Sydney Environment Institute academics, Professor David Schlosberg and Hannah Della Bosca, together with their project partners, have published the fourth and final paper from their Australian Research Council-funded global research project “Realising Environmental Justice: Strategy and Tactics for Transformation.” The project examined how scholars and activists understand and pursue environmental justice, and identifying the key strategies, barriers and approaches shaping efforts to achieve transformative environmental and climate justice.
The article, now out in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, employs Q methodology to examine the multiple ways that environmental justice (EJ) scholars and activists understand the task of creating real change, and presents an overview of approaches seen as enabling success for EJ initiatives.
While there is broad agreement on the central strategic focus on racial and socioeconomic injustices, the paper identifies three distinct approaches within that consensus: (1) an ontological focus, addressing decolonial and redistributive visions of racial and socio-economic justice in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and other marginal social groups; (2) a strategic systems focus on political disruption, based on networked power from below and transformative practical strategies; and (3) a methods focus, using tools, tactics, and techniques for prioritising local knowledges, participation, recognition, and inclusion in public, political, and legal forums.
In turn, the researchers found that scholars and activists most often disagreed with mainstream strategies that focus on traditional policy-making and legal institutions. The authors hope this work will be helpful for those attempting to address environmental injustice in a moment when EJ faces intense political and corporate attacks.
This is the last of four publications out of this global study, which included an impressive team of researchers: Lauren Rickards (La Trobe University), Rebecca Pearse (Australian National University), SEI academic Hannah Della Bosca (University of Sydney), Oli Moraes (Climates), and Lisa de Kleyn (La Trobe University), in addition to SEI Director Professor David Schlosberg.
The first publication, “Critical Environmental Justice in Contemporary Scholarship and Movements”, in Environmental Politics, addressed the growing global consensus around a critical EJ approach focused on issues of race, gender, colonization, capital and power. It found that, beyond this strong consensus, differences of emphasis and interest exist around knowledges, participation, the liberal state, and movement praxis and political disruption.
The second article, “Compounding Barriers to Environmental Justice,” in Local Environment, focused on the obstacles and barriers faced by environmental justice movements and advocates. It identified four primary categories of barriers to change from the survey and interviews, each capturing different sites of EJ struggles and revealing distinct dimensions of environmental injustice: The first, and broadest, refers to the structural marginalisation, particularly historical and contemporary violence, which underpins the other three barriers. The second is more specific and refers to institutional obstacles, such as weak legal and political institutions. The third is exclusionary public policy processes which silence community and social justice concerns; and the fourth barrier includes the bureaucratic cultures facing the EJ movement as well as internal strategic dilemmas within the movement. Overall, the results point to the multi-layered, compounding way that environmental injustice is embedded and perpetuated – something our US colleagues have found supercharged in each space in the current political environment.
Finally, the team’s use of Q methodology in an engaged and participatory way also led to the publication of a piece on the methodology in Environmental Sociology: “Q Methodology and Environmental Social Science: Adapting Q for Complexity and Inclusion in Environmental Justice Research.” There, the authors discuss the methodological adaptations and deliberative infrastructure developed in their use of Q and the importance of an ethic of engagement and respect for participants as they were included in co-interpretation of the data. The piece reflects on the challenges and benefits of the approach and aims to support others interested in using the methodology while remaining driven by the ethics of environmental justice.
Acknowledgements go to the Australian Research Council for funding this work, and to the incredible team who helped to realise it in the midst of some difficult and turbulent times.