Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Global Civil Society and the Distribution
of Environmental Goods: Funding for
Environmental NGOs in Ecuador
Tammy L. Lewis
How are environmental “goods” distributed across borders? In this
chapter, I take a different slant on environmental injustice by examining
the allocation of environmental goods, rather than environmental bads.
Traditionally, the literature on environmental justice has largely focused
on who gets the environmental “bads” of society—toxic waste, hazard-
ous facilities, and poor air quality, to name a few. As movements shift
from pointing out environmental injustices to seeking environmental
justice and what Agyeman (2005) calls “just sustainability,” we need to
ask, who gets the environmental amenities? Parks? Water cleanup?
Access to affordable public transportation? Resources for environmental
improvements? Which communities get the “goods” to improve their
quality of life?
By looking to goods as well as bads, I shift the conversation to a
broader understanding of environmental inequality, one that looks to
the full spectrum of distribution. An analogy can be made to income
inequality. We cannot understand income inequality only by studying
poor people.
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Likewise, we cannot understand environmental inequality
only by studying contaminated communities. We can devise environmen-
tal measures similar to those used to assess income inequality by includ-
ing the entire range of distribution, though that is not the task of this
chapter.We might ask, at what levels of environmental equality do we
recognize just sustainability?
If we could quantify environmental “goods” and environmental
“bads,” a distribution score, like the GINI coeffi cient (a measure of
inequality of income distribution) could provide indicators for whether
the distribution of environmental goods and bads was getting more or
less equal. This inequality has real consequences for responses to envi-
ronmental change. As Gould (2006) argues, greater inequality in the
distribution of environmental goods removes those at the top of the dis-
