Daniela Del Bene

In this article we undertake a systematic mapping of 649 cases of resistance movements to both fossil fuel (FF) and low carbon energy (LCE) projects, providing the most comprehensive overview of such place-based energy-related mobilizations to date. We find that (1) Place-based resistance movements are succeeding in curbing both fossil-fuel and low-carbon energy projects. Over a quarter of projects encountering social resistance have been cancelled, suspended or delayed. (2) The evidence highlights that low carbon, renewable energy and mitigation projects are as conflictive as FF projects, and that both disproportionately impact vulnerable groups such as rural communities and Indigenous peoples. Amongst LCE projects, hydropower was found to have the highest number of conflicts with concerns over social and environmental damages. (3) Repression and violence against protesters and land defenders was rife in almost all activities, with 10% of all cases analysed involving assassination ...

In this article we undertake a systematic mapping of 649 cases of resistance movements to both fossil fuel (FF) and low carbon energy (LCE) projects, providing the most comprehensive overview of such place-based energy-related mobilizations to date. We find that (1) Place-based resistance movements are succeeding in curbing both fossil-fuel and low-carbon energy projects. Over a quarter of projects encountering social resistance have been cancelled, suspended or delayed. (2) The evidence highlights that low carbon, renewable energy and mitigation projects are as conflictive as FF projects, and that both disproportionately impact vulnerable groups such as rural communities and Indigenous peoples. Amongst LCE projects, hydropower was found to have the highest number of conflicts with concerns over social and environmental damages. (3) Repression and violence against protesters and land defenders was rife in almost all activities, with 10% of all cases analysed involving assassination of activists. Violence was particularly common in relation to hydropower, biomass, pipelines and coal extraction. Wind, solar and other renewables were the least conflictive and entailed lower levels of repression than other projects. The results caution that decarbonization of the economy is by no means inherently environmentally innocuous or socially inclusive. We find that conflicts and collective action are driven by multiple concerns through which community mobilization seeks to reshape the energy regime and its impacts. These include claims for localization, democratic participation, shorter energy chains, anti-racism, climate-justice-focused governance, and Indigenous leadership. Climate and energy policymakers need to pay closer attention to the demands and preferences of these collective movements pointing to transformative pathways to decarbonization.

Chinese investments in large hydropower dams have rapidly increased all over the world in the last 20 years. Some of these projects have been contested both from a technological and political point of view due to the ways in which decisions have been made, as well as in relation to the resulting social-ecological change and ecological distributional aspects. From an Environmental Justice perspective, this paper analyses the main drivers and contested aspects of Chinese hydropower investments in the global South. The paper builds on Chinese projects located in different regions of the world, by combining information from the literature and the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice – EJAtlas dataset. Based on the analysis of Chinese hydropower projects and environmental justice concerns, this paper sheds light on the current literature on drivers and multidimensional conflictive outcomes of these large hydropower dam investments.

The present article analyses a unique database of 220 dam related environmental conflicts, retrieved from the Global Atlas on Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), and based on knowledge co-production between academics and activists. Despite well-known controversial social and environmental impacts of dams, efforts to increase renewable energy generation have reinstated the interest into hydropower development globally. People affected by dams have largely denounced such 'unsustainabilities' through collective non-violent actions. Nevertheless, we found that repression, criminalization, violent targeting of activists and assassinations are recurrent features of conflictive dams. Violent repression is particularly high when indigenous people are involved. Indirect forms of violence are also analyzed through socioeconomic , environmental, and health impacts. We argue that increasing repression of the opposition against unwanted energy infrastructures does not only serve to curb specific protest actions, but also aims to delegitimize and undermine differing understanding of sustainability, epistemologies, and world-views. This analysis cautions that allegedly sustainable renewables such as hydropower often replicates patterns of violence within a frame of an 'extractivism of renewables'. We finally suggest that co-production of knowledge between scientists, activists, and communities should be largely encouraged in order to investigate sensitive and contentious topics in sustainability studies.

