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GlobalizingEnvironmental JusticeThe Geography and Politics of
Frame Contextualizationand Evolution
GORDON WALKERLancaster University, UK
abstract The use of the language of environmental justiceas a
frame for collective action on socio-environmentalconcerns has now
evolved and extended far beyond itsoriginal formulation in the USA.
This article examines twoways in which the use of the environmental
justice frame hasglobalized. The first involves the international
emergence ofideas, meanings and framing processes in new settings
aroundthe world. The horizontal diffusion of an
environmentaljustice frame is traced, examining processes of
transfer,reproduction and contextualization that are taking
placewithin the political and institutional cultures of
differentcountries. The cases of the UK and South Africa
areexamined in detail. The second involves the verticalextension of
the environmental justice frame to encompassconcerns that do not
end at national borders but that involverelations between countries
and global scale issues such astrade agreements, transfers of
wastes and climate change. Theimplications of these two shifts, the
tensions that haveemerged around them and their relevance to the
pursuit ofprogressive global social policy objectives are
considered.
keywords environmental justice, framing, globalization,
SouthAfrica, UK
ARTICLE 355
Global Social Policy Copyright The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and
permissions:http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
1468-0181 vol. 9(3): pp 355382; 343640;
DOI:10.1177/1468018109343640 http://gsp.sagepub.com
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1. Introduction
Environmental justice became in the 1980s a language and a frame
for mak-ing normative claims about the relationship between
environment and social
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difference. The first conjunction of the two words to provide a
label for specificforms of political activism is universally
attributed to campaigners in the USA,working to resist the
imposition of toxic and polluting facilities in minorityand poor
communities (Bullard, 1999; Taylor, 2000). The ideas,
meanings,aspirations and boundaries of the environmental justice
movement were con-structed in ways that reflected the context of US
politics at the time, in particularthe coming together of
previously separate traditions of civil rights,
anti-toxic,community and occupational health politics (Capek, 1993;
Faber, 2005). Theuse of the language of environmental justice has
now extended far beyond itsorigins. The limited early delineation
of the socio-environmental concerns ofthe environmental justice
movement in the USA has been extended materi-ally, spatially and
politically, to produce a far more expansive field of activismand
contested claim-making. As a range of commentaries have
recentlyobserved (Carruthers, 2008; Schlosberg, 2007; Schroeder et
al., 2008; Sze andLondon, 2008;Walker and Bulkeley, 2006) it is now
possible to speak of envi-ronmental justice in far more global
terms and as a dynamic frame for activism,research and policy that
has international as well as local manifestations andagenda. This
is an important development which has implications for how
weunderstand environmental justice as a concept, its fixity and
contextuality, andfor how environmental justice frames, as used in
both collective action andpolicy communities, are becoming more or
less powerful and influential.In this article I utilize a simple
categorization for analysing the globalization
of environmental justice framing in two related dimensions. The
first dimensioninvolves the horizontal emergence of the language
and rhetoric of environ-mental justice in new settings around the
world. Here the international uti-lization of the frame is mapped,
and processes of diffusion, reproduction andcontextualization that
have taken place within the political and institutionalcultures of
different countries are analysed. Two countries, the UK and
SouthAfrica, are examined in detail, considering the dynamics that
have beeninvolved and the degree of influence of the US
environmental justice frame ineach country in comparison to other
indigenous factors. The second dimensionof globalization involves
the vertical extension of the scope of environmentaljustice frames
to encompass concerns that do not end at national borders butthat
involve relations between countries (Anand, 2004) and global scale
issuessuch as trade agreements, transfers of wastes and climate
change. Throughsuch scaling up, environmental justice activism can
no longer be characterizedas being only about local militant
particularisms (Harvey, 1996) and theintra-national distribution of
environmental bads (Dobson 1988), whichagain has implications for
how we understand its scope and the practice oflocal and
transnational activism. It will be argued that environmental
justicehas become a far-reaching, mobile and evolving frame for
understanding andacting on socio-environmental concerns, subject to
necessary but sometimesproblematic processes of
recontextualization. There are tensions involved inthese processes
around for example the scope for managerialist redefinition
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and loss of radical potential which the cases examined in this
article will beused to explore. There are also questions as to how
productively the use of thenew language of environmental justice
can give additional voice and influenceto struggles that pre-exist
its arrival and application. Within these dynamicsthere is the
potential for productive interactions with wider global social
policyobjectives and with the diversity of actors who are seeking
to provide a counter-weight to the ideologies and operating
practices of transnational corporationsand international
organizations. I begin the discussion by focusing on thenotion of
framing and briefly on how the environmental justice frame
firstemerged in the USA.
2. Framing, Collective Action and EnvironmentalJustice in the
USA
The concepts of frames and framing are well established
particularly in theanalysis of social movements and collective
action, although they are notrestricted in their application to
this domain of political life. Drawing onGoffmans (1974) initial
theorization of framing as a schemata of interpretation,this body
of work has argued that the work of framing is central to the
activitiesof social movements, involving the ongoing production and
reproduction ofideas and meanings and ways of understanding the
world. Actors within socialmovements, along with and in competition
with others who are also aimingto assert their own preferred ideas
and meanings, are signifiers, actively doingthe work of framing as
a process of reality construction (Benford and Snow,2000). Framing
typically has a profile of different elements, including
normativearticulation, diagnosis of problems and responsibilities
and prognostic assertionsof solutions and process of change.
Collective action frames also vary consid-erably in their scope,
elasticity and flexibility, some being tightly limited to aset of
closely related problems, others to a far broader canvas to the
degreethat they become master frames that may transcend the
particularities ofspecific social movements (Taylor, 2000).Gamson
(1992) contends that notions of justice and injustice are always
part
of the frames of collective action, identifying victims of
injustice and stressingtheir victim status to call attention to
situations and circumstances that needto be addressed.While others
have argued that this is not necessarily the case,there is no doubt
that justice and injustice claims are commonplace with thework of
social movements of many different forms (Benford and Snow,
2000).Environmental justice can therefore be readily interpreted as
a collectiveaction frame and the environmental justice movement in
the USA has accord-ingly been analysed in terms of the framing work
that this has involved(Sandweiss, 1998; Taylor, 2000). Capek (1993)
provides one of the first suchanalyses, identifying the salient
characteristics of the environmental justiceframe as it emerged
from local community struggles over the siting of toxic
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and waste sites in minority communities in different parts of
the country. Sheargues that local residents ability to mobilize
against perceived threats totheir safety was intimately linked to
their adoption of an environmental jus-tice frame and that this was
constructed through an interplay between thescales of the local
community and the national level of the anti-toxics move-ment. More
recently Benford (2005) has examined the evolution of the
envi-ronmental justice frame in the USA over a 20 year period,
emphasizing thefact that frames are not static and given, but
through the active work of fram-ing are open to continual
redefinition and reformulation. He traces how aninitial innovative
discourse of environmental racism, which resonated wellwith
minority communities mobilizing against risks to their safety and
well-being, broadened to the environmental justice frame (a master
frame forTaylor, 2000), which was both more elastic and inclusive
of the many dimen-sions of environmental discrimination that were
being diagnosed, as well asmore positive in its ability to assert
rights and visions of what the achievementof greater justice might
constitute. Following the movements significantimpacts both through
local legal challenges and pressurizing for policy inno-vation at a
national level (Bullard, 1999), Benford outlines how more
recentlyit has struggled to maintain its salience and momentum in
the face of politi-cal change and counterframes emerging that have
been strongly critical of theeconomic impacts of environmental
justice activism and its more radicalimplications (Chang and Hwang,
2000).Drawing on this body of analysis and taking the evolution of
the environmental
justice frame in the USA into account, we can identify a set of
key characteristics:
1. It has emphasised an identity politics of race reflecting its
emergence froma history and infrastructure of grassroots civil
rights activism. This madeit not only an innovative and radical
frame but also a new brand of envi-ronmentalism (Schlosberg, 1999;
Taylor, 2000), involving a far morediverse constituency of
activists than in the traditional environmentalmovement, a
diversity that has extended over time to include many
differentracial, ethnic and cultural groups. It would be wrong
though to characterizethe US environmental justice frame as being
only about a politics of race,as other forms of class and identity
politics including gender (Kurtz, 2007;Stein, 2004) have been
involved, to some degree reflecting a wider critiqueof racial
politics in the post civil rights era.
