Access to environmental justice
Tackling human vulnerability and environmental management

What is environmental justice? How can it tackle human vulnerability to environmental degradation? When is environmental justice accessible to the most vulnerable? What role does it play in environmental management?

Environmental justice is a useful tool in tackling human vulnerability and environmental management, Capacity Global (Capacity), a UK-based, not-for-profit organisation working on poverty, environment and human rights, has found. Environmental justice for vulnerable communities is based on two main principles:

• Everyone has the right to a clean, safe and healthy environment and to manage their own resources.
• The most vulnerable people in society, the poorest in particular, should not suffer the disproportionate, negative effects of environmental omissions, actions, policies or law.

Up until recently, the poorest people have often been seen as the reason for environmental degradation and bad management. In reality, the root of environmental degradation is more likely to be environmental injustices over which the most vulnerable have had little control. For example:

• discriminatory (direct and indirect) practices by government and business
• barriers to legal and judicial processes and procedures
• inability to participate in decision-making.

The lack of equity in what choices and what resources are provided to whom in the process of environmental management is an environmental justice issue. Environmental management shapes decisions and actions in how resources are developed and to whom they are provided. Yet the people most likely to be affected by environmental management are not included in the process often enough.

Tackling human vulnerability by dealing with environmental injustices is a fundamental part of effective, fair and long-term environmental management. What would this mean in practice? Environmental justice involves the provision of tools by which people have the civil and political coping capacity to best protect their right to and responsibility for a clean environment and the management of it. These are the four As of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration:

• access to information
• access to participation
• access to decision-making
• access to justice.

Research conducted by a global coalition of civil society groups, The Access Initiative (TAI), found the following barriers when measuring the progress of the four principles in nine countries - including Chile, India, Uganda, Indonesia, Hungary and South Africa:

• lack of regular reports in response to Agenda 21 (Indonesia)
• insufficient detail on air quality (Chile)
• failure to involve affected communities early on in decisions concerning waste water treatment (Thailand)
• insufficiently comprehensive legal frameworks and unclear interpretation of public interest (South Africa)
• lack of capacity in civil society (Chile, Hungary, Indonesia and Uganda)
• restricted access of civil society to international sources of funding (India).

There is an important link between tackling human vulnerability and developing effective environmental management. One example provided by the World Resource Institute (Petkova, 2002) is that of women's access to forestry management decision-making in Nepal. Many women are excluded from local and national decision-making on the environmental resources on which they are directly dependent for their survival. The decision by male-dominated forest community groups to create specific forest entry points to protect degraded forests from further mismanagement caused considerable inconvenience to women, who made up 90% of the forest users. As a result, these women suffered further economic hardships from being forced to walk for miles to gain access through the designated entry points. Whilst access to decision-making was not the only issue involved in poverty alleviation in this case, it was an important element in addressing poverty and women's lack of opportunity to get involved in environmental management.

Capacity has found in its work that the most successful attempts at creating environmental justice have been to build the capacity of vulnerable groups by providing funding or information and removing barriers to decision-making by creating avenues for affected communities to challenge and influence traditional, top-down decision-making processes.

Maria Adebowale
Director
Capacity Global
South Bank University
London SW8 2JZ
UK

T + 44 (0)208 469 4671

maria@capacity.org.uk

www.capacity.org.uk

See also
'Environment and Human Rights Approach to Sustainable Development',
International Institute for Environment and Development, Briefing Paper, by Maria Adebowale et al, 2001
'Closing the Gap, Information, Participation and Justice in the Decision-making Environment', World Resources Institute, by E. Petkova et al, 2002

Views expressed on these pages are not necessarily those of DFID, IDS, id21 or other contributing institutions. Copyright remains with the original authors but (unless stated otherwise) articles may be copied or quoted without restriction, provided id21 and originating author(s) and institution(s) are acknowledged. Copyright © 2005 id21. All rights reserved.