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Abstract
This paper argues for incorporating an environmental justice framework into sustainable tourism and ecotourism. Such a framework provides important directions and guidance for addressing injustices related to human–environmental relationships, particularly with respect to disadvantaged, low-income and minority communities. Issue areas include environmental equity, environmental discrimination and environmental racism. Drawing from the environmental justice literature, this paper first clarifies key concepts associated with environmental justice. This is followed by an examination of issues in tourism development that clearly relate to environmental justice (even though the term itself may not have been used). An analytical framework for addressing environmental justice and equity in tourism studies is proposed, incorporating environmental justice concepts and dimensions of procedural and distributive justice. Several theoretical areas that offer potential for developing this bridge between tourism and environmental justice are presented. The discussion opens new avenues for better incorporating justice and equity into ecotourism and sustainable tourism development and research.
Notes
Porter and Tarrant Citation(2001) examined the distribution of federal tourism sites across social groups from an environmental justice perspective. Citations like Sharpley Citation(2000) did not show up, though equity is discussed and despite several authors like Sharpley discussing notions such as inter-generational and intra-generational equity. This may be due, in part, to the title, abstract and key word choices of the author(s), as well as the abstracting format used by the citation index or publishers.
‘Sufficiency economy’ is another model of sustainability and is based on ‘a philosophy that stresses the middle path as the overriding principle for the appropriate conduct of all people’ (Theerapappisit, Citation2005: 17). It focuses on ‘the way for a recovery of respect for ethical values that will lead to a more resilient and sustainable economy, better able to meet the challenge arising from globalization and other changes’ (Theerapappisit, Citation2005: 17).
While equality was a strong focus in his early work, later Rawls Citation(2001) elaborates on the notion of justice as fairness.
Theories of justice provide principles and guidelines for deciding what makes acts equitable or inequitable. Some major justice theories are utilitarianism, contractarianism, egalitarianism and libertarianism (see Fennell, Citation2006 for a discussion of these).
‘Environmental Justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies’ (US Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/compliance/environmentaljustice/index.html. Accessed 30 April 2007).
Environmental equity originates from three major sources of dissimilarity: social, generational and procedural. Social equity refers to the role of social and economic factors in environmental degradation and resource consumption (Cutter, Citation1995).
These studies focused mainly on distributive elements rather than procedural issues.
The environmental justice (EJ) movement that evolved in the 1970s was very different from mainstream environmental groups focused on biodiversity conservation. Its ecological dimension remains weak in that ‘there is little appreciation of the role played by complex ecosystems in sustaining life on earth’ (Dryzek, Citation1997: 178). Our discussion of EJ in this paper does not critique its anthropocentric or human-centred perspective.
Conceptualisation this framework as we have done refers to defining the nature of a problem and identifying its parts as well as their relationships (Mitchell, Citation1989).
The demolition of an asbestos-contaminated cruise ship in India was vehemently opposed by Greenpeace, for instance (see www.greenpeace.org/india/press/releases/greenpeace-campaign-forces-fre. Accessed 15 August 2006).
In addition to developing theoretical areas, appropriate methodologies will also be needed. Previous environmental justice studies indicate that outcomes vary depending on analysis methods employed (Oakes et al., Citation1996). In a number of studies that found environmental inequity among communities and social groups, the reasons and sources of inequity were poorly investigated.
