This is an in-depth analysis of coal fire burning power plants, their effects on human health and the environment. It also employed case study data from Tampa Electric Company’s Big Bend facility to examine environmental infractions at that facility. Tampa Electric Company’s Big Bend Utility Plant, violated the Clean Air Act, which led to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in 1997. This case study details the lawsuit, and subsequent settlement as well as Tampa Electric Company’s record of compliance since 2000. This study examines the area surrounding the plant, and impacts the facility may cause local residents and the ecosystem in this part of Florida. Several questions are explored in this case study revolving around environmental justice and environmental racism. Did the actions taken by the Department of Justice in 2000 on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency and the people of the State of Florida through its Department of Environmental Protection fit the corporate crimes that Tampa Electric were accused of in the lawsuit? Has this company been compliant with state and federal law as required by the settlement? Finally, has the Tampa Electric Company maintained their commitment to provide environmental justice for the communities surrounding the Big Bend Utility Plant or would their actions fit a definition for the crime of corporate environmental violence?

First Nations in Canada have long struggled to participate effectively in resource development decisions. In 2004, the Supreme Court established that the federal and provincial governments of Canada have a duty to consult First Nations in cases where their treaty rights, land claims, or traditions may be adversely affected by government decision-making or third-party development. To determine whether the duty to consult has made an impact on the empowerment of First Nations in these decisions, I assess three case studies using four criteria. This research finds that, while the duty to consult has made a positive impact on the empowerment of First Nations, it still does not go far enough in truly empowering communities to achieve sustainable development on their own terms. This study concludes that the duty to consult may be supplemented with Aboriginal self-government – signaling the potential for positive change in the empowerment of communities seeking environmental justice.

Inanda Dam situated near Durban in the Mngeni River, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal was completed in the late 1980s. As a typical large dam of the modern era, one major impact of the dam was the displacement and resettlement of over 1300 rural households living under communal ("tribal") tenure. Households were relocated to different places some kilometres away from their original places. These new relocation areas, where different tenure and other arrangements prevailed, then became their permanent residential location. This study was initiated to investigate two key issues. It sought to understand how the relocation altered the quality of life of removed families. It also sought to explore adaptation strategies adopted by the settlers and constraints to effective adaptation. Primary data were collected by means of in-depth interviews and direct observation of certain indicators of quality of life in the study area, over a period of five months. Fourteen households participated in the study. Simple quantitative methods were used to supplement the overall qualitative research design. Because of the small sample that was used, the study is perhaps not widely generalizable. However the study does provide insights into the long-term impacts of this inadequately mitigated displacement. It is also a case study of the nature of long-term environmental injustice and disruption associated with the construction of large dams. This is an injustice made worse by the political system of apartheid prevailing when the dam was planned and built. The general findings are that the dam did impact negatively on the quality of life of the displaced families. Thirteen years after compulsory relocation, the quality of life of several families has deteriorated instead of slowly improving. While the process of adaptation for some families has been easy, other families are still battling to reconstruct their livelihoods and quality of life. Where benefits of access to services such as potable piped water and electricity are enjoyed, these benefits are overshadowed by inability to pay and lack of access to other goods such as proper housing and adequate land. Loss of access to common property resources has meant a shift towards more money-based livelihood generation strategies. Constraints to adaptation are both internal and external. Low levels of socioeconomic status, poor access to environmental resources and the unfavourable political conditions in the relocation areas are some of the major constraints to effective adaptation. While the individual and group coping strategies employed have assisted families in the adaptation process, it is argued that the inadequacy of state support mechanisms significantly retarded the ability of households to adapt to life in the relocation areas. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2002.