2. It has maintained a resolute focus on questions of justice to
people in theenvironment (Agyeman et al., 2003: 327), rather than a
politicized concernfor justice to nature a separate question of
ecological justice in thecategorization of Low and Gleeson (1998).
This anthropogenic placing ofpeople and communities at the centre
of the frame, particularly thosewho are marginalized economically
and politically as well as environmen-tally, again distinguished
environmental justice from the traditionalframes of environmental
groups in the USA that focused on wildernessand conservation
concerns (Shrader-Frechette, 2002).
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3. In terms of its environmental boundaries, the early
formulation ofenvironmental justice was narrowly focused on forms
of technologicalpollution, waste and risk particularly those forms
of environmental badassociated with the siting of landfill,
incinerators, chemical plants andthe like. This narrowness has
since given way to a far broader profile ofenvironmental concerns
(Taylor, 2000) moving beyond only environmentalburdens to include
access to environmental benefits and resources of variousforms
(Mutz et al., 2002) and concerns that some argue could or shouldbe
classified as social rather than environmental (Benford, 2005).
Theseshifts have extended the constituency of interested locally
and nationallyorganized groups and increased the scope for
productive interactionbetween environmental and social policy
activists.
4. It has similarly evolved beyond an initial emphasis on issues
of distributivejustice, to bemore inclusive of other forms of
normative claim and assertion.Environmental justice activism has
always been concerned with more thandistribution, including demands
for participatory justice in particular(Schlosberg, 2007;
Shrader-Frechette, 2002; Wenz, 1988), but distributiveclaims about
who gets what in the environment have dominated
mostrepresentations. This is partly because of the close
association betweeninitial phases of activism and statistical
studies which analysed patterns ofdistribution of environmental
bads in relation to the racial and incomeprofiles of affected
communities. These found repeated patterns of apparentbias and
disproportionate concentration in poor, African American
andHispanic areas (Bowen, 2002; Brown, 1995; Mohai and Saha, 2006)
andthe courts were used to challenge siting decisions that further
reproducedthese biases.
5. In diagnosing the causes of inequality and injustice, or
assigning blameand responsibility it has been focused on industry
and corporate actors for example making siting decisions or
operating installations to varyingstandards (Gouldson, 2006) and on
the institutionalized (and racist)practices of the state operating
regressive and exclusionary decision makingand regulatory
processes.
6. It has been explicitly inclusive of multiple interconnected
scales of analysis,but until recently (see later discussion) these
have been largely containedwithin the borders of the USA. A key
part of the environmental justiceframe has been both the horizontal
interconnectionsmade betweenmultiplelocal grassroots struggles
across the USA and the vertical scaling up tonational claims and
regulatory settings (Kurtz, 2002; Towers, 2000).However, despite
rhetorical references to a wider global sense of justicefor all
people, for example in the Principles of Environmental Justice
laidout in 1991 (Bullard, 1999), for some time these horizontal and
verticalscalar connections remained firmly bounded within national
borders.
7. While a broadly based environmental justice frame has been
based in avibrant social movement as well as in the work of
academics with whichthemovement has been closely connected (Cable
et al., 2005) other versions
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of an environmental justice frame have emerged within theUS
governmentand its agencies, in part because of the success of
activists in demandingpolicy attention. The creation of anOffice of
Environmental Justice withinthe Environmental Protection Agency and
the signing of Executive Order12898 in 1994 requiring federal
regulatory agencies to make environmentaljustice a part of all they
do were key steps in this process. The consequencehas been the
emergence of a managerial framing of what environmentalinjustice
constitutes, a frame that is highly circumscribed in comparisonwith
that of the activist community and problematic in both its
conceptu-alization and implementation (Block and Whitehead, 1999;
Holifield,2001, 2004).
While not exhaustive, these seven dimensions of the framing of
environmentaljustice in the USA provide a sufficient
characterization with which to nowproceed to examine how the use of
an environmental justice frame hasemerged in other places, across
new networks and at a global scale.
3. Globalizing Horizontally: New Places and Contexts
One of the less explored currents of work on collective action
frames is howthey spread and move into new political and cultural
contexts. Benford andSnow (2000) highlight this gap in
understanding, but suggest that processesof strategic selection and
strategic fitting will be involved strategic selectionencompassing
situations in which there is intentional cross-cultural
borrowingand adoption of the borrowed frame, or some of its
components. Strategic fittingencompassing situations in which there
is intentional cross-cultural promotion,with active tailoring and
fitting of the objects or practices of diffusion to a newcultural
context. In both case it is clear that significant changes,
reformulationsand transformations of the frame may take place. We
can identify otherpotential dynamics as well, including, for
example, frames being adopted atdifferent scales of collective
action to those in which they originated andframes transferring
away from social movements actors towards others thatsee strategic
advantage in their adoption. Before exploring these
possibilitiesfurther it is useful to get a view of the extent of
the movement and adoptionof environmental justice frame around the
world.The movement of the environmental justice frame beyond the
borders of
the US has happened over an extended period, although as Debbane
and Keil(2004) show each particular case of transfer may happen
relatively rapidly.The first manifestations of labelling and naming
using the term environmentaljustice can be found in the early to
mid-1990s, with a more expansive diffusiontaking place after 2000.1
A snapshot taken in mid-2008 provides an indicationof how far the
use of the language had by then reached. Table 1 lists the
countriesin which the specific term environmental justice has been
applied and written
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about in relation to indigenous environmental concerns, based on
a search ofacademic and grey literature databases and web searches.
