse to oppose or problematize the imposition of “development” projects (...truncated)


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Leah Temper, Federico Demaria, Arnim Scheidel, Daniela Del Bene, Joan Martinez-Alier. The Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas): ecological distribution conflicts as forces for sustainability, Sustainability Science, 2018, pp. 1-12, DOI: 10.1007/s11625-018-0563-4