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)