This listing isindicative at best, as there are problems in relying
on database and websearches. On the one hand an environmental
justice frame may be in usewithin a country without this having
been written about (in English) ornamed precisely in this way; and
conversely environmental justice may beused as a framework for
academic analysis rather than this being explicitly partof the
discourse of those involved in activism or policy debates. As
discussedfurther later, it would also be wrong to interpret the
adoption of an environ-mental justice frame, as synonymous with the
extension or development of anindigenous environmental justice
movement this being far more than a mat-ter of framing. Even so the
list of 37 countries in Table 1 is extensive anddemonstrates that
the language of environmental justice (at least) has been inuse in
each of the major global regions and in some cases across many of
thecountries within these regions.This indication of the scale and
extent of environmental justice framing
activity militates against simple generalization or distillation
of the mechanismsof diffusion and adoption that have been involved.
It is clear though that delib-erate transnational networking
between environmental justice activist groupsin different countries
has been part of the story, paralleling wider trends acrossvarious
forms of social movement in which globalization from below
(Brecheret al., 2000), through international alliances, coalitions
and networks, has beenobserved (Bandy and Smith, 2005; Routledge et
al., 2006; Smith and Johnston,2002). For example, the Environmental
and Economic Justice Project based inLos Angeles set up in 1993
worked to support international networking and thebuilding of
grassroots organizations in developing countries through
conveninginternational meetings and activist exchanges (Faber,
2005). The Coalitionfor Environmental Justice, a civic action
network of activists, lawyers, andresearchers from environmental
and human rights organizations in Bulgaria,Czech Republic, Hungary,
Macedonia, Romania, and Slovakia, was established
Walker: Globalizing Environmental Justice 361
table 1 Countries included in written material using an
environmental justice frame
Region Countries
Africa Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, Cameroon,Zambia,
Angola, Mozambique
Asia Taiwan, Israel, India, Singapore, PhilippinesAustralasia
Australia, New ZealandEurope United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden,
France, Spain,
Belarus, Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia,Czech
Republic, Latvia
North America United States, CanadaSouth and Central Brazil,
Peru, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Columbia, MexicoAmerica
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in 2003 to actively promote an environmental justice frame
across Central andEastern Europe. Network activities included
linking up with environmentaljustice activists in the USA to form a
Transatlantic Initiative on EnvironmentalJustice in 2005 (Pellow et
al., 2005), and the laying out of an agenda of key issuesfor
Central and Eastern Europe particularly focusing on the Roma who
arediscriminated against across the region (Steger, 2007). There
have been a num-ber of such transnational initiatives using an
environmental justice framewithin other regions including South
America (Carruthers, 2008), Africa(Kalan and Peek, 2005) or focused
on particular environmental issues such asan anti-toxics agenda
(Pellow, 2007).Such networks do appear to have played a significant
role in promoting the
diffusion of language and ideas from the USA (encompassing both
strategicselection and fitting in Benford and Snows terms) as well
as generating inter-action and learning between countries within
regions although these may notbe the only mechanisms involved.
Amore in-depth analysis is required not onlyto understand how
frames have emerged in new places, but also to understandhow an
environmental justice frame once travelled becomes contextualised
inits new cultural and political setting or becomes locally
grounded (Debbaneand Keil, 2004: 210). For this reason two cases
will be examined in closer detail the UK and South Africa cases
that contrast in many ways but, as we shallsee, also show
similarities in the contextualization processes involved.
3.1. THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE FRAME IN THE UKIn 1998, Dobson
noted that in comparison to the emphatic arrival of justiceon the
environmental agenda in the USA, there had been no direct
equivalentin Britain (Dobson, 1988: 26). The closest
contemporaneous parallel to theUS experience had been the UK Black
Environmental Network (BEN),which in the 1980s highlighted the
white, middle-class nature of much envi-ronmentalism and worked
with local black communities to develop environ-mental awareness
and involvement in conservation work (Agyeman, 1987).However BEN
remained small scale and failed to mobilize any
significantconstituency of support or to develop a more radical
campaigning profile. Anumber of factors may have contributed to
this a far weaker infrastructureand tradition of radical civil
rights politics in the UK, the spatial patterningof where ethnic
minorities were concentrated that did not so obviously coin-cide
with patterns of environmental degradation (Walker et al., 2001)
and alack of grassroots protest activity around which to organize a
wider campaign.Similarly, while there was a history of opposition
to the siting of toxicand polluting facilities in the UK including
the formation of networkinginitiatives such as Community Lobby
Opposing Unhealthy Tips andCommunities Against Toxics these had
failed to develop any form of col-lective agenda around justice
arguments.In contrast then to the grassroots emergence of
environmental justice in the
USA it was a mainstream and established environmental group,
Friends of the
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Earth (FoE), which first started to work with an environmental
justice framein the UK. In the mid-1990s FoE had begun to develop a
more socially awareand urban theme to its work (for example related
to fuel poverty issues)and to work in closer collaboration with
social and development NGOs(e.g. through the Real World Coalition
formed in 1996) and an environmen-tal justice frame fitted well
with these developments. Through collaborationswith academics
working to formulate a UK environmental justice agenda(Stephens et
al., 2001) and networking with US activists (Bob Bullard wasbrought
to the UK as a guest speaker at a number of academic and
NGOevents), there was both a drawing on the US environmental
justice frame anda purposeful redefinition to fit the UK political
context at the time. In particular,an opportunity was seen to make
the environment more directly relevant tothe recently installed New
Labour administration that had campaignedstrongly on social
exclusion and inequality issues. A series of pamphlets
andpublications produced by others NGOs, consultancies and
political groupswere highlighting the linkages between theNewLabour
governments prioritieson social exclusion and the social dimensions
of environmental concerns.Jacobs (1999), for example, in a pamphlet
for the Fabian Society developed argu-ments around environmental
exclusion as a component of a new environmentalmodernization
agenda.This combination of both drawing on the US frame alongside
redefinition
of its elements into the UK context can be seen across FoEs work
at this time.Its first significant move was to undertake research
that closely mirrored theUS model of analysing the distribution of
polluting industrial facilities toreveal biases in siting patterns
(Friends of the Earth, 2000, 2001). In makingthis step it
explicitly sought to convey a new style of gritty urban
environmentalconcern (with some parallels to the positioning of
activists in the USA) thisis the sharp end of social exclusion. On
top of unemployment and crime thesefamilies and communities face
the grime of industrial pollution. Here pollutionis as far from a
middle-class concern as it can get (Friends of the Earth, 2000:2).
However, the research focused not on siting in relation to patterns
of raceor ethnicity, but on patterns of income a social class
orientation thatreflected the political context at the time and the
lack of strong race-basedcivil rights mobilization in theUK. Key
agenda-setting publications developedby FoE in collaborationwith
academics and otherNGOs are similarly positioned introducing
environmental justice by referring to the US experience, beforethen
laying out a set of concerns that are quite distinct from the
emphases ofthe US frame (Boardman et al., 1999; Stephens et al.,
2001) These includeinternational and intragenerational issues,
inequalities in access to environ-mental resources including food,
energy and water, transport needs and risksand aesthetic, mental
and spiritual needs (such as quiet and access to the coun-tryside).
