Environmental Justice

Across the Globe, people rise up and protest against social injustices and environmental threats. They protest when confronted with environmental ‘bads’ such as polluted or degraded local environments or the damages incurred by climate changes. They protest when excluded from accessing environmental ‘goods’ such as clean water, land for agriculture or grazing, or urban green spaces for recreation. They protest against environmental injustices associated with infrastructure development, industrial complexes, agribusinesses, and large corporations, which are seen to derive profit from activities that threaten the environments that underpin the livelihoods of current and future generations. These social movements can be grassroots groups and/or groups organized as non-governmental organizations, and often organize under the banner of ‘environmental justice’.

Alongside the growth of environmental justice movements, the academic field of environmental justice has also rapidly expanded. It is a highly interdisciplinary field that draws on theories and concepts from across the natural and social sciences and humanities, such as environmental science, moral and political philosophy, science studies, development studies, and critical human geography. Environmental justice academics seek to analyze: (i) the nature of the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens; (ii) how environmental phenomena are experienced in different ways by different social groups; (iii) how justice claims are enacted/mobilized in struggles over resources, in particular the strategies of the social movements that call for justice.

This course offers students of environmental science, food science, natural resources governance, geography, global development or similar fields the opportunity to learn how to understand and analyze, but also engage, in environmental justice conflicts and debates.

The course has two overall parts. The first part consists of the first five weeks of the course. These are focused on theory and analysis. This part helps students analyze environmental (in-)justice from a social science perspective that also incorporates elements of environmental science. Theories taught include philosophical underpinnings of environmental justice; decolonial theory, feminist theory, critiques of capitalism and neoliberalism, and theoretical perspectives on knowledge. The main learning activities will be lectures and various exercises and group discussions to introduce the theories, and a group work process throughout the five weeks where students get to apply the theories by analyzing a case of environmental justice conflict. This first part culminates with the handing in of a short group report communicating the analysis of the case, with a session where groups give feedback on another group’s report and receive feedback from peers and lecturers on their report.

The second part comprises the last three weeks of the course, and is focused on practice. Here students will engage with theories on how social movements strategize and communicate their claims, and will formulate their own environmental justice action/campaign with a point of departure in the case they analyzed during the first five weeks. This part of the course culminates with an oral presentation in class where the groups will receive feedback on their ideas for an action/campaign from an experienced social movement expert.

By completing this course, students will have acquired the skills to formulate critical questions and clear methodologies around environmental justice that will enable them to engage in diverse environmental justice conflicts and debates across diverse topics, scales, and contexts. Similarly, students will have gained tools and experience in collectively creating an action/campaign in an environmental justice conflict setting.