Environmental Justice in Rural South Asia: Applying Lessons Learned from the United States in Fighting for Indigenous Communities' Rights and Access to Common Resources

I. INTRODUCTION

The environmental justice movement in the United States is unique because it addresses the issue of environmental harm not just as an environmental issue, but also as a civil rights issue.1 Environmental justice is the recognition that poor and marginalized communities bear a disproportionate environmental burden and aims to reverse this trend.2 Framing environmental harms as a civil rights issue allows for the use of additional tools in fighting the disproportionate environmental burden placed on marginalized communities.3

The link between environmental issues, poverty, and the rights of local communities in South Asia was recently recognized in the Kathmandu Declaration.4 The Declaration was drafted and adopted by a body of judges from the Supreme and High Courts of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in 2004.5 It set out bold goals for increasing environmental justice and explicitly recognized the need to curtail the exploitation of biodiversity.6 Implicit within this ideal to preserve biodiversity, especially in rural South Asia, is the important role that local communities play in preserving and sustaining the use of biodiversity.

For preserving and sustaining biodiversity, local community ownership, and control over common resources has many recognized advantages.7 Specifically, community ownership results in management of resources by a group more familiar with the resources than a regulatory entity.8 Based on this familiarity, local resource users can then establish limits on resource use based on an intimate "local knowledge" of the resource.9

However, rural communities continue to face increasing difficulty in staking claim to common property and the right to use and access natural resources.10 Government policies encouraging trade of natural resources as a means of capital further limit the ability of local communities to lay claim to common property.11 The effect of the inability to access and use natural resources and common property goes beyond a desire to obtain property. Many local and indigenous communities are heavily, if not solely, dependent on natural resources for their livelihood.12 Preventing access to natural resources, therefore, threatens their ability to survive.

The struggle indigenous and local communities face trying to access and use natural resources is a struggle for environmental justice. Due to their heavy dependence on access to and use of natural resources, indigenous and local communities are more severely affected...