Search

This study looks at the case of industrial energy transition campaigning by a traditional conservation group in a regional city that hosts coal- fired power and emissions-intensive industry. We ask, what tensions do metropolitan campaigners find when communicating the idea of just transition and building alliances in regional places? How do they deal with those tensions? What does this mean for the task of developing ‘useable useful theories of environmental justice’ ? Our results illustrate the need to navigate three principal tensions: inclusivity, recognition, and equity. The case of the Australian Conservation Foundation in Gladstone reveals that as these tensions get worked through, the campaign goal is reframed as something other than ‘just transition’ and more akin to a local environmental justice campaigning. Ultimately, the ENGO now wrestles with the local difficulties of building energy justice politics on the scale and time-frame that climate science implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical environmental justice (EJ) scholars, focused on the role of race, gender, capital, colonization, and power as key to environmental injustice, argue that EJ thinking and practice should move past the traditional focus on liberal and state-based remedies. There are many scholarly accounts of critical EJ, but no systematic examinations of such views in practice. This paper reports on a survey of the meanings of EJ circulating among activists and scholars globally. Using Q method, we found strong agreement with this more critical framing of EJ – representing an important development of EJ as a global discourse. At the same time, we found important differences in terms of knowledge and standpoints, participation, the liberal state, EJ praxis, and the politics of disruption. We argue that this heterogeneity of perspectives, within a generally critical approach, reflects the context-specificity, evolution and expanding reach of EJ and reflects the field’s overarching ethos of plurality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]