Again the lack of a distinct racial dimension is apparent in, for
example,the way the foreword to one such publication positions the
significant socialdivisions in class and age terms, environmental
problems are serious and
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impact most heavily on the most vulnerable members of society,
the old, thevery young and the poor (Boardman et al., 1999:
1).Another distinctive feature of the diffusion of the
environmental justice
frame into the UK was its ready adoption into the discourses and
policies ofgovernmental bodies (Agyeman and Evans, 2004; Bulkeley
and Walker,2005). Whereas it took many years of concerted
campaigning in the USA toget the Environmental Protection Agency to
begin examining questions ofenvironmental justice, its equivalent
in the UK, the Environment Agency(EA), proactively did so early on
as part of its own strategic political positioning(Chalmers and
Colvin, 2005). The EA included a debate on environmentalequality at
its 2000 Annual General Meeting and initiated its own analysis
ofpatterns of the social distribution of various environmental
indicators in twocommissioned research projects on environment and
social justice andaddressing environmental inequalities both
focused not on race but on socialdeprivation following the classic
US environmental justice method of statis-tically analysing spatial
data sets at national and regional scales (e.g. Walkeret al., 2003,
2007). The reframing work undertaken by the EA included notonly its
definition of relevant social and environmental concerns
(includingflooding and water quality, both central to its
regulatory remit), but also thenaming of the frame itself. While
clearly derived initially from the US envi-ronmental justice frame,
the EA settled on naming its own agenda as beingone of
environmental inequalities with a position statement under this
head-ing produced in 2004 (EA, 2004). This was seen as both less
politically con-tentious and more aligned with familiar policy
discourses such as that onhealth inequalities.A framing process
going on more widely within government led by the
Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs which
coordinated across departmental working group on environment and
social justice andcommissioned a wide ranging evidence review
(Lucas et al., 2004) alsoserved to incorporate environmental
justice ideas into pre-existing sustainabledevelopment frames
(Agyeman and Evans, 2004), rather than taking these upto form a
distinctive new theme. Sustainable development was well
estab-lished as a master frame in the UK by the late 1990s and
through incorpo-rating the interaction between social and
environmental dimensions ofsustainability, was seen to readily
accommodate questions of social differenceand inequality. In this
vein the 1999 National Sustainable Development strat-egy stated
that everyone should share the benefits of increased prosperity
anda clean and safe environment Our needs must not be met by
treating oth-ers, including future generations and people elsewhere
in the world, unfairly(UK Government, 1999).In various ways then
the adoption and reframing of environmental justice
in theUKwas contextualized into contemporary cultural
andpolitical conditions,moving from themargins to themainstream
(Agyeman and Evans, 2004: 159),but also arguably in the process
being stripped of some of its more radical and
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distinctive qualities. Its adoption by elites in existing
established environmentalgroups and government agencies (Bulkeley
and Walker, 2005), its lack ofgrassroots mobilization and its
renaming and incorporation into existingframes, each to some degree
weakened the frames substance and significancein comparison to the
US version. This is brought home by the contrastbetween two self
named Environmental Justice Summits held on either sideof the
Atlantic the first in the USA in 1991 brought together hundreds
ofrepresentatives of grass roots organizations from around the
country workingexplicitly within an environmental justice frame;
the second held in Londonin 2008 and organized by Capacity Global
(the only clear example of a grouporganized around an environmental
justice frame in the UK) with fundingsupport from a government
department, involved 50 people, most of whomwere academics and
representatives of government agencies or of nationallevel NGOs and
consultancies.While this analysis may characterize the
London-focused picture in the
UK, in Scotland it has been significantly different,
demonstrating that formsof contextualization can take at levels
below that of the nation-state. In Scotland,political opportunities
were presented by the devolution of substantialresponsibilities of
governance to the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Friends ofthe Earth
Scotland (FoES) deliberately chose this moment to adopt a
moresubstantial and radical environmental justice campaign than
elsewhere in theUK (Scandrett, 2007) interlinking local and global
issues and supporting thiswith various forms of training and
networking activity intended to empowerlocal level activism
(Dunion, 2003). Having been promoted strongly by FoES,a version of
the environmental justice frame focused in this case on local
envi-ronmental conditions (or environmental incivilities) also
moved into gov-ernment with Jack McConnell, Scotlands first
Minister declaring in 2002that: I am clear that the gap between the
haves and have-nots is not just aneconomic issue. For quality of
life, closing the gap demands environmentaljustice too. That is why
I said that environment and social justice would bethe themes
driving our policies and priorities ... (McConnell, 2002).
Thisspeech, briefly at least, catalysed the explicit use of the
term environmentaljustice as a policy objective, with a dedicated
team established in the ScottishExecutive, various resource
commitments made to fund research (Curticeet al., 2005; Fairburn et
al., 2005), support community action and reviewthe implications for
planning legislation and pollution regulation (Jacksonand Illsley,
2007; Poustie, 2004). The 2002 Scottish Sustainable
Developmentstrategy was also explicit in its appeals to
environmental justice stating thatsustainable development is about
combining economic progress with socialand environmental justice we
should have regard for others who do nothave access to the same
level of resources, and the wealth generated (ScottishExecutive,
2002). Despite such rhetorical commitments Scandrett (2007)
iscritical of the way in which the environmental justice frame in
Scottish policyhas evolved, in particular its failure to in any way
challenge the interests of
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capital. The election of the Scottish National Party to power in
2007 and theinevitable development of new policy discourses around
environmental con-cerns have also done little to maintain the
strength of the environmental jus-tice frame either in policy or
within the campaigning work of FoES.
