Applying justice frameworks to environmental decision-making

Background/Question/Methods

The problems of sharing natural resources have become increasingly complex and challenging as populations grow and environmental limits are reached. For example, localized opposition and hard-fought conflicts around energy developments, such as wind farms and coal seam gas, have become global phenomena.  Many of the issues raised, including perceived rights, potential disruption to life and livelihood, and unknown health and environmental impacts, are frequently dismissed by observers as being a selfish stance closely akin to the Not-In-My-Backyard attitude. However, there are a variety of valid underlying concerns that fall generally into four interconnecting areas: personal, social, material and environmental.  Anxieties about harm, future security and unfairness are common threads within these areas.  Protests by local residents are often put down by outsiders to emotional reactions and selfish attitudes that lack objectivity when considering the greater good to society to be gained from these developments. Ideas, feelings and thoughts about unfairness and fairness occur naturally to people as they interact in the workplace and in their social activities in which facilities are shared.  But there exists a parallel domain of academic thought and research around the many fields of justice, which is rarely specifically connected to these every-day conflicts.  Justice research now has a broad reach including social justice at a societal and individual level, legal justice, environmental justice, ecological justice and climate justice. This paper draws these two domains—the every-day and the academic notions of justice—together. It uses findings from two empirical case studies to explore themes and concepts of injustice, fairness and justice.

Results/Conclusions

One study explores local perspectives about a proposed wind farm in Australia and discusses justice areas including process fairness (procedural justice) and outcome fairness (distributive justice).  It highlights the differing fairness needs of different groups within a community. A community fairness framework is developed from community perspectives and justice concepts. The second study explores differing perspectives about a water diversion from a drought-declared and agriculturally important water catchment (watershed) to Melbourne, the capital city of the Australian state of Victoria.  This study demonstrates the importance of interactional justice, which is concerned with recognition, inclusion and respectful treatment of stakeholders. The paper draws distinctions between justice concepts using these two studies, and shows the relevance and importance of theories of both injustice and justice to environmental decision-making.