Environmental Justice in the Global South -Overview of some Contemporary Developments (original) (raw)

2023, Eghosa Ekhator, ‘Environmental Justice in the Global South: Overview of some Contemporary Developments’. Human Rights Centre (HRC) Guest Speaker Series: Sustainability, Environment, Law, and Rights. Organised by the Human Rights Centre and University of Essex Law School, 15 June 2023

Environmental justice is a new paradigm for achieving healthy and sustainable environment or communities and it is a culmination of more than 500 years of struggle by people of colour in the USA to achieve this (Ekhator 2014). Historically, environmental justice emerged as a counter measure to the discontent and inherent racism entrenched in government policies in the Deep South of the USA in the 1960s and 1970s. The significance of the doctrine varies depending on the context or the country in focus (Ekhator 2017). However, it is now applied to a widening spectrum of serious social concerns, particularly those related to communities that suffer from social inequity attributed to environmental inequalities (Ako 2009). The environmental justice doctrine has flourished and it has spread to all corners of the world, especially areas with a history of environmental abuse or degradation. Countries to which the doctrine has diffused include Nigeria, South Africa, and India, amongst others. This presentation focuses on the environmental justice paradigm in the Global South and highlights some of the recent trends and developments in this sphere. Some of the issues that will be in focus in this presentation include the conceptualisation of environmental justice doctrine from Global South perspectives, role of sub-regional and regional courts/mechanisms in the promotion of environmental justice, collaboration between western-based NGOs and NGOs in the Global South, the utility of the right to environment as one of the strategies of promoting environmental justice in the Global South and the role of environmental justice paradigm in the conceptualisation of climate litigation jurisprudence in the Global South. Thus, in essence, this presentation argues that ‘from its origins in grassroots activism and engaged sociological scholarship, primarily in the USA, environmental justice research has generated what is now a vast, multi-disciplinary literature encompassing a wide range of issues and politics’ in the Global South (Holifield, Chakraborty & Walker 2017).