Environmental Justice and Sustainability
Concepts of environmental justice and environmental sustainability have attracted steadily increasing interest amongst political theorists and political scientists in the past few decades. The explosion of interest in normative and policy dimensions of global climate change since the negotiation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of 1992 have only accelerated this interest. Nevertheless, there is continuing disagreement in the literature concerning the meaning of sustainable development, the connection between environmental sustainability and norms of global and intergenerational justice, weak vs strong sustainability, and the extent to which normative theory can contribute to the implementation of policies of sustainable development. This chapter explores the conceptual development of environmental sustainability, and aims to show how normative theory can enrich the discussion of sustainable development in theory and in practice.