Citizens of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation fight for justice with their bodies at the frontlines of environmental catastrophe. This dissertation employs a biopolitical and interpretive analysis to examine these struggles in the polluted heart of Canada’s ‘Chemical Valley’. Drawing from a discursive analysis of situated concerns on the ground and a textual analysis of Canada’s biopolitical ‘policy ensemble’ for Indigenous citizenship, this dissertation examines how citizens and public officials respond to environmental and reproductive injustices in Aamjiwnaang. Based upon in-depth interviews with residents and policy-makers, I first document citizens of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation’s activities and practices on the ground as they cope with and navigate their health concerns and habitat. Second, I examine struggles over knowledge and the contestation over scientific expertise as the community seeks reproductive justice. Third, I contextualize citizen struggles over knowledge by discussing the power relations embedded within the ‘policy ensemble’ for Indigenous citizenship and Canadian jurisdiction for on-reserve environmental health. From an interpretive lens, inspired by Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality, the dissertation develops a framework of “ecological citizenship”, which confronts biopolitics with a theoretical discussion of place to expand upon existing Canadian citizenship and environmental studies literature. I argue that reproductive justice in Aamjiwnaang cannot be separated from environmental justice, and that the concept of place is central to ongoing struggles. As such, I discuss “ecological citizenship’s double-edge”, to contend that citizens are at once bound up within disciplinary biopolitical power relations and also articulate a radical form of place-based belonging.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis critically analyses collective action processes and outcomes in Community Forestry through the concept of embeddedness. This research focuses on the questions of when people cooperate, how and why collective action emerges and evolves, and what leads or does not lead to equitable outcomes. The thesis makes a fundamental distinction between equality and equity. The research focuses specifically on the Nepalese experience with Community Forestry (CF), which is regarded as one of the most progressive CF programs being implemented in one of the poorest countries in the world. The thesis adopts an integrated research approach involving multiple actors, scales and methods with a focus on local level CF processes and forest users. This study considers the Forest Users Group (FUG) as a unit for analysis. Field work was conducted in three FUGs from the mid-hill region of Nepal over seven months between August 2001 and February 2002. The field research moves downwards to the household level and upward to the district, national and international level actors. It employs a combination of the process analysis and actor oriented approach and qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how CF is being driven, who is driving it and why CF is advancing in a certain direction. The study shows that the emergence, evolution and outcomes of collective action in CF are complex and varied due to specific and changing socio-cultural, economic, political and ecological contexts. Without understanding the complexities, in which peoples’ motivation and collective action are embedded, we cannot explain the emergence and evolution of collective action in CF. This thesis challenges the rational choice tradition and some key points of Common Property Regimes (CPR) theory and highlights the concept of embeddedness in participatory natural resource management. The thesis highlights the problem of decentralised CF policy and the forest bureaucracy. Decentralisation universally imposes a formal democratic system based on equality without acknowledging unequal societies. In Nepal, there has been little reorganisation of the forest bureaucracy. Despite being an international model for community forestry, in Nepal the existing bureaucracy has been unable or unwilling to transfer knowledge to forest users. The thesis concludes by stating the need to avoid the pitfalls of some democratic principles associated with standardisation and formalism. This means transforming bureaucratic norms and ideology. Context is central for the sustainable and equitable management of natural resources. It must be further researched and applied in decision-making if CF is going to achieve its potential to improve the condition of forests and the welfare of rural people.

This thesis explores the ways in which the environmental justice movement, which is in opposition to environmental racism, and the Black Lives Matter movement, which is in opposition to police brutality and other forms of racism, are part of the same struggle: a struggle against the neoliberal violence of the state. This struggle against neoliberal violence is at the same time a struggle for communities of color to achieve self-determination on a global scale, a monumental task which might be informed through a revolutionary intercommunalist framework of global grassroots solidarity. State oppression embodies violence in more forms that one, including co-optation—which entails the assimilation of people into a political framework that answers to the gatekeepers of transnational capital. This work includes input from environmental justice activists from Los Angeles County in its exploration of local grassroots struggles.

abstract: This dissertation examines the development of grassroots environmental organizations between 1970 and 2000 and the role they played in the larger American environmental movement and civil society during that period. Much has been written about growth in environmental values in the United States during the twentieth century and about the role of national environmental organizations in helping to pass landmark federal-level environmental laws during the 1960s and 1970s. This study illuminates a different story of how citizen activists worked to protect and improve the air, water, healthfulness and quality of life of where they lived. At the local level, activists looked much different than they did in Washington, D.C.--they tended to be volunteers without any formal training in environmental science or policy. They were also more likely to be women than at the national level. They tended to frame environmental issues and solutions in familiar ways that made sense to them. Rather than focusing on the science or economics of an environmental issue, they framed it in terms of fairness and justice and giving citizens a say in the decisions that affected their health and quality of life. And, as the regulatory, political, and social landscape changed around them, they adapted their strategies in their efforts to continue to affect environmental decision making. Over time, they often connected their local interests and issues with more sophisticated, globalized understandings of the economic and political systems that under laid environmental issues. This study examines three case studies in the rural Great Plains, urban Southwest, and small-town Appalachia between 1970 and 2000 in an attempt to understand community-based environmental activism in the late twentieth century, how it related to the national environmental movement, the strategies local-level groups employed and when and why, the role of liberal democratic arguments in their work and in group identity formation, the limits of those arguments, and how the groups, their strategies, and the activists themselves changed overtime. These three groups were the Northern Plains Resource Council in Montana, Southwest Environmental Service in Southern Arizona, and Save Our Cumberland Mountains in Eastern Tennessee. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. History 2012

