Environmental Justice In Developing Countries

The evolving environmental justice paradigm is conceptualized differently based on political, economic and historical factors. In developed countries, emphasis is placed on the role of individuals in environmental decision-making and the protection of their access to the prerequisite environmental information and capacity to challenge environmental decisions is the main focus. However, in developing countries, access to land and natural resources are considered integral elements of environmental justice paradigm. This book focuses on the conceptualization, recognition and protection of environmental justice in developing countries. It explores the situation by engaging an analytical discourse of relevant legal provisions in four case study countries including Nigeria, South Africa, India and Papua New Guinea. The comparative analysis of environmental justice in these countries present a framework within which to appreciate the conceptualization of the environmental justice paradigm

This comprehensive Research Handbook offers an innovative analysis of environmental law in the global South and contributes to an important reassessment of some of its major underlying concepts. The Research Handbook discusses areas rarely prioritized in environmental law, such as land rights, and underlines how these intersect with issues including poverty, livelihoods and the use of natural resources, challenging familiar narratives around development and sustainability in this context and providing new insights into environmental justice.

Environmental justice is one of the most controversial and important issues in contemporary social science. Volume 8 of the Energy and Environmental Policy series challenges our understanding of environmental justice in a global context. It includes theoretical investigations and case studies by leading authors in the field. Global forces of technology and the development of global markets are transforming social life and the natural order. These changes require a critical examination of nature-society relations. Increasingly, modernization assigns the risks of modernity to those with the least power and greatest vulnerability to environmental harm. Conventional environmentalism, which focuses on critique of the effects of humanity against nature, is inadequate to the challenges of globalization. In particular, it fails to explain sources of persistent patterns of social injustice that accompany escalating environmental exploitation. As the capacity for environmental destruction expands, broader concerns about environmental injustice have come to the fore, including awareness of threats to whole cultures, ways of life, and entire ecologies. The volume's authors consider the links between expanded patterns of environmental injustice and the structures and forces underlying and shaping the international political economy. Environmental injustice is examined across a variety of cultures in the developed and developing world. Through case studies of climate colonialism, revolutionary ecology, and environmental commodification, the global and local dimensions of the problem are presented.The latest volume in this important series demonstrates that environmental justice cannot be reduced to simple parables of indifference, prejudice, or appropriation. It forges understanding of environmental injustice as a development of international political economy itself. Likewise, initiatives on behalf of environmental justice are seen as elements of broader movements to secure self-determination in a globalizing world. This book will be of interest to policymakers, energy and environmental experts, and all those interested in the environment and environmental law. It provides new perspectives on the place of environmental justice in international political and economic conflict.

This edited volume provides a fresh perspective on the important yet often neglected relationship between environmental justice and urban resilience. Many scholars have argued that resilient cities are more just cities. But what if the process of increasing the resilience of the city as a whole happens at the expense of the rights of certain groups? If urban resilience focuses on the degree to which cities are able to reorganise in creative ways and adapt to shocks, do pervasive inequalities in access to environmental services have an effect on this ability? This book brings together an interdisciplinary and intergeneration group of scholars to examine the contradictions and tensions that develop as they play out in cities of the Global South through a series of empirically grounded case studies spanning cities of Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe.

Situating the global poverty divide as an outgrowth of European imperialism, this book investigates current global divisions on environmental policy.

This important work satisfies the need for a thorough assessment of environmental justice concerns at the global level. Using three international environmental case studies, the book extends the theory of environmental justice, commonly used in domestic settings, to the international arena of environmental law, policy and politics. Spanning the traditional boundaries between political science, international relations, international law, international political economy and policy studies, this text is intended primarily for scholars of environmental justice, national and international policymakers, businesses, activists and students of international environmental law, public policy and political economy of the third world.

Although it is commonly asserted that enhanced citizen participation results in better environmental policy and improved enforcement of environmental standards, this hypothesis has rarely been subject to testing on a comparative basis. The contributors to this book set out to study the extent to which citizens can and do exert influence over their urban environments through the legal (and extra-legal) 'gateways' in eleven countries spanning several continents as well as different climates, levels and type of economic development, and national legal and constitutional systems, as well as exhibiting a different set of environmental problems. One interviewee questioned about access to environmental justice, dryly remarked that in his city there was no environment, no justice and no access to either. Yet this view, as will be seen, requires to be nuanced. While few people will be surprised by the finding that legal gateways to environmental justice are largely ineffective, the reasons for this are revealing; but also the richness of detail and the comparisons between the different countries, and also the positive aspects which surfaced in several instances, were indeed both encouraging and sometimes surprising. This book presents the first comparative survey of access to environmental justice, and will be of considerable use to lawyers, policy-makers, activists and scholars who are concerned with the environmental issues which so profoundly affect and afflict our habitat and conditions of social justice throughout the world.

Softbound - New, softbound print book.