3.2. THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE FRAME IN SOUTH AFRICAThe first
traces of the emergence of an environmental justice frame in
SouthAfrica can be found in 19921993 a few years before those in
the UK. Themost significant early event is seen by various
commentators as the EarthlifeInternational Conference in 1992 that
instigated the formation of theEnvironmental Justice Networking
Forum (EJNF) in 1994 (which has sincegrown into a network with over
400 members across a diversity of civil societyorganizations [Duma,
2007]). Here the US influence appears to have beensignificant in
various ways. A participant account by Kalan and Peek (2005)traces
early initiatives by students from South Africa studying in the USA
toconnect the environmental struggles in the USA with those of
their homecountry. The South African Exchange Programme on
EnvironmentalJustice (SAEPEJ) sought to develop two-way exchanges
of various forms exchanges of information and research, the meeting
of people from grassrootsand communities mobilising around similar
environmental problems in theUSA and South Africa and even the
collection of samples of toxins from SouthAfrica that were then
taken for analysis in labs the USA. For Bobby Peek whoformed
groundWork in 1999 as a group seeking to promote
environmentaljustice activism both within South Africa and more
broadly across the region,the link to the USA was crucial: the
language that was appearing in the civilrights movement and around
the environmental justice movement during thelate 1970s and early
1980s was something that came to South Africa in the late1980s and
early 1990s (Kalan and Peek, 2005: 261). The two way nature ofthe
exchange is also clear however, with learning about organizing at a
locallevel in South Africa instructive for US activists and the
understanding thatthese things happen globally (Kalan and Peek,
2005: 260) pushing USgroups towards a more international
perspective. Their account shows howthe movement of knowledges and
commitments embodied in particular peo-ple can be important in
frame diffusion (Faber, 2005).Struggles against the operation of
oil refineries and other sources of pollution
in the heavily industrialized basin of South Durban were also
significant ingiving a focus and profile for the emergency of
environmental justiceactivism. As Barnett and Scott (2007) trace in
some detail, the South Durbanconcentration of industrial
development took shape during the apartheid era,with non-white
communities forcibly relocated into the area in the 1950s and60s
under the Group Areas Act. Concerns about high levels of ground,
air andwater pollution were already long standing and there was a
strong profile oflocal civic organisation and political activism
that had inputs into the ANCsenvironmental policy in the early
1990s. This provided the foundation for the
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formation of the umbrella organisation the South Durban
CommunityEnvironmental Alliance (SDCEA) in 1996, which took up an
agenda explicitlyusing the language of environmental justice that
was by then circulating withinNGO networks. Over subsequent years
the work of the SDCEA has madeSouth Durbans two oil refineries (two
of only four in the country) emblematicof environmental justice
conflict (Barnett and Scott, 2007:: 2616) and amodel for how to
engage in community mobilization in other pollutionhotspots around
the country.In the environmental justice frame that has emerged in
South Africa there
are many parallels with the US (Debbane and Keil, 2004;
McDonald, 2002).Most significantly the connections between the
civil rights movement in theUSA and anti-apartheid struggles in
South Africa meant that the discourse ofenvironmental racism
resonated strongly in a country where the racializationof space had
been institutionally organized and maintained through statepower.
Other parallels included the focus on toxic and polluting
activities andon anti-corporate campaigns, and the deliberate
contrast drawn between newactivist discourses and traditional South
African environmental concerns ofwilderness and nature conservation
based in colonial and post-colonial ideology(Martinez-Alier,
2002).There is a further parallel in the way that principles of
environmental justice
have been given a legislative status at a national level. The
post-apartheidarrival of democracy in South Africa in 1994 had the
task of addressing deepinequalities, including environmental
inequalities of various forms that dis-criminated against
themajority black population. TheBill of Rights of the SouthAfrican
Constitution accordingly included several statements of
environmentalrights: everyone has the right to have access to
sufficient food and water an environment that is not harmful to
their health or well-being ... to have theenvironment protected,
for the benefit of present and future generations(Republic of South
Africa, 1996: s.27.1, s.24).This positioning of environmental
rights at the heart of the new constitution
appeared a powerful assertion of the environmental justice frame
in principleextending over and beyond the embedding of Executive
Order 12898 in theUSA. However, a number of observers have
critiqued the way that environ-mental management has since been
practised, the lack of procedural as well asdistributive justice
through meaningful opportunities to participate andthe obstacles
presented by other more powerful framings of
environmentalgovernance. As in the UK, Patel (2006) argues that the
sustainability frame,well established in South Africa (ORiordan et
al., 2000), has been dominant,often interpreted in technical and
managerial ways that have failed to shakeoff the legacies of
established colonial approaches to environmentalmanagement.She
contends that consequently social and environmental justice
dimensionsin particular have failed to be addressed within
sustainability programmes.Even where matters of procedural justice
have been given attention, for exam-ple in revamped Environmental
Assessment regulations, the distributional
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consequences of decisions have been neglected in the face of
developmentimperatives (Patel, 2009). Bond (2000) similarly sees a
neo-liberal ecologicalmodernization perspective at work overriding
the individual rights supposedlyprotected by the constitution,
while Oelofse et al. (2006) point to bothreliance on technocentric
scientific approaches (Scott and Oelofse, 2005) andan institutional
implementation deficit as limiting the way that
environmentalobjectives have been pursued. Debbaine and Keil (2004)
point to particulartensions of these forms in the case of
management of water and water supplyin the post-apartheid period.
In these ways the enshrining of environmentaljustice rights in the
constitution has not, as yet at least, had a significantimpact on
the established dominant policy frames of key actors, such asthe
Department for Environment and Tourism, or on the deeply
embeddedstructural legacies of apartheid (Kalan and Peek, 2005).For
environmental justice activists tensions have emerged around these
and
other challenges standing in the way of overcoming deep and
lasting legaciesof environmental inequality.While the focus on the
distributive and proceduralrights of historically marginalized
township communities has remained inplace, the scope of their
frames has extended into a diversity of socio-environmental issues
affecting everyday well-being (McDonald, 2002). Thesehave included
the provision of basic resource and infrastructural needs suchas
water and electricity (Bond, 2000; Debbane and Keil, 2004), health
andsafety for workers in the mining sector and the health risks of
asbestos andherbicides (Martinez-Allier, 2002). This has stretched
the coherence ofenvironmental justice as a label for collective
action and groups have readilyworked with environmental justice,
sustainability and health frames, strategi-cally shifting the
labelling they use in different contexts and interactions. Inpart,
as a consequence, McDonald (2005) argues that there have been
signif-icant differences of opinion among environmental justice
groups in SouthAfrica over the importance of race, gender and class
as social framings and thepotential to achieve meaningful reform
within a market-based economy.Barnett and Scott (2007) in their
analysis specifically of the work of the SouthDurban Community
Environmental Alliance identify many such tensions, forexample, in
the potential for the group to become co-opted through inclusionin
formulaic decision-making processes and in its relationship with
internationaldonor NGOs pushing for cooperative rather than
confrontational ways ofworking with the state and business. In
moving towards partnership workingand procedural inclusion the
SDCEA has faced major challenges in reconcilingthese strategies
with foundational demands for historical redress and
account-ability for discrimination and environmental harm
experienced over the longhistory of apartheid rule.