Environmental Justice is both a field of study and a social movement. This dialectical relationship between theory and praxis constitutes the basis of its empirical and theoretical richness. However, there is a persistent divide between theorist and activist approaches to Environmental Justice that needs to be abridged. This paper explains how through co-design we delved into the transformative potential of EJ research with and for social movements and aimed to unearth some of the tensions and colliding epistemologies inherent in co-production of knowledge.Activities included workshops and consultations, visioning through appreciative enquiry, a pro-action café , and an online survey.We conclude that co-design can help inform more just, inclusive and socially relevant scholarship, however we caution that the needed transformation in knowledge production and the dismantling of hierarchies remains an unfinished process that calls for ongoing attention to power dynamics and 'care-full' scholarship.

This article highlights the need for collaborative research on ecological conflicts within a global perspective.
As the social metabolism of our industrial economy increases, intensifying extractive activities and the
production of waste, the related social and environmental impacts generate conflicts and resistance across the
world. This expansion of global capitalism leads to greater disconnection between the diverse geographies of
injustice along commodity chains. Yet, at the same time, through the globalization of governance processes
and Environmental Justice (EJ) movements, local political ecologies are becoming increasingly transnational
and interconnected. We first make the case for the need for new approaches to understanding such interlinked
conflicts through collaborative and engaged research between academia and civil society. We then present a
large-scale research project aimed at understanding the determinants of resource extraction and waste
disposal conflicts globally through a collaborative mapping initiative: The EJAtlas, the Global Atlas of
Environmental Justice. This article introduces the EJAtlas mapping process and its methodology, describes
the process of co-design and development of the atlas, and assesses the initial outcomes and contribution of
the tool for activism, advocacy and scientific knowledge. We explain how the atlas can enrich EJ studies by
going beyond the isolated case study approach to offer a wider systematic evidence-based enquiry into the
politics, power relations and socio-metabolic processes surrounding environmental justice struggles locally
and globally.

Cet article met en évidence la nécessité pour la recherche collaborative sur les conflits écologiques, avec une
perspective globale. Le métabolisme social de notre économie industrielle est en augmentation. Cette
intensifie les activités d'extraction et la production de déchets, et les impacts sociaux et environnementaux
associés générer des conflits et de la résistance. Cette expansion du capitalisme mondial conduit à une plus
grande déconnexion entre les diverses «géographies de l'injustice» à travers le filière. Pourtant, dans le même
temps, grâce à la mondialisation de la gouvernance et des mouvements pour la justice environnementale (EJ),
les écologies politiques locales sont de plus en plus transnationale et interconnecté. D'abord, nous plaidons
pour de nouvelles approches pour comprendre ces conflits interconnectés à travers la collaboration et la
recherche engagés, entre le monde universitaire et la société civile. Deuxièmement, nous présentons un projet
de recherche à grande échelle visant à comprendre les déterminants de conflits au sujet de l'extraction des
ressources et de l'élimination des déchets à travers une collaboration mondiale initiative de cartographie: le
EJAtlas, l'Atlas mondial de la Justice de l'environnement. Ce document présente les EJAtlas et sa
méthodologie, décrit le processus de co-conception et la phase de développement, et évalue les résultats
initiaux et la contribution de l'outil pour l'activisme, de plaidoyer et de connaissances scientifiques. Nous expliquons comment l'Atlas peut enrichir les études EJ. Il propose une enquête fondée sur des preuves
systématiques dans la politique, les relations de pouvoir et les processus socio-métabolique environnantes
luttes de justice environnementale, localement et globalement.

