Session 8(b): Urbanising and Globalising Justice
10th Global Conference
Friday 8th July 2011 – Sunday 10th July 2011
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
Trade and Environmental Citizenship?
Sherrie Baver
Dept. of Political Science and Latin American/Latino Studies Program, The City College and The Graduate Center-CUNY, New York, USA
My paper falls under the area of “governance, leadership, and management” and touches upon several of your suggested themes. I am interested in the potential role of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and international economic organizations (IOs) in promoting democratic and effective environmental governance.
I am well-aware of the negative economic impacts of FTAs. Nevertheless they are central to the present stage of economic globalization. Therefore, given that these economic groupings have environmental provisions, they remain underexplored institutions with potential to provide space for the public, corporations, and NGOs to promote more sustainable development.
The specific research question is how might these institutions promote domestic adoption of procedural environmental access reforms of the type mandated by, for example, the 1998 Aarhus Convention? These global norms of access to information, participation, and justice in environmental matters, which are guaranteed to citizens of the U.S. and Europe, are largely absent in other parts of the world.
My two case studies are region specific, involving Mexico and Chile, two countries with a similar Latin American culture and level of economic development. Both have free trade agreements with the United States (Mexico 1994 and Chile 2004) and both are members of the OECD. They also pose a puzzle, Mexico rates low on most “quality of democracy” scores while Chile rates the highest in the region, yet Mexico has been a much earlier adopter of good environmental governance norms such as establishing an Environmental Ministry, a Freedom of Information Act, and public participation in impact assessments. In contrast, Chile only began creating a robust environmental governance regime in 2008 as it prepared for accession to the OECD in 2010. While I cannot argue that FTAs or economic IOs will promote environmental justice, they may play a role in promoting better environmental citizenship.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Govern mentality and Environmental justice in the city
Jeffrey Masuda
Department of Environment and Geography, University of Manitoba, Canada
For the past three decades, the concept of environmental justice has become a “master frame” by those who would advocate for greater scrutiny to environmental activities and consequences that disproportionately impact the health and quality of life of marginalized populations. As environmental justice movement and theory have progressed in tandem, the focal point has become elaborated from a demand for the amelioration of non-randomly distributed “risks” toward the mobilization of a concerted “fourth wave” of re-politicized critical environmentalism intended to counter the marginalizing effects of mainstream environmental planning and management. In urban geography and planning literatures, recent scholarship has shifted from a focus on individual environmental risks and risk events toward a more spatially robust theorization of the “just city” as the basis for understanding urban environmental disparity as a function of historically contextualized developmental dynamics. In this paper, I develop a theoretical approach to urban environmental justice that seeks to understand the formulation of spatial disparity in the city as a politics of articulation surrounding risk, nature, and prosperity within environmental planning and management. Drawing on recent applications Foucault’s governmentality, I examine a case study of Hamilton, Ontario to illustrate how environment disparity has become de-problematized within politically sanctioned industrial development proposals in local settings. In my analysis, I assess the relative extent to which urban environmental discourses have been employed by governmental actors to environmentalize the city in line with neoliberal developmentalist agendas. The findings suggest that opportunities for environmental justice action may depend on the mobilization of subaltern community knowledge working directly against the discourse-producing deliberative governmental spaces of environmental planning and management.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Negotiating green urbanism in imagined communities
Thor Kerr
School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University, Australia
A consortium of property developers set out to occupy 345 hectares of sea bed near Fremantle Port by claiming that their project, North Port Quay, would demonstrate that the community of Western Australia could ‘lead the world in sustainable development’. However, this legitimization strategy collapsed by late 2009 after the consortium’s proposed urbanism clashed with pre-existing imagining of Fremantle and environmental sustainability in a discourse of public concerns about the project. This paper describes attempts by the consortium to claim the environmental high ground and their discursive failure in public encounters in Fremantle. The ecological risk of a carbon-constrained future articulated by proponents was transformed in the minds of their target audience into the ecological risk of the project’s construction while representations about investing in the city’s future meant unacceptable risk for Fremantle community. The threat of North Port Quay became an effective discursive tool, used successfully by a Greens party candidate to win the Fremantle seat in Western Australia’s parliament; producing an historic electoral victory for the Greens and ending 85 years of continuous Labor Party representation. The paper is adapted from PhD research examining how representations of ecological threats, such as climate change, are applied as discursive resources for social action in the field of urban development. The research design consists of a multi-method approach in which techniques of discourse analysis are applied to representations of ecological threat in public and media texts organized in an empirical study of North Point Quay. The paper provides insight into how community imagining affects the negotiation of green urbanism.
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