Compounding barriers to environmental justice

Abstract

This paper examines how environmental justice (EJ) activists and scholars experience and think about the barriers to beneficial change. It reports findings from an international study that used Q methodology. We ask: how do activists and scholars view the barriers to realising environmental justice goals of movements? What insights from their political practice and research can extend contemporary theories of environmental justice? Our data reveals a broad consensus among scholars and practitioners about the forms of elite power that create injustice, particularly political and corporate corruption. Four primary categories of barriers to change were interpreted from the survey and interviews, each capturing different sites of EJ struggles and revealing distinct dimensions of environmental injustice. The first is the broadest: structural marginalisation, particularly historical and contemporary violence, which underpins the other barriers. The second is more specific institutional obstacles, particularly weak legal and political institutions. The third is exclusionary public policy processes which silence community and social justice concerns. And the fourth barrier includes the bureaucratic cultures facing the EJ movement, as well as internal strategic dilemmas. Overall, the results point to the multi-layered, compounding way that environmental injustice is embedded and perpetuated. Together, these dimensions illustrate the variety of ways injustice is manifest in environmental policymaking, and the complex barriers to be overcome. Barriers to practical EJ efforts are structured, institutionalised, related, and compounding in distinct sites, forming a web of challenges that requires a coordinated and multipronged EJ strategy.

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