3.3. CONTEXTUALIZATIONS AND REFRAMINGSIn the examples of the UK
and South Africa we can see various forms ofcontextualization or
grounding of the environmental justice frame. There are
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similarities and contrasts between the experiences in each
country. Similaritiesinclude a clear reference to and borrowing
from the environmental justiceframe in the USA and examples of
international networking and interactionsthat promoted frame
diffusion. Second, an attachment of this borrowed lan-guage onto
pre-existing concerns about specific environmental wrongs,
pro-viding a new impetus and edge to local activism through which
new networksand initiatives could be developed. Third, the
importance of particular politicalevents new democratic
institutions, devolution, new administrations inproviding openings
for the introduction of an environmental justice frameinto
political debate and policy commitments. Fourth, an environmental
justicelanguage having been taken up not only within social
movements, but alsoby government bodies who have introduced their
own meanings and repre-sentations. Fifth, differences having opened
up between activist and govern-mental framings in terms of their
constituent elements, interpretation andapplication. Sixth,
environmental justice being set alongside or within an
existingsustainable development master frame, both by campaign
groups and govern-ments, leading to tensions as to their
compatibility and relative importance.Contrasts in the
contextualization of environmental justice in the two countries
centre particularly on the extent to which the frame has been
part of grassrootsnetworking and has encompassed a discourse of
environmental racism. Faber(2005) identifies a number of different
competing discourses dominatingenvironmental justice politics, only
one of which is based around racial identity.In the UK, the
environmental justice frame has been promoted primarily bya
mainstream environmental NGO. A wide range of
socio-environmentalissues have been included within the frame but
without an emphasis on racialor ethnic identity politics. In Fabers
(2005) categorization, a socialist politicshas dominated focused
primarily on shared material interests or social class although in
Scotland there has been more substantial grassroots activism andthe
politics have had something of a nationalist flavour. In South
Africa, thereis more evidence of environmental justice emerging as
a frame for grassrootsmobilizations, following more closely the US
trajectory, and including theresonance of race as a key if not
dominant discourse. Because of this and itsfoundation in
anti-apartheid politics, the environmental justice frame inSouth
Africa has maintained a more radical edge, with activists
positionedmore clearly in opposition rather than in consensus with
governmental actors,although strategic tensions around this have
been identified.This profile of similarities and differences both
between the two cases and
in comparison with the USA is sufficient to demonstrate that the
environmentaljustice frame is not singular, but rather flexible and
dynamic, open to recon-struction as its moves both in space and
time. In this way both Debbane andKeil (2004) and Williams and
Mawdsley (2006) argue that the geography ofenvironmental justice
matters, in that it has to be defined within the contextfor each
site in which it is used, cannot be readily universalized under
only oneconceptualization. As an environmental justice frame
globalizes its initial
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meaning derived from the US context it is not simply reproduced
althoughneither is it entirely abandoned. It provides a vocabulary
of political oppor-tunity (Agyeman and Evans, 2004) that is
productive in place and time, inwhich some common elements are
distilled, but important distinctions bornof history, place and
contemporary political dynamics are also to be found.
AsHeetenKalaan states very directly in the context of the South
African experience:
just because the term environmental justice was coined in the
US, that doesnt meanyou have a monopoly on the term. People have
been doing this kind of work allaround the world and may not be
calling it environmental justice. The US environ-mental justice
movement has given the rest of us an incredible tool by giving us a
lan-guage to talk about it, giving us the Principles of
Environmental Justice. However,that doesnt mean that you monopolize
the issue. (Kalan and Peek, 2005: 255)
Before returning to discuss further the implications of these
observations wecan now move to examine another sense in which the
environmental justiceframe has globalized, not only in space, but
also in its scales of concern.
4. Globalizing Vertically: New Scales and Concerns
For those looking from the outside a striking feature of the US
environmentaljustice frame, in its earlier manifestations, was its
introspection.2 As alreadynoted its dominant concerns were with who
got what within the citiesand regions of the USA (Dobson, 1988),
not with questions of distribution,disproportionate impact or
marginalization extending beyond the borders of theUSA to encompass
people elsewhere and the implications of international orglobal
environmental processes (Newell, 2005). For some observers,
enthusiasticin other ways about the new form and constituency of
environmentalism thathad emerged in the USA, this was a significant
limitation (Martinez-Allier,2002), meaning that it was failing to
grapple with the justice issues which wereparamount for many
environmental and social advocates outside of the USAand already
situated within a sustainable development frame.The shift towards
environmental justice framing beginning to vertically
upscale its scope of concerns is not disconnected with the
horizontal travellingof ideas and meanings discussed in the
previous section. Part of the contextu-alization processes taking
place in frame movement involves redefinition ofthe scope and reach
of the frame and this redefinition can readily encompassnot just
indigenous local and national issues, but also international and
globalones. For example in Scotland, when Friends of the Earth
first formulated itsenvironmental justice campaign theme, it
adopted a definition of environ-mental justice that neatly and
succinctly expressed the simultaneous local andglobal reach of
justice issues no less than a decent environment for all: no
morethan a fair share of the Earths resources (Friends of the Earth
Scotland, 1999).Here justice is conceived not only in terms of
local rights to environmental
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quality, but importantly also global responsibilities deriving
from patterns ofconsumption (Dunion and Scandrett, 2003) a
dimension entirely lackingfrom the early phases of US activism.
Similarly when environmental justicebecame a frame used by
transnational activist networks, this was not restrictedin
substantive terms to connecting up mobilizations focused on local
within-country disputes (over facility siting, access to clean
water and so on). It alsoincluded the positioning of transnational
responsibilities for harm in distantlocations firmly within the
frame, connecting globalized economic and politicalrelations with
their environmental consequences. For example, the agenda ofthe
Coalition for Environmental Justice transnational network in
Central andEastern Europe includes the exporting of risks from
richer to poorer countriesalongside a range of country specific
concerns (Steger, 2007).Looking then across the international and
global scope of the various envi-
ronmental justice frames that have been adopted internationally
as well asthe development of the frame in theUSwhich in the 1990s
increasingly beganto look beyond its own borders (Bullard, 2005)
partly because of the impactsof international networking described
in the previous section a diversity ofinternationally structured
issues can be identified. These include the move-ment and disposal
of hazardous wastes (Adeola, 2000; Pellow, 2007), tradeagreements
(Newell, 2007; Schlosberg, 2007), resource extractions of
variousforms (Martinez-Alier, 2001), bioprospecting and genetic
property rights(Vermeylen, 2007), climate change (Trainor et al.,
2007) and cross-borderenergy issues (Carruthers, 2008). For the
purpose of this paper three of these the environmental justice
dimensions of trade relations, waste export andclimate change will
be considered in more detail.The engagement of environmental
justice activism with international trade
and trade policy has been most directly analysed by Newell
(2007) in the con-text of various forms of mobilization in South
America against both continentwide and sub-regional trade
agreements. He argues that groups working with,or drawing in part
on, an environmental justice frame have been able to bringa
stronger environmental critique of regional trade integration in
theAmericas that is far more grounded in justice to people and
communities thanthe nature conservation agendas advanced by
mainstream environmentalistsinvolved in trade agreement
campaigning. This deliberately atypical form ofenvironmentalism,
grounded in campesino and indigenous peoples move-ments (and
thereby claiming a broad constituency of support) has been drivenby
the local experience of living with neo-liberal approaches to the
control ofresource rights and basic services such as water
provision. Furthermore, heargues that an environmental justice
frame has provided the basis for cri-tiquing the procedural
elements of trade policy who participates, on whosebehalf and who
gains from trade policy and at whose expense (Newell, 2007:238).
