Environmental justice, health and wellbeing seminar

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.