Daniela Del Bene
Daniela Del Bene is currently a PhD candidate in Environmental Sciences at ICTA-UAB. She holds a Master degree in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Turin (Italy) and a BA in International Relations and Diplomacy at the University of Triest (Italy). She also studied Ethnology, History of Southern Asia and Politics at the South Asien Institute at University of Heidelberg (Germany). Her main research topics are conflicts related to water resources and river basin management, dams and hydropower, social movements. Her work will be carried out mostly in Southern Asia (Indian Himalayas), Europe (Alps) and Latin America. She currently works in the EJOLT project and on the global map of environmental conflicts and resistance
Address: Catalunya
Address: Catalunya
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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
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
- 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