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Environmental justice is both a vocabulary for political opportunity, mobilization and action, and a policy principle to guide public decision making. It emerged initially in the US, and more recently in the UK, as a new vocabulary underpinning action by community organizations campaigning against environmental injustices. However, as the environmental justice discourse has matured, it has become increasingly evident that it should play a role in the wider agendas for sustainable development and social inclusion. The links between sustainability and environmental justice are becoming clearer and more widely understood in the UK by NGOs and government alike, and it is the potential synergy between these two discourses which is the focus of this paper. This paper argues that the concept of 'just sustainability' provides a discourse for policymakers and activists, which brings together the key dimensions of both environmental justice and sustainable development.
KEY WORDS: environment, justice, sustainability
Introduction
During the last five years, the concept of environmental justice has attracted increasing attention in the UK. The academic community, largely stimulated by the work of social scientists Bullard, Wright and Bryant, geographers such as Pulido and Cutter, and others in the United States, has begun to be interested in the inter-relationships between geographical space and conceptions of equity and justice, and how these might be examined in the UK.
At the same time, UK pressure groups and NGOs, most notably Friends of the Earth Scotland (FoES), have adopted environmental justice as a framework within which to place their entire campaigning agenda. Finally, there is some evidence to suggest that the UK government is beginning to recognize that environmental justice can play a role in the wider agenda for sustainable development and social exclusion. It is this emerging discourse by NGOs and government alike, based around the linked notions of environmental justice and sustainability, that we call 'just sustainability'.
In this review paper, we highlight and assess the significance of the emerging discourse of 'just sustainability' in Britain. We briefly examine the influence of the US environmental justice movement upon emerging UK debates, and the role of the many and various 'home grown' initiatives; we reflect upon the contrasting 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' experiences of the UK and the US, respectively, and we finally examine the...