Environmental Justice and the Politics of Scale under Ecological and Environmental Protection: A Case Study of a Village in the Ecological Protection Zone

Ecological environmental protection is an important support for China to achieve ecological civilization, but it often encounters challenges in fairly distributing protection responsibilities and development rights between the wider society and local communities living in protected areas. Ecological protection planning is an instrument for reconstructing environmental protection responsibilities and development rights among different social groups: the communities within the protected areas bear the responsibility for ecological protection but may lose some development rights to some extent, whereas the communities outside the protected areas enjoy the benefits of environmental protection without having to fulfill related obligations. This asymmetry of rights and obligations triggers environmental injustice, and is a crucial factor in determining the effectiveness of policy implementation. The changing patterns of environmental (in)justice are shaped by negotiations between governments at different scales and local stakeholders, and involve complex political processes. Therefore, this study introduces a theoretical framework that integrates scale politics and environmental justice to explore the distinctive-scale political processes involved in achieving environmental justice in ecological protection areas under China's segmented and hierarchical political system. First, the pattern of environmental justice is shaped by the highest-scale actors among relevant stakeholders. Second, intermediate-scale actors tend to prioritize compliance with policy directives from higher scales and may use methods such as scale retention or devolution to limit the interest demands of lower scales. Finally, lower-scale actors may seek to enhance their political discourse power through scale escalation when faced with unjust situations created by a top-down decision-making system. Empirically, this research selected a village yet to be reconstructed in an ecological protection zone in the central provincial capital city of China as a case study and analyzed the environmental injustice faced by the villagers and pathways to change the injustice. The empirical findings suggest that, without prior consideration of the development rights of local residents, strict top-down ecological environmental protection methods often aggravate tense relationships among actors at different scales. Specifically, this leads to environmental injustice, in which the development rights of local residents at lower scales are overshadowed by the protection requirements enforced by higher-scale government entities. Environmental (in)justice includes the allocation, institutional, and recognition dimensions. In response, scale reconstruction emerges as an informal strategy for lower-scale residents to seek justice. Through this strategy, lower-scale residents appeal to higher-scale governments to intervene in the development issues of ecological protection areas, and thus strive to achieve equality in development rights and protective responsibilities. This process opens a way to achieve environmental justice. Additionally, the reliance on informal mechanisms underscores the lack of formal mechanisms in China to ensure that lower-scale groups have fair rights to urban ecological environmental protection. To address the challenges, this article integrates theoretical insights with empirical evidence to propose the following policy measures:(1) strengthening the top-down transmission of policies to implement the principle of balancing ecological protection by improving people's livelihoods, (2) establishing mechanisms for achieving environmental justice through the balanced allocation of rights and responsibilities, and (3) enhancing the democratic participation of relevant stakeholders in planning.