Este artículo destaca la necesidad de realizar investigación colaborativa sobre conflictos ambientales en una
perspectiva global. Al crecer el metabolismo de las economías industriales se intensifican las actividades
extractivas y la producción de residuos, con impactos sociales y ambientales que producen conflictos y
resistencia en todo el mundo. Esa expansión del capitalismo global lleva a una desconexión entre las
geografías de la injusticia a lo largo de las largas cadenas de extracción, transporte y desecho de las
mercancías. Pero al mismo tiempo, a través de la globalización de los procesos de gobernanza y de los
movimientos de Justicia Ambiental, las ecologías políticas locales cada vez son más transnacionales y están
más interconectadas. En primer lugar, proponemos nuevos enfoques para entender esos conflictos mediante
la investigación colaborativa y comprometida entre los académicos y la sociedad civil. Presentamos después
un proyecto de investigación dirigido a entender los factores globales determinantes de los conflictos por
extracción de recursos y producción de residuos a través de una iniciativa colaborativa de mapeo: el EJAtlas,
el Atlas Global de Justicia Ambiental. Este artículo introduce este proceso de mapeo del EJAtlas y su
metodología, describe el diseño colaborativo y el desarrollo del atlas, evalúa sus resultados iniciales y su
contribución como una nueva herramienta para los activistas, los académicos, las organizaciones
ambientalistas. Explicamos cómo el atlas puede enriquecer la investigación de la Justicia Ambiental yendo
más allá de los casos individuales, ofreciendo la posibilidad de estudios sistemáticos más amplios, basados en
evidencias, sobre la política, las relaciones de poder y los procesos socio-metabólicos relacionados local y
globalmente con las luchas por la justicia ambiental.

The environmental movement may be “the most comprehensive and influential movement of our time” (Castells 1997: 67), representing for the ‘post-industrial’ age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial period. Yet while strike statistics have been collected for many countries since the late nineteenth century (van der Velden 2007),1 until the present no administrative body tracks the occurrence and frequency of mobilizations or protests related to environmental issues at the global scale, in the way that the World Labour Organization tracks the occurrence of strike action.2 Thus until the present it has been impossible to properly document the prevalence and incidence of contentious activity related to environmental issues or to track the ebb and flow of protest activity. Such an exercise is necessary because if the twentieth century has been the one of workers struggles, the twenty-first century could well be the one of environmentalists. This Special Feature presents the results from such an exercise—The Global Atlas of Environmental Justice—a unique global inventory of cases of socio-environmental conflicts built through a collaborative process between academics and activist groups which includes both qualitative and quantitative data on thousands of conflictive projects as well as on the social response.

This Special Feature applies the lenses of political ecology and ecological economics to unpack and understand these socio-environmental conflicts, otherwise known as ‘ecological distribution conflicts’, (hereafter EDCs, Martinez-Alier 1995, 2002). The contributions in this special feature explore the why, what, how and who of these contentious processes within a new comparative political ecology.

The articles in this special issue underline the need for a politicization of socio-environmental debates, whereby political refers to the struggle over the kinds of worlds the people want to create and the types of ecologies they want to live in. We put the focus on who gains and who loses in ecological processes arguing that these issues need to be at the center of sustainability science. Secondly, we demonstrate how environmental justice groups and movements coming out of those conflicts play a fundamental role in redefining and promoting sustainability. We contend that protests are not disruptions to smooth governance that need to be managed and resolved, but that they express grievances as well as aspirations and demands and in this way may serve as potent forces that can lead to the transformation towards sustainability of our economies, societies and ecologies.

The articles in this collection contribute to a core question of sustainability science—why and through what political, social and economic processes some are denied the right to a safe environment, and how to support the necessary social and political transformation to enact environmental justice.

Open access: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-018-0563-4

Journal Sustainability Science

Journal of Political Ecology Vol. 21, 2014 20
Abstract
In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide array of concepts and slogans related to environmental inequities and sustainability, and explore the connections and relations between them. These concepts include: environmental justice, ecological debt, popular epidemiology, environmental racism, climate justice, environmentalism of the poor, water justice, biopiracy, food sovereignty, "green deserts", "peasant agriculture cools downs the Earth", land grabbing, Ogonization and Yasunization, resource caps, corporate accountability, ecocide, and indigenous territorial rights, among others. We examine how activists have coined these notions and built demands around them, and how academic research has in turn further applied them and supplied other related concepts, working in a mutually reinforcing way with EJOs. We argue that these processes and dynamics build an activist-led and co-produced social sustainability science, furthering both academic scholarship and activism on environmental justice.

