Across the world, environmental problems and environmental solutions create profound inequalities. Communities living in flood-prone areas, Indigenous peoples facing restrictions on access to ancestral lands, low-income households struggling with rising energy costs during sustainability transitions, and populations exposed to pollution from industrial activities often bear a disproportionate share of environmental burdens while enjoying fewer of the benefits. At the same time, policies designed to address environmental challenges, such as climate adaptation measures, nature conservation initiatives, renewable energy projects, or urban greening programmes, can themselves produce unequal outcomes.
These inequalities are frequently reinforced by limited opportunities for participation in decision-making, unequal access to resources, and a lack of recognition of diverse knowledge systems, values, and ways of life. As a result, questions of environmental justice have become increasingly central to debates about sustainability and environmental governance. But how can societies pursue environmental change in ways that are both effective and fair?
Many people support environmentally just policies because they believe fairness and justice are important moral principles in their own right. Others emphasize that policies perceived as fair are often more effective, as affected communities are more likely to support and comply with them. Yet there is considerable disagreement about what environmental justice actually means in practice. Who should bear the costs of climate adaptation? How should benefits from conservation be distributed? Whose voices count when decisions are made about environmental resources and landscapes? Different individuals, communities, and cultures often hold different answers to these questions.
This summer course introduces students to environmental justice from a variety of perspectives. We will engage with philosophical approaches that seek to identify normative standards for fair environmental decision-making and distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. This includes questions such as: Should everyone have equal access to essential ecosystem services? Should wealthier countries finance climate adaptation in lower-income countries, and if so, to what extent? At the same time, we will critically examine the strengths and limitations of philosophical reasoning. Can abstract principles help guide action in complex real-world situations, or do understandings of justice emerge primarily through the experiences, claims, and struggles of affected communities? We will therefore also explore how environmental justice is articulated and pursued by social movements, activists, Indigenous groups, local communities, and other stakeholders, examining their objectives, strategies, and impacts.
A central theme throughout the course is the role of values in environmental decision-making. People value nature in diverse ways: as a source of livelihoods, cultural identity, spiritual meaning, recreation, health, or biodiversity conservation. These different values can shape perceptions of what constitutes a just environmental outcome and whose interests should be prioritized. Students will examine different approaches to identifying and assessing values.
Throughout the course, theoretical debates will be connected to real-world cases of environmental justice. Examples may include conflicts around climate adaptation and energy transitions, the social consequences of protected area establishment, urban environmental inequalities, and tensions between conservation objectives and local livelihoods. By comparing cases across different environmental contexts, students will explore how environmental justice challenges vary across places, communities, and time scales, and how different approaches can help address injustices in practice.
The course will be highly interactive. Lecturers will provide input on key concepts, methods and empirical trends in the field of environmental justice, and guest lectures by practitioners will demonstrate how these concepts are operationalized, feeding into discussions of theory versus practice. Students will be given considerable room to work with these inputs and apply them to cases of environmental injustice or environmental justice movements that they themselves choose to work on. The teachers for this course will come from different backgrounds and departments and have expertise in different environmental issue areas, making this a truly interdisciplinary learning experience. As environmental justice also plays out in urban design, we will include a site visit related to environmental justice in Amsterdam.