The environmental justice movement emerged after the civil rights movement and began as an attack on environmental racism, when communities of color and low-income experience disproportionately high levels of exposure to air pollution, water pollution, and toxic facilities. The environmental justice movement is not unitary in practice, nor should it be—environmental racism and injustice are manifested in different ways and scales. However, those exposed to environmental racism are unified under an identity in solidarity, known as the people of color identity in environmental justice. As the environmental justice movement has grown and taken shape to better address injustices of a racialized landscape, it has connected more closely with movements for spatial justice and immigrant rights to combat a detrimentally narrow focus of activism. This thesis explores the rise of community-based activism in the Los Angeles’ labor social justice organizing after the civil unrest in 1992. By employing a spatial framework to environmental activism in urban settings, Los Angeles is a particularly provoking case study for analyzing the regional environmental justice movement as well as the multi-scalar social justice organizing movement. Contextualizing Los Angeles’ community-based activism in a historic context in the first section and then analyzing components of social justice organizing across movements, this project attempts to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the development of identity in justice-seeking activism.

The rush for land has escalated the last decade, with Sub-Saharan Africa as the most targeted region. Governments, local elites and foreign corporations are increasingly taking control over large areas of agricultural lands with the aim of creating higher financial returns and achieve food security. This phenomenon, known as land grabbing, has received a lot of attention worldwide, not least from non-governmental organizations and scholars stressing the negative impacts on rural farmers and families. Yet, several international organizations as well as many African governments keep advocating the positive effects that land grabbing can have on poverty reduction and economic growth. The dominating capitalist and neoliberal view on development, focusing largely on the economic part, undermines the social and environmental impacts that these investments bring. The purpose of this comparative study is therefore to examine, analyze and compare these impacts in Ghana and Ethiopia, two countries heavily affected by land grabbing. This is done through the lens of political ecology, where concepts such as environmental justice, accumulation by dispossession and sustainable rural livelihoods will be of particular significance. Based on a systematic literature review, the results show that land grabbing projects, said to aim at stimulating economic and social development, have resulted in dispossessions, injustices and environmental conflicts wherein indigenous communities have been deeply affected. Their traditional livelihoods, based mainly on cultivation, fishing, gathering and hunting, have been threatened by several impacts from the land grabs. These include loss of land, declined access to resources, damaged ecosystems, deforestation and lack of alternative ways to maintain food security.

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / A presente dissertação tem por objetivo analisar a eficácia social e ambiental do plano diretor participativo conjuntamente com as normas de direito ambiental, definindo, para tanto, o princípio de justiça social e ambiental como requisito obrigatório destes instrumentos. Demonstra-se, a partir do levantamento de dados referentes às condições ambientais nas cidades brasileiras, a ruptura entre os temas urbano e ambiental, tanto na prática legislativa, como na econômica. É realizada uma crítica ao modelo capitalista de apropriação do solo urbano, paradoxal e incompatível com o pleno desenvolvimento das funções sociais e ambientais da cidade. Conclui-se que a inserção do princípio de justiça social e ambiental, enquanto diretriz obrigatória para plano diretor e legislação ambiental, permitirá uma maior garantia do pleno desenvolvimento das funções sociais e ambientais da cidade. / The aim of this paper is to analyze the social and environmental effectiveness of the master plan within the norms of environmental legislation, and therefore, defining the principle of social and environmental justice as an obligatory requirement of these instruments. The conflict between the urban and environmental themes is demonstrated in both legislative and economical practice, by surveying data on the environmental conditions in the Brazilian cities. A criticism is made of the capitalist system of appropriation of urban territory, which is paradoxical and incompatible with the full development of the social and environmental functions of the city. It is concluded that the insertion of the principle of social and environmental justice as a compulsory framework the master plan and environmental legislation, will make full development of the social and environmental functions of the city more likely.