Search

The "impact" of EJ studies when linked to advocacy

"It is difficult to imagine any of these studies exerting as much of an impact on public discourse and policy as they did if they had not been closely connected to litigation, advocacy, and regulatory interest in addressing the emerging issue of environmental justice."

Larger questions behind EJ struggles

"While “environmental justice” emerged as a concept in the United States in the 1980s, it addresses enduring global questions that long predate contemporary environmentalism. How should humans share the benefits and burdens of nature fairly among our contemporaries and with generations to come? In doing so, what are our obligations to the land, air, water, other species, and to the divine? Who should make such important decisions and how?"

EJ as a concept in global comparison

"Even if the term “environmental justice” is not as widely used outside the U.S., it has become a global concern, albeit one that is articulated differently around the world (Agyeman, Cole, Haluza-DeLay, & 9 O’Riley, 2009: Baehler, 2017; Walker & Bulkeley, 2006). In Europe, EJ is often seen as an extension of protections for human rights, including rights of access to environmental information, participation in decision making, and access to the courts, which are enshrined in the United Nations Economic Convention for Europe’s1998 Aarhus Convention (Mason, 2010). In the global South, EJ issues are more often framed as matters of climate justice, participatory and sustainable development and conservation, indigenous and women’s rights, food and energy sovereignty, workplace safety and health, or the environmentalism of the poor (Carmin & Agyeman, 2011; Carruthers, 2008; Martinez-Alier, 2002; Reed & George, 2018; Walker, 2012).

Civic Experts

"Karvonen and Brand (2014) describe four additional models of expertise relevant to sustainability that arose in recent decades, which can foster greater trust between EJ communities and experts. Foremost is the civic expert, who understands the need to enrich technical understanding with other forms of knowledge (including local, experiential, tacit, and indigenous understandings), and to share power over choices with the public, to arrive at better informed and more socially acceptable decisions (see also Stilgoe, Irwin, & Jones, 2006). These experts are adept at organizing authentic public participation in environmental (John, 1994; Shutkin, 2000), scientific (Jasanoff, 2011), and technological (Sclove, 1995) policy making and projects. Civic experts may be assisted by outreach experts, who provide technical and scientific information that can help boost communities’ capacities to participate in EJ decisions. Multidisciplinary experts may help by fostering collaboration among experts from different fields to tackle complex problems, and meta-experts may broker novel solutions that emerge and help ensure they are implemented in policy or practice. Within each of these models academics may play a range of roles in any given research project, such as planner, leader, catalyst, facilitator, teacher, designer, listener, observer, synthesizer, and reporter (O’Brien, 2001; Huntjens et al., 2014)."

Minimalist participatory approaches & ethnography

"At present, examples of the least participatory approaches that can still meet the definition of ES include research on communicating risks effectively and enhancing public understanding of science, when they involve tailoring information to communities based on surveys, focus groups, and other means of gauging their interests and needs. Ethnography can promote fuller participation by amplifying community members’ voices in scholarship and conducting “member checks” with participants to test researchers’ understandings against community interpretations (although researchers exert final control over analysis)."

Big Data and EJ research key points

While big data offer new possibilities for environmental justice research, they also present problems of voice, speed, and expertise (Mah, 2017). First, much institutionally-gathered big data is proprietary and inaccessible to community members and researchers, and unrepresentative of marginalized populations. Researchers need to consider how to practice transparency, given that many of these data are collected not by researchers but by third parties, with minimal or no approval from data subjects, who have little control over how these data are used and interpreted to make decisions that affect subjects. Second, there is the problem of speed. While real-time analysis of crowdsourced data can help track the immediate effects of environmental disasters, it may not be as useful for documenting long-term, cumulative toxic exposures typical of many EJ issues. Third, because big data are complex and challenging to analyze well, and can present novel problems of reliability (such as depending on anonymous contributors of crowdsourced data), they require considerable expertise to interpret. Much of that expertise is concentrated in corporate, government, and academic institutions, which may be unable or unwilling to collaborate with community-based EJ organizations. EJ researchers could play a valuable role in helping to foster big data literacy by working with communities to consider how these data are gathered, demystifying how algorithms analyze data, and so on (D’Ignazio & Bhargava, 2015)."