Across the world, the most vulnerable people are most severely affected by the detrimental consequences of global environmental change. Policies and practices for mitigation of and adaptation to global environmental change impact people in in highly uneven ways. These impacts are exacerbated by a lack of voice and agency, as well as a lack or recognition of diverse worldviews and practices among more vulnerable groups. Such injustices hamper achieving SDGs 14 and 15 (life below water and life on land) as well as SDG 1 (zero poverty) and SDG 10 (reduce inequalities). Scholars, environmental activists and policy makers are increasingly sensitive to these patterns, and calls for environmental justice abound. But how to achieve a more just and sustainable future?
Some people support just environmental policies and practices because they are convinced that treating each other justly is inherently the right thing to do – there is a moral imperative. Research also shows that environmental policies that are perceived as “just” can more effective because people are more likely to comply with them. However, it is far less clear what environmental justice really is, and what it demands in practice. Moreover, ideas of justice differ across people and contexts.
This summer course will introduce students to environmental justice from a variety of perspectives. We will engage with philosophical attempts to identify normative standards for what can be considered a just allocation of the benefits and burdens of environmental action. This includes questions such as: Should everybody have equal access to vital ecosystem services? Should rich countries pay for climate change adaptation in poorer countries? If so to what extent? But we will also critically scrutinize the value of philosophical reasoning as an approach to environmental justice. Does philosophy provide us with much needed impartial principles to guide our actions or is it too much of an armchair discipline, removed from what is going on in the ‘real world’? Is listening to stakeholders’ claims and the demands of environmental justice movements and activists a more practically relevant way to make sense of environmental justice? What are their objectives and strategies and how successful are they?
We will also engage with environmental justice aspects of the assessment of impacts of conservation and other environmental policies and interventions. The Intergovernmental Platform of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has well laid out that people hold diverse values for nature, linked to the way they engage with nature and their worldviews. Then how to best assess such values? What are the advantages of expressing such values in monetary terms, and what are the counterarguments? What is the role of environmental economics and socio-cultural studies in assessing values of nature? How can the process of valuation be organized in a such a way that the resulting outcomes are supported by the people whose values are at stake?
In discussing different approaches, we link these to concrete case studies and examples of struggles for environmental justice. These will come from different environmental issue areas such as climate change (SDG 13), terrestrial ecosystem conservation (SDG 15), ocean protection (SDG 14). Environmental justice plays out differently in these problems due to different spatial and temporal scales; whereas in some cases the impacts are felt nearby and immediately (e.g. forest conversion), other issues such as climate change span vast areas and multiple generations. This may lead to different approaches to reduce injustices.
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 (and Amsterdam is an important pull factor for students coming to the VU) we will include one local (Amsterdam/Amstelveen) guided walk discussing environmental justice issues at city level.