Even where trade agreements have in principle acceded greater
trans-parency and been opened up to a greater diversity of voices,
the practices ofinvolvement have been shown to be exclusionary and
inaccessible to groups
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with a weaker resource base. Schlosberg (2007) makes a similar
point in arguingthat groups mobilized against global trade
agreements in various parts of theworld have not only been
concerned with inequalities in the distribution ofconsequent
environmental bads (pollution, waste and resource depletion),
butalso with matters of social and cultural recognition and
participatory justice.As with campaigning on trade agreements,
environmental justice mobiliza-
tion around the trade in and export of hazardous wastes has been
able to bringnew impetus and dimensionality to longer standing
forms of activism (Hilz,1992). Protests against the international
dumping of hazardous wastes which in the 1980s targeted Africa in
particular labelled this practice asracist through seeking the
backyards of people seen as less significant or ableto resist
corporate power, with clear parallels to the claims and language
ofenvironmental justice activists in the USA (Pellow, 2007).
Ironically thoughthis push towards exporting hazardous wastes was
in part a consequence of theactivism of environmentalists including
environmental justice advocates inthe developed world mounting
increasingly successful campaigns against localwaste management
operations (Bryant, 2003). In this sense the lack of a
globalperspective within the environmental justice frame enabled
the externalizingof the distributional inequalities of waste
problems beyond national bordersand beyond the view of not only the
regulatory systems of waste producingcountries but also the
campaigning view of environmental justice activists.The dilemmas
this poses have increasingly been recognized and environmen-tal
justice groups have necessarily developed a more global view,
workingthrough transnational networks to resist illegal and state
sanctioned wastedumping and incineration that follows the path of
least resistance both athome and overseas. For electronic wastes
(Iles, 2004) US-based academicsand campaigners working with an
environmental justice frame (such as theSilicon Valley Toxics
Coalition) have been active in tracing complex transna-tional
linkages of production, supply, use, disposal and recycling,
followingwaste flows from what used to be seen as a relatively
benign form of industrialactivity into the lives of poor and
marginal communities in Asia, Africa andother parts of the
developing world and working with transnational and localgroups to
contest waste management decision and practices. Iles (2004:
88)argues in a comprehensive analysis that applying an
environmental justiceframework in this case demands attention be
given to the largely unknown butcomplex distribution of e-waste and
recycling impacts for both workers andcommunities, and to root
causes rather than only technical solutions. Againactivist critique
has centred not only on the distributive inequalities in impactsof
patterns of waste flow, processing and disposal but also patterns
of respon-sibility for generating these flows (including the
perverse effects of regulatoryinitiatives in source countries) and
on the procedural and participatory justicefailures of
international negotiation processes and agreements such as the
BaselConvention (Adeola, 1997), even though this in theory has
justice principlesat its heart (Okereke, 2006).
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Inequalities in access to international climate change
negotiations havealso been part of the claims of climate change
activists, but the multidimen-sional justice implications of
climate change clearly extend much further(Beckman and Page, 2008;
Paavola, 2008; Page, 2007). While as for otherinternational
concerns, environmental justice collective action has not
newlydiscovered the justice implications of climate change
mitigation and adap-tation, it is significant that these have
increasingly been positioned withinan environmental justice frame.
In North America, part of the agenda hasremained inward looking,
focused on the disproportionate impacts that cli-mate change will
have on its own poor and minority communities throughimpacts of
heat waves, storms and floods (Radick, 2008), but a far moreglobal
perspective has also emerged. Examples of climate justice
campaign-ing can now be found among many established environmental
justice groups such asWeAct in New York, which is holding its 20th
year anniversary con-ference in 2009 on the theme of Climate
Justice but there have also beenspecific new mobilizations. These
include the Environmental Justice andClimate Change Initiative
based in the USA, which describes itself as amovement from the
grassroots to realize solutions to our climate and energyproblems
that ensure the right of all people to live, work, play, and pray
insafe, healthy, and clean environments (Environmental Justice
ClimateChange Initiative, 2008). This acts to bring together
environmental justice,climate justice, religious and policy
networks to promote just and meaning-ful climate policy through
leadership training and advocacy work. In CanadaJust Earth,
describing itself as a coalition for environmental justice
focusedon carbon mitigation similarly puts forward profiles of
actions for individu-als and organisations and a declaration
calling for the setting of ambitioustargets and commitments by the
Canadian government. While clearly onlypart of far broader
campaigning on climate change issues such initiatives
aresignificant in firmly bringing climate change into the
environmental justicemovement and acting to instantly globalize the
profile of what is in, ratherthan out of scope.These various
examples of the globalization of concerns positioned within
an environmental justice frame show again how it has been open
to evolutionand recontextualization over time. In the process of
scaling up other dimen-sions have also had to evolve, further
distancing these evolved framings fromthe characteristics of the
early US collective action frame. With climatechange in particular
the assignment of blame and responsibility has extendedbeyond
corporate and state actors to include the consumption practices
ofnations and their (more wealthy) citizens, a crucial development
arguably formore directly revealing the structural fault lines in
relationships between theGlobal North and South. Again particularly
in relation to climate change thedriving concern for justice to
people has also extended temporally to includethose people that are
part of future as well as current generations (Schlosberg,2007);
while the established prognostic focus on demanding action by
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national and local levels of government has had to reach further
to includetransnational and global intergovernmental regimes.
5. Conclusion. . . the environmental justice movement is
potentially of great importance, pro-vided it learns to speak not
only for the minorities inside the USA but also for themajorities
outside the USA (which locally are not always defined racially) and
pro-vided it gets involved in issues such as biopiracy and
biosafety, or climate change,beyond local instances of pollution.
(Martinez-Alier, 2002: 14)
. . . if the environmental justice movement is to survive at all
it must go global. Itmust go global, because the sources and causes
of environmental inequality areglobal in their reach and impact.
(Brulle and Pellow, 2005: 296)
These two calls for the globalizing of the environmental justice
frame makethe case for the various forms of diffusion and evolution
that have been tracedin this article. The language of environmental
justice has now taken on anincreasingly global form and perspective
and its reach now extends far beyondthe USA and hence into very
different socio-political circumstances. It isbecoming an
international master frame that, as Dawson (2000) argues, doesnot
appear to require a particular political or economic context in
which toflourish. In moving horizontally across space, vertically
across scales, andtemporally as socio-environmental and political
conditions have shifted, theenvironmental justice frame has shown
the capacity to evolve and recontextu-alize. In both its horizontal
and vertical movement the environmental justiceframe is sometimes
proving instrumental in identifying new concerns andnew material
cases of inequality and injustice. It is more often though
becom-ing attached to existing local, regional and international
issues, framing andlabelling these as matters of justice and
thereby identifying them as part ofwider systemic processes and
wider demands for fairness and the protectionof basic needs and
rights (Schroeder et al., 2008). Its significance is thereforeboth
materially and discursively structured.In some ways it is ironic
that the environmental justice framing has emerged
from the USA, a country so deeply implicated in patterns of
economic andenvironmental exploitation around the world and in the
causes of global scaleproblems such as climate change. Indeed this
has itself created some difficultiesand tensions for activists in
countries such as South Africa that have strategi-cally not wanted
to be seen to be simply following a US created discourse andmodel
of campaigning (Kalan and Peek, 2005). However, it has become
clearfrom the preceding analysis that whilst the early US
experience and networkingwith US activists has been influential,
there is a large degree of local reinter-pretation, and reframing
going on. As Debbane and Keil (2004) argue, a relativeand scaled
understanding of what constitutes environmental justice is
needed,
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rather than one based on notions of simple universality and
conformity derivedfrom the US model. That is not to say that the
environmental justice frame isborn anew in each place it emerges,
or that it has evolved out of all recognitionfrom where it began.
