Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
incomplete. For example, Low and Gleeson (1998, 24) argue that “atten-
tion must be paid not only to the substance of justice, justice of outcomes
and consequences, but also to the justice of procedure.” Schrader-
Frechette (2002) puts forward the Principle of Prima Facie Political
Equality as the objective for correcting problems of environmental
justice, combining distributive with participative justice. Drawing on
Young (1990), she argues that a combined conceptualization is needed
because “purely distributive paradigms tend to ignore the institutional
contexts that infl uence or determine the distributions” (Schrader-Frechette
2002, 27). Both Torres (1994) and Schlosberg (2007) make a similar
point in arguing that broad, inclusive, and democratic decision-making
procedures are a tool, or indeed a precondition, for achieving distribu-
tional justice.
While it has become relatively commonplace to acknowledge that
environmental justice claim making is “bivalent,” incorporating both
distribution and procedure, Schlosberg (2004) goes further to add a third
concept of recognition. At the core of misrecognition are cultural and
institutional processes of disrespect and denigration that devalue some
people in comparison to others, meaning that there are unequal patterns
of recognition across social groups. This, he argues, makes environmen-
tal justice “trivalent” (Schlosberg 2004) with issues of recognition
distinct from, but closely connected to, those of distribution and proce-
dure. In constructing this argument he draws from justice theorists such
as Young (1990), Fraser (1997, 1999), and Honneth (1995), who each
argue, although in different ways, that misrecognition in the form of
insults, degradation, and devaluation is fundamental to the damage and
constraint infl icted on individuals and communities and to the produc-
tion of distributional inequalities. As with procedural justice, an inte-
grated argument is made that sees recognition as both a subject and a
condition of justice. It is a distinct, separate form and experience of
injustice and terrain of struggle, but deeply tied to distributional inequali-
ties. Schlosberg (2007, 26) in this way nicely conveys the interconnec-
tions at work between recognition, participation, and distribution: “If
you are not recognized you do not participate; if you do not participate
you are not recognized. In this respect justice must focus on the political
process as a way to address both the inequitable distribution of social
goods and the conditions undermining social recognition.”
While in part a pluralistic understanding of environmental justice rests
on acknowledging that it can take these multiple interconnected forms,
a full account also needs to recognize the diversity of value systems and
