Environmental justice, health and wellbeing seminar
MAIN ORGANIZER(S): NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY, STEPS CENTRE, UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA
Environmental justice addresses both the distribution of environmental harms and benefits (goods and services), and people's participation in decision-making, including recognition of people’s particular identities and visions of a desirable life. These concerns are often expressed as aspects of distributive justice and procedural justice. The basic premise motivating environmental justice research is that injustices drive environmental degradation and profoundly influence its differential impacts on people. It is centrally concerned with the capacities of different social actors to resist impacts and with the constraints on individual and collective action. Recent debates also surround the related concept of health justice, with health posited as a foundation for human agency, and a view of justice based on capabilities to achieve good health (and avoid disease risk from environmental hazards). It is important, in this sense, not to address health in a narrow, biomedical sense but to embrace wider concepts of human wellbeing (e.g. emotional, spiritual dimensions), and their fundamental linkages with poverty, participation and sustainability.
The seminar will take a global perspective, and attention will focus strongly on addressing the continuing need for research and debate on environment, health and wellbeing issues in developing countries, where the effects of environmental injustice tend to be thrown into sharpest relief. However, the underlying processes of environmental injustice are truly global (and increasingly globalized) and we will also examine how justice concepts can frame environment and wellbeing concerns in the UK and other higher-income countries.
EVENT WEBSITE: http://www.steps-centre.org/events/index.html
Carmit Lubanov, AEJI Director presented at the seminar "Health and Environmental Justice in israel as a platform for policy change".
Summary of the seminar sessions The sessions of the Seminar were organized not on the basis of empirical topics but on broad themes such as change and transformation. The programme was designed to allow room for discussion within each session, followed by an extended discussion forum in the final session. For further details on specific presentations please consult the set of abstracts provided in the appendix to this report. Session 1: Introduction The first session began to explore what justice means and how it can be articulated in relation to the links between environment and health/wellbeing. The chair, Roger Few (University of East Anglia), provided some preliminary thoughts about justice perspectives on environmental health, emphasizing how environmental justice as a political movement was rooted in health and wellbeing issues, applicability of distributive and procedural ideas of justice, and social power, spatial scale and intergenerational dimensions. Jennifer Holdaway (Social Science Research Council) then presented on 3 Environmental justice, health and wellbeing: reflections on the Chinese experience. Her talk stressed both the socio-political complexity of environment and health challenges and their context specificity, questioning, for example, simple assumptions about the relationship between poverty and environmental health burdens in China.
Carmit Lubanov (The Association of Environmental Justice in Israel) did emphasize the role of economic and political marginalization in heightening risk in her talk on Health and environmental justice in Israel as a platform for policy change. She spoke particularly about neglected disease burdens and the need for action, but also of the specific difficulties and limitations of state-led action in a country with such deep political divisions.