There are clear common reference points around forexample the
incorporation of core demands for distributive and procedural
jus-tice, and, Schlosberg (2007) has argued, for individual and
community levelrecognition and capability to function but the ways
in which these are inter-preted, combined and operationalized is
open to variety and diversity.While the capacity to co-evolve with
socio-environmental and political
change and to go global can be seen as both positive and
necessary for envi-ronmental justice frames to continue to be
relevant and to do work foractivist groups and the communities they
represent, the analysis in this articlehas also identified tensions
within this process (see also the concerns ofDawson, 2000). While
there is much positive talk around international net-working and
coalition building within a common environmental justiceframe,
there can be conflicts between the aspirations of activist groups
posi-tioned in and concerned with different places and scales of
concern. Effectivelocal environmental justice action to resist
unwanted development in com-munities in the USA or UK may still
have the paradoxical effect of pushingthis overseas into less
regulated spaces, despite attempts to demand commonstandards and
forge transnational resistance networks. There is also
demon-strable scope for the radical edge of claims for
environmental justice and therealization of environmental rights to
become blunted through reframing,relabelling and incorporation into
the managerialist frameworks of govern-ment bodies and more
conformist NGOs. Here the interaction between envi-ronmental
justice and sustainable development frames has proved
particularlyproblematic. For some observers their coming together
is necessary and pro-ductive (Agyeman et al., 2003), but for others
the tendency of sustainabilityperspectives to emphasize
compatibility with themarket, consensus approachesand ecological
modernization solutions can mean that questions of inequalityand
impacts on vulnerable and excluded groups are too easily downplayed
ifnot pushed aside. This more than anything emphasizes the need to
keep thedistinct language and approaches of environmental justice
framing activityalive, not as something static, but as a
continually reproducing space forasserting the importance of not
seeing one global populace and one environ-ment, but a diversity of
unequal interactions between multiple environmentsand multiple
forms of social difference.Finally as globalized environmental
justice activism takes on this dynamism
it is important that the scope for interactions with other forms
of collectiveaction beyond the environmental justice frame is
recognized. This includesnot only other forms of environmental
activism but also collective actionfocused on achieving more
progressive global social policy. The blurring ofthe boundaries of
what constitutes the environmental and the social and theformation
of coalition networks that transcend specific frame agendas,
have
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characterized the activity of global social movements
campaigning against thepower and regressive practices of
transnational corporations and internationalorganizations. In this
context while collective action under an environmentaljustice frame
needs to assert and maintain its distinctive arguments, claimsand
discourses, it also needs to find opportunities for forging common
groundwith others concerned with patterns and processes of
inequality and injusticefrom local to global levels.
acknowledgements
I am grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions of three
referees andthe interactions with various activists and policy
makers that have informedthe analysis in this article.
notes
1. This is not to suggest that protest against environmental
injustice only started atthis time. There is a long history in many
places around the world of collectiveaction against environmental
abuse, in particular the impacts of resource exploitationon
indigenous communities. The temporal positioning here is concerned
specificallywith the use of the language of environmental justice
in the naming and framingof environmental concerns, campaigns and
groups.
2. As noted earlier, while a rhetoric of international and
global environmental justicecould be found, the practice of the
majority of environmental justice activism inthe USA was far more
local.
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rsum
La Globalisation de la Justice Environnementale: la Gographieet
la Politique de la Contextualisation et de lvolution du Cadre
Lemploi du langage de la justice environnementale, comme cadre
pour laction col-lective en ce qui concerne les proccupations
socio-environnementales, a volu bienau-del de sa formulation
originale aux Etats-Unis. Cet article examine deux faonsdans
lesquelles lemploi du cadre de justice environnementale sest
globalis. La pre-mire entrane la naissance des ides, des
significations et des processus dencadrementdans plusieurs cadres
nouveaux autour du monde. Larticle tudie la diffusion hori-zontale
dun cadre de justice environnementale, en tudiant les processus de
transfert,de reproduction et de contextualisation qui ont eu lieu
dans les cultures politiques etinstitutionnelles de diffrents pays.
Les cas du Royaume Uni et de lAfrique du sudsont examins en dtail.
La deuxime faon entrane la prolongation verticale ducadre de
justice environnementale afin dinclure les proccupations qui ne
terminentpas aux frontires nationales, mais qui entranent des
relations entre les pays et lessujets dimportance mondiale, tels
que les accords commerciaux, les transferts dedchets et le
changement climatique. On considre les implications de ces
deuxchangements, les tensions qui ont surgi, et leur pertinence
avec la poursuite des objec-tifs progressifs de politique sociale
globale.
Walker: Globalizing Environmental Justice 381
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resumen
La Globalizacin de la Justicia Medioambiental: La Geografa yla
Poltica de la Contextualizacin y la Evolucin del Marco
El uso del lenguaje de la justicia medioambiental como marco
para la accin colectivaen las preocupaciones socio-medioambientales
se ha desarrollado mucho ms all desu formulacin original en los
EEUU. Este documento examina dos maneras en lascuales el uso del
marco de justicia medioambiental se ha globalizado. La primera
setrata de la aparicin internacional de ideas, significados y
procesos de marco en nuevosentornos alrededor del mundo. El
documento detalla la difusin horizontal de unmarco de justicia
medioambiental, examinando los procesos de transferencia,
repro-duccin y contextualizacin que han ocurrido dentro de las
culturas polticas e institu-cionales de varios pases. Los casos del
ReinoUnido y de la Sudfrica estn examinadosrigurosamente. La
segundamanera se trata de la ampliacin vertical del marco de
justiciamedioambiental para englobar las preocupaciones que no
terminan a las fronterasnacionales, sino que suponen relaciones
entre los pases y los asuntos a escala global,como los acuerdos
comerciales, la transferencia de desechos y el cambio climtico.
Seconsidera las implicaciones de estos dos cambios, las tensiones
que surgieron a su alrede-dor, y su relacin con la bsqueda de
objetivos progresivos de poltica social global.
biographical note
GORDON WALKER is Professor in the Department of Geography at the
LancasterEnvironment Centre, Lancaster University. Please address
correspondence to:Gordon Walker, Department of Geography, Lancaster
University, Lancaster, LA14YQ, UK. [email:
[email protected]]
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