CfP - Special Issue "Environmental justice in Europe, spatial dimensions" (Belgeo)
Brendan Coolsaet
Dear colleagues,
We are excited to launch this call for papers for a special issue on the spatial dimensions of environmental justice in Europe in the journal Belgeo, the Belgian journal of geography (free of charge, diamond open access journal!). We welcome submissions in English and in French; abstracts by the 30th of September. Please find all details below and please share widely within your networks.
Best,
Brendan Coolsaet
Environmental justice in Europe, spatial dimensions
Guest editors
Brendan Coolsaet, Research Professor, FNRS/UCLouvain, Belgium; Sophie Moreau, Associate Professor, Université Gustave Eiffel, France;
Sophie Vanwambeke, Professor, UCLouvain, Belgium ; Edwin Zaccaï, Professor emeritus, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
Environmental justice analysis emphasises the unequal distribution of environmental costs and benefits, and seeks to understand both the proximate and underlying drivers of this inequality. In the USA, scholars and environmental justice activists have built an established scientific track record ever since 1st-generation environmental justice studies documented the unequal spatial distribution of toxic pollution in the 1980s (Bullard 1990). Almost 40 years later, an environmental justice community is now also slowly emerging in Europe. This can be observed, for example, in the increasing adoption of ‘climate justice’ by large parts of the European environmental movement (Cassegård & Thörn 2017), through the study of issues and concepts (eg. energy justice, just transition, planetary justice) established and developed primarily through European scholarship (eg. Sovacool & Dworkin 2015; Routledge et al 2018; Biermann & Kalfagianni 2020), and through emerging policy initiatives at the intersection of social difference and environment.
Unlike in the USA, however, empirical evidence of the spatial distribution and production of environmental inequalities in Europe is inconsistent, in part due to the considerable heterogeneity of the available data and the absence of common, cross-European analytical frameworks. Examples of currently available data include studies showing how waste incinerators in France are more likely to be situated in the most deprived and ethnically diverse areas (Laurian and Funderburg 2014); how Roma and travellers communities across Europe are disproportionately exposed to hazards due to the siting of travellers sites near noxious facilities (Acker 2021; Harper et al 2009); how access to green spaces in cities follow predictable patterns of inequality (Anguelovski et al. 2018); how environmental health inequalities are prevalent across Europe (WHO 2019; Paavola 2017), and how the consequences of climate change (eg. heat waves, floods) hit minorities harder (Ballester et al 2023; Poussard et al 2021), to name a few.
This special issue aims at strengthening the pool of evidence on the spatial dimensions of environmental (in)justice in Europe. Drawing on the concept of “spatial justice” (Harvey 1996; Bret and Moreau 2019) and the subsequent study of the plural “geographies of environmental justice” (Walker and Bulkeley 2006), it asks if and how environmental injustices are spatially constituted in Europe. We are interested in studies that empirically document not just the distribution but also the processes of (re)production of environmental inequalities in Europe, including those taking place at the intersection of multiple inequalities and across multiple and dynamic spatial scales. Suggested topics include, among others :
- Empirical case studies on the spatial dimension of environmental (in)justice in Europe, today or at any point in the past. We use a deliberately broad understanding of the spatial, including “spatialities of different forms, of different things and working at different scales” (Walker 2009). Examples include (but are not limited to):
- socio-spatial patterning of environmental “goods” and “bads”, including, for example the locations of waste, landfill and industrial sites; access to environmental amenities; exposure to pollutants and environmental risk; etc;
- spatiality of responsibility for the production of environmental inequalities;
- multiscalar analysis of the causes and consequences of environmental justice cases;
- the role of space in environmental political claim-making, environmental activism, for environmental movements in Europe.
- Conceptual and theoretical explorations on the role and the meaning of space and place of environmental (in)justice in Europe, including on the deeper processes through which certain spaces are chosen for unwanted land uses or become devalorised;
- Methodological considerations, including (geo)spatial data applications, for the study of environmental justice in Europe.
Importantly, proposed papers should critically engage with the use of the environmental justice framework. They should seek to discuss how their original findings challenge and/or expand upon contemporary environmental justice scholarship by explicitly situating the work in the broader field (for an overview of the field, see Coolsaet 2020 and Hollifield et al 2018).
Submission Guidelines/Instructions
Queries to the Guest editors regarding your topic proposal and/or abstract prior to submission are encouraged. We welcome submissions in English and in French.
