Decolonizing Environmental Justice Studies: A Latin American Perspective

ABSTRACT

The “environment” and “justice” of environmental justice are often defined through Western ways of thinking. Empirical environmental justice research, however, increasingly takes place in the context of the global South. As a result, there is a tendency to transpose Western concepts and frameworks to the global South, running the risk of being ineffective and of producing additional injustices. Drawing on decolonial thought, a Latin American and Caribbean theoretical movement, this paper analyses the problems which arise when Western concepts are used as the main organizing principles of non-Western environmental justice movements. Examples include failing to account for cases involving mutually undermining modes of life, hence presenting deliberate exposure to environmental harm as a fair solution; rendering invisible the fact that “participation” may contribute to the reproduction of environmental injustices, sometimes with the consent of those who are likely to be the first victims of environmental injustices; or reproducing the idea that communities in the global South do not produce knowledge, that their knowledge is inferior, or only useful for empirical observation, while Western science provides for the underlying theoretical framework. We conclude by highlighting some of the principles of a decolonial environmental justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• decolonialism
• coloniality of justice
• critical environmental justice studies

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank James A. Fraser at Lancaster University and Arturo Escobar at the University of North Carolina for their incisive comments on earlier versions of this paper. A previous version was presented at the “Environmental Justice 2017” conference at the University of Sydney, in November 2017.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For decolonial theorists, “Western” does not just point to a geographic origin but involves a mode of life, a system of values, and a political and historical project that emerged with the colonization of the Americas.

2 The “Dene” refers to indigenous people living in the western Canadian Subarctic, including First Nations groups such as the Chipewyan, Tlicho, Slavey, Sathu and Yellowknives.

3 Fanon calls this process of internalization “in-corporation” and “epidermalization”; the conceptual nuance is key to grasp how environmental coloniality works quite literally by disempowering the colonial subjects though the destruction of their environment and the poisoning of their bodies.