The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice

Although the terms “environmental justice” and “environmental racism” emerged due to race-based mobilization in the United States, justice is a constant feature of environmental struggles around the world. Pursuing social justice in environmental advocacy can be difficult, but case studies of activism in places including New Zealand, Mexico, Jamaica, Brazil, and the United States show that it is possible. Environmental injustice emerges when populations that are already politically and socioeconomically marginalized disproportionately bear the costs of environmental consumption, and they are often systematically excluded from the benefits of this consumption. Although different political systems vary in how they structure marginalization, this close association of social injustice with environmental injustice characterizes cases like fossil fuel extraction in industrialized countries and agricultural development in the Global South alike. While skeptics have argued that promoting environmentalism is counterproductive to social justice, because environmental regulations often constrain economic growth, combining the two can lead to more sustainable environmental practices.

Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management in Chile

Neoliberal environmental policies operate through markets, including for carbon, water, ecosystem services, or—as in contemporary Chile—for environmental scientific knowledge. Chile illustrates how markets for science operate, such as for monitoring data or environmental impact assessments, and their negative impacts on public trust in science and on the state’s regulatory efforts. In a society governed by a market for science, environmental scientists cannot escape the suspicion that conflicts of interest compromise their independence and the credibility of their work. Chile’s neoliberal 1980 Constitution sustains this market for knowledge but will be reformed following national demonstrations in 2019. The health of Chile’s environment depends on a new constitution that democratizes both democracy and science. Rights of nature doctrines, as in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution, can provide the constitutional foundation for strong mutual accountability between science, the state, society, and nature.

Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods, and Comparative Environmental Politics

This chapter argues for a broader and more creative understanding of the relationship between methods and epistemology in the study of comparative environmental politics. Quantitative methods tend to be associated with comparative inferential questions while interpretive questions tend to be associated with qualitative methods. This chapter argues against these associations. The chapter begins by fleshing out the argument against assumed methodological associations. It identifies the use of quantitative methods in interpretive research as the biggest lacuna in the methodological playing field of comparative environmental politics. It then presents two examples of how to use quantitative methods effectively in interpretive research, without embedding those methods in an epistemological positivism with which they are generally associated. The first of these cases, based on dissertation research by Saskia van Wees, looks at the different patterns of environmental performance and environmental foreign policy in India and China in the period 2002–2012. The second case looks at efforts by Indigenous and traditional communities in Brazil’s Amazon Basin to oppose the construction of dams that would impact their communities.

National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe

Despite a reputation for climate policy leadership, European states vary markedly in their responses to climate change. During the 2010s, a “conglomerate of crises” afflicted Europe, stymying climate ambitions to varying degrees. Yet climate change had ascended European political agendas by the decade’s close, championed by new social movements and voices and mirrored by innovative policy approaches, such as “Climate Emergency” declarations. In turn, this peak of engagement was followed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In such a tumultuous setting, the literature on comparative European environmental politics faces a complexity crisis as it seeks to map multiple axes of ambition across multiple levels. In this chapter, the authors problematize the identification of leaders and laggards within climate mitigation studies, as well as identify the challenges inherent to comparing state performance. They also examine recent policy and research trends, analyze the importance of policy resilience during crises, and emphasize the utility of multilevel understanding in national climate analysis.

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities

The US and Argentinian shale industry enjoyed staunch support from domestic political, financial, and legal institutions, which enabled the industry to expand while externalizing financial, public health, and environmental costs to the general public. The Argentinian government’s decision to finance shale investments and the US and Argentinian governments’ decisions to finance the industry bailout sustained the industry even as its poor financial outlook that predated the COVID-19 crisis became widely acknowledged. State and provincial governments in both the United States and Argentina employed the legal system to prohibit local government and local communities, including Indigenous communities, from restricting shale development and infrastructures in their localities. Politicians’ support for the industry, cloaked as concerns for workers and communities, fortified the industry’s privileges. Reforming the entrenched institutional support for the industry, although a formidable challenge, is necessary for these countries to shift away from oil and gas dependency.

Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics

This chapter uses gender lenses to evaluate recent population debates and the implications of dominant discourses within those debates. It asks about the gendered implications of environment and population discourses by focusing largely on population discourses in the US context that have also tended to have implications far outside US borders. Paying particular attention to the politics of climate change, the chapter argues that environment and population discourses in multiple spaces continue to reflect rigid gender norms and assumptions about who in society are environmental saviors and who are environmental problems. It argues that failure to critically evaluate population discourses contributes to injustice among peoples and among states. While the most extreme forms of population discourses linking women’s fertility to food insecurity and environmental decline have shifted away from their most extreme versions, other developments are also worrying from the perspective of gender justice.

Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence in US Environmental Activism

This chapter explores the logic of illegal or “radical” tactics in the United States environmentalist movement, generating broader theoretical insights to guide research in other national settings. Two theoretical concepts help to explain environmentalists’ escalation from legal activism (lobbying, litigation, marches, etc.) to more confrontational tactics such as civil disobedience, sabotage, and violence. The first concept is the stepwise escalation of intensity: from legal activism to civil disobedience, to sabotage, to interpersonal violence. Activists escalate from one level of tactical intensity to the next when government and business interests prove unresponsive to activism at the lower level. The degree of escalation is proportional to the degree of government and business resistance. The second concept is the diversity of tactics. Even in highly contested campaigns, only a minority of activists escalates to illegal tactics, while the majority continues to employ legal means of struggle. Tactical diversity is a source of strength: civil disobedience and sabotage may temporarily block environmentally destructive projects until legal challenges and legislative rule changes end them for good. Tactical diversity also creates opportunities for solidarity, with different organizations contributing to the same campaign according to their tactical comparative advantages. The chapter lays out directions for further research and speculates about the future—whether the worsening climate crisis portends an increase in the most radical tactics, sabotage and violence.

Toward a Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice

The politics of environmental justice increasingly feature in environmental governance across multiple levels. Environmental defenders risk their lives to protect land, water, and forests. Non-human actors like rivers are gaining rights. Frontline environmental justice communities now include nation-states like Fiji that faces existential threats from climate change. Indigenous Peoples’ fights for self-determination illuminate how deeply connected and inseparable are the politics of sovereignty, representation, and environment. This chapter explores these developments to chart and examine how a politics of environmental justice can inform environmental and social policies by treating environmental justice as a driver, rather than unintended consequence, of policy and politics. Through this critical, comparative review, the chapter illuminates how and why environmental justice concerns matter for environmental governance and for the study of comparative environmental politics.

The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality, and Perceptions of Government Assistance

This chapter addresses a central research question of the politics of climate disaster: Who do citizens believe responsible for aftermath relief? The authors examine the issue of responsibility attribution in federal disaster assistance—and the related question of who voters believe deserves government disaster relief—against three devastating 2017 hurricanes, with a special focus on the impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico. The authors begin to answer the questions of responsibility and deservingness with survey data collected by them in a pilot study on the Island of Puerto Rico in 2019. They conclude by identifying fruitful links of comparative analysis between climate disaster politics and distributive and welfare politics.

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia

How do environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) continue their activism under conditions of increasingly authoritarian governance? In the 1990s, during the immediate post-Soviet period, Russian environmental organizations developed activist strategies in a period of political instability and economic recession. These strategies roughly corresponded to Hirschman’s ideal types of exit, voice, and loyalty. Since that time, many of the conditions that facilitated the creation of these organizational types have changed. Foreign funding for civil society development declined sharply, the government has embraced a more coercive approach to shaping social activism, and social media provide new platforms and resources for environmentalists. Following the passage of the 2012 Law on Foreign Agents, new forms of environmentalism in Russia emerged to adapt to and challenge the government’s effort to contract space for autonomous action. These activist strategies complicate Hirschman’s ideal types in ways that illuminate how environmentalism may endure under authoritarian regimes in Russia and beyond.