Abstracts (maximum 500 words) are due by 30 September 2024 and should be sent in electronic format to christian.v...@ulb.be and edwin....@ulb.be. For accepted proposals, full papers will be due by 31 March 2025 at the latest, but authors are encouraged to submit as early as possible. Submissions of full papers must follow the Belgeo journal’s editorial standards for manuscripts available at: https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/7117
Accepted papers will be published on a rolling basis as soon as possible following peer-review and will be part of volume 2025/4 of the journal.
About the journal
Belgeo is the Belgian journal of geography. It is a peer-reviewed, free of charge diamond open access journal hosted by the Royal Belgian Geographical Society. Published articles are made available under Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0. More information on https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/67
About the Guest editors
- Brendan Coolsaet (brendan....@uclouvain.be) is tenured Research Associate with the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and Research Professor at UCLouvain (Belgium). He studies environmental (in)justice in Europe. He is the editor of Environmental Justice: Key Issues (Routledge, 2020), the principal textbook in the field.
- Sophie Moreau (sophie...@univ-eiffel.fr) is Associate Professor of geography at the Université Paris-Est-Marne la Vallée and at the Université Gustave Eiffel (France). She works on environmental and social justice in both the Global North & the Global South.
- Sophie Vanwambeke (sophie.v...@uclouvain.be) is professor in geography at the Centre for Earth and Climate research, Earth & Life Institute, UCLouvain. She studies health as a manifestation of human-environment interaction, with a focus on infectious diseases.
- Edwin Zaccai (edwin....@ulb.be), professor emeritus at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Ex-director of the Centre d’Etudes du Développement Durable, he co-edited “Environnement et inégalités sociales” (ULB, 2007).
References
Acker, William (2021) Où sont les « gens du voyage » ? Inventaire critique des aires d'accueil. Paris: Editions du Commun
Anguelovski, I., Connolly, J. and Brand, A.L. 2018. From landscapes of utopia to the margins of the green urban life: For whom is the new green city? City 22(3): 417-436.
Ballester, J., Quijal-Zamorano, M., Méndez Turrubiates, R.F. et al. (2023) Heat-related mortality in Europe during the summer of 2022. Nat Med 29, 1857–1866
Biermann, F., & Kalfagianni, A. (2020). Planetary justice: a research framework. Earth System Governance, 6, 100049.
Bullard, R.D. 2008. Dumping in Dixie: Race, class, and environmental quality. Avalon Publishing
Coolsaet, B. (2020) Environmental Justice: Key Issues. Routledge.
Harper, K., Steger, T., & Filčák, R. (2009). Environmental justice and Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe. Environmental Policy and Governance, 19(4), 251-268.
Harvey, D (1996) Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Oxford, Blackwell Publishers
Holifield, R., Chakraborty, J., & Walker, G. (2018). The Routledge handbook of environmental justice. London, UK: Routledge.
Laurian, L. and Funderburg, R. 2014. Environmental justice in France? A spatio-temporal analysis of incinerator location. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 57(3): 424-446.
Moreau, S, Bret, B. (2019) Justice spatiale et environnementale. Sainsaulieu, I. ; Barozet, E. ; Cortesero,R. ; Melo D. Où est passée la justice sociale ?, Presses universitaires du Septentrion 2019.
Paavola, J. Health impacts of climate change and health and social inequalities in the UK. Environ Health 16 (Suppl 1), 113 (2017).
Poussard, C., Dewals, B., Archambeau, P., & Teller, J. (2021). Environmental inequalities in flood exposure: A matter of scale. Frontiers in Water, 3
Routledge, P., Cumbers, A., & Derickson, K. D. (2018). States of just transition: Realising climate justice through and against the state. Geoforum, 88, 78-86.
Sovacool, B. K., & Dworkin, M. H. (2015). Energy justice: Conceptual insights and practical applications. Applied energy, 142, 435-444.
Walker G. 2009. Beyond distribution and proximity: exploring the multiple spatialities of environmental justice. Antipode 41:614–36
Walker, G., and Bulkeley, H. 2006. Geographies of Environmental Justice. Geoforum 37(5): 655-659.
WHO (2019) Environmental health inequalities in Europe. Second assessment report. Copenhagen: WHO Regional Office for Europe; 2019.
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Brendan Coolsaet Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) Sciences Po – Paris School of International Affaire (PSIA)
Book : Environmental Justice: Key Issues. Routledge, 2020
Recent publications • Dawson et al (2024) Is it just conservation? A typology of Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ roles in conserving biodiversity. One Earth (in press) • Coolsaet & Deldrève (2023) Exploring environmental justice in France: Evidence, movements, and ideas. Environmental Politics (in press) • Pickering et al (2022) Justice and Equity in Transformative Biodiversity Governance. Cambridge University Press |