Keywords: Political ecology, environmental justice organizations, environmentalism of the poor, ecological debt, activist knowledge

Joan Martinez-Alier a 1
Isabelle Anguelovski a
Patrick Bond b
Daniela Del Bene a
Federico Demaria a
Julien-Francois Gerber c
Lucie Greyl d
Willi Haas e
Hali Healy a
Victoria Marín-Burgos f
Godwin Ojo g
Marcelo Porto h
Leida Rijnhout i
Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos a
Joachim Spangenberg j
Leah Temper a
Rikard Warlenius k
Ivonne Yánez l

- Support of environmental defenders requires better understanding of environmental conflicts.

- Environmental defenders employ largely non-violent protest forms.

- Indigenous environmental defenders face significantly higher rates of violence.

- Combining preventive mobilization, tactical diversity and litigation increases activists’ success.

- Global grassroots environmentalism is a promising force for sustainability.

Abstract
Recent research and policies recognize the importance of environmental defenders for global sustainability and emphasize their need for protection against violence and repression. However, effective support may benefit from a more systematic understanding of the underlying environmental conflicts, as well as from better knowledge on the factors that enable environmental defenders to mobilize successfully. We have created the global Environmental Justice Atlas to address this knowledge gap. Here we present a large-n analysis of 2743 cases that sheds light on the characteristics of environmental conflicts and the environmental defenders involved, as well as on successful mobilization strategies. We find that bottom-up mobilizations for more sustainable and socially just uses of the environment occur worldwide across all income groups, testifying to the global existence of various forms of grassroots environmentalism as a promising force for sustainability. Environmental defenders are frequently members of vulnerable groups who employ largely non-violent protest forms. In 11% of cases globally, they contributed to halt environmentally destructive and socially conflictive projects, defending the environment and livelihoods. Combining strategies of preventive mobilization, protest diversification and litigation can increase this success rate significantly to up to 27%. However, defenders face globally also high rates of criminalization (20% of cases), physical violence (18%), and assassinations (13%), which significantly increase when Indigenous people are involved. Our results call for targeted actions to enhance the conditions enabling successful mobilizations, and for specific support for Indigenous environmental defenders.

Keywords: Environmental justice, Environmentalism of the poor, Environmental conflicts, Sustainability, Statistical political ecology, EJAtlas

In this article we undertake a systematic mapping of 649 cases of resistance movements to both fossil fuel (FF) and low carbon energy (LCE) projects, providing the most comprehensive overview of such place-based energy-related mobilizations to date. We find that (1) Place-based resistance movements are succeeding in curbing both fossil-fuel and low-carbon energy projects. Over a quarter of projects encountering social resistance have been cancelled, suspended or delayed. (2) The evidence highlights that low carbon, renewable energy and mitigation projects are as conflictive as FF projects, and that both disproportionately impact vulnerable groups such as rural communities and Indigenous peoples. Amongst LCE projects, hydropower was found to have the highest number of conflicts with concerns over social and environmental damages. (3) Repression and violence against protesters and land defenders was rife in almost all activities, with 10% of all cases analysed involving assassination of activists. Violence was particularly common in relation to hydropower, biomass, pipelines and coal extraction. Wind, solar and other renewables were the least conflictive and entailed lower levels of repression than other projects. The results caution that decarbonization of the economy is by no means inherently environmentally innocuous or socially inclusive. We find that conflicts and collective action are driven by multiple concerns through which community mobilization seeks to reshape the energy regime and its impacts. These include claims for localization, democratic participation, shorter energy chains, anti-racism, climate-justice-focused governance, and Indigenous leadership. Climate and energy policymakers need to pay closer attention to the demands and preferences of these collective movements pointing to transformative pathways to decarbonization.