Globalizing Environmental Justice

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Globalizing Environmental Justice The Geography and Politics of Frame Contextualization and Evolution GORDON WALKER Lancaster University, UK abstract The use of the language of environmental justice as a frame for collective action on socio-environmental concerns has now evolved and extended far beyond its original formulation in the USA. This article examines two ways in which the use of the environmental justice frame has globalized. The first involves the international emergence of ideas, meanings and framing processes in new settings around the world. The ‘horizontal’ diffusion of an environmental justice frame is traced, examining processes of transfer, reproduction and contextualization that are taking place within the political and institutional cultures of different countries. The cases of the UK and South Africa are examined in detail. The second involves the ‘vertical’ extension of the environmental justice frame to encompass concerns that do not end at national borders but that involve relations between countries and global scale issues such as trade agreements, transfers of wastes and climate change. The implications of these two shifts, the tensions that have emerged around them and their relevance to the pursuit of progressive global social policy objectives are considered. keywords environmental justice, framing, globalization, South Africa, 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 355–382; 343640; DOI:10.1177/1468018109343640 http://gsp.sagepub.com gsp 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 at CADIZ UNIV on April 2, 2015 gsp.sagepub.com Downloaded from

description

The use of the language of environmental justice as a frame for collective action on socio-environmental concerns has now evolved and extended far beyond its original formulation in the USA. This article examines two ways in which the use of the environmental justice frame has globalized. The first involves the international emergence of ideas, meanings and framing processes in new settings around the world. The ‘horizontal’ diffusion of an environmental justice frame is traced, examining processes of transfer, reproduction and contextualization that are taking place within the political and institutional cultures of different countries. The cases of the UK and South Africa are examined in detail. The second involves the ‘vertical’ extension of the environmental justice frame to encompass concerns that do not end at national borders but that involve relations between countries and global scale issues such as trade agreements, transfers of wastes and climate change. The implications of these two shifts, the tensions that have emerged around them and their relevance to the pursuit of progressive global social policy objectives are considered.

Transcript of Globalizing Environmental Justice

  • 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

    gsp

    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

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    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.

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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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