EiJ Global Record: Hawaii, USA

In preparation for the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in Honolulu, EcoGovLab researchers participated in a rapid collaborative assessment of environmental injustices in Hawai'i, and especially O'ahu.

We started with a simple question: As visitors with diverse commitments and alliances in the environmental justice movements that we have come to be a part of, how should we figure out our ethical and political obligations to the region?

We started approaching this question in EcoGovLab by reading the already extensive and rigorous analyses prepared by Hawaiian scholars and activists, such as the Mauna Kea Syllabus; and by searching for illustrations of different types of environmental injustice in the region.

As homework, we annotated the gathered information using the EiJ Case Study Framework. The framework invites researchers, both experienced and novice, to interdisciplinary and collaborative characterization of environmental injustice in particular places. Depending on their interests, EcoGovLab brought together information on the history of pesticide use in Hawaiʻian plantations, contamination after the Lahaina fires, the demand for disaggregated racialized data, radioactive contamination, agrochemical transnational companies, renewable energy concerns, and of course–the erasure of indigenous sovereignty itself as part of the toxicity of environmental governance. We followed these annotations with a three-hour discussion of what we had come across and what questions still remained to be answered.