THE DIVERSITY OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: Towards a European Approach Open Access

During the last nearly 30 years, ‘environmental justice’ has emerged as a socio-politically accepted term in the US, denouncing the unequal distribution of environmental burdens throughout society. Environmental justice was initially put on the agenda by grassroots groups accusing polluting industries (e.g., dumps or chemical companies) of disproportionately locating facilities in communities and residential areas with a high share of poor and ethnic minority residents (cf. Bullard 1990, 1993; Szasz 1994). Vastly increasing public debate on environmental justice started in the early 1980s (General Accounting Office 1983; Commission for Racial Justice 1987) and came to a preliminary climax with its recognition as a legal issue in political debates in the 1990s (cf. US Environmental Protection Agency 1992, 2005; US Environmental Protection Agency – Office of Inspector General 2004). Nevertheless, there are still numerous commentators which view the claims of the environmental justice movement as mere rhetoric (Block and Whitehead 1999) or perceive the status quo as institutional racism (Dicum 2006). However, this indicates that the topic is still gaining in relevance in the United States (cf. Pellow 2002; Pellow and Brulle 2005).

In European countries, there have been several campaigns by environmental organizations to take seriously the issue of environmental justice. Yet, whereas the issue is beginning to attract social scientists, environmental groups, and social activists, it is still far from being on a regular agenda of public concern. Against this background, this paper will aim at this social phenomenon called environmental justice, which for a few decades has been developing in a certain cultural setting, and which is currently finding its way into slightly different societal contexts. By revealing core dimensions of environmental justice related debates we want to demonstrate that as a concept for policy making it will require a different framework than the US model. By so doing, we do want to stimulate discussion about future directions of environmental justice research and its transferability into policy.

Our main thesis is that the important challenge lying ahead is to outline a concept of environmental justice as an inherent feature of controversial decision processes, evolving around any kind of regulation perceived to affect the environments of heterogeneous stakeholders. Justice in this respect is understood as a successive and often iterative process of action and reaction, which allows learning from failures and surprising events (cf. Sitkin 1995; Gross et al. 2003; Gross and Hoffman-Riem 2005). The practices of heterogeneous actors involved have to be iterative in the sense that they comprise a fine tuned but nevertheless playful or ‘experimental’ structure of alternate phases of accommodation to localized sites of sometimes rapid change.

In the following, we will first point to several unique starting points of the US environmental justice movement, followed by a discussion of its current framing in two European countries. We will then elaborate central dimensions of environmental justice in order to grasp pivotal areas of conflict around issues of environmental justice. These main dimensions will be integrated into a working model, which may serve as analytical and prescriptive framework for the analysis and optimisation of environmental justice related policy processes. Finally, we will discuss the potential of the model as well as further points of research.

Dorceta Taylor argues that although not labeled as such, environmental justice-related activism goes back to attempts at improving housing conditions for people of color in the early twentieth century and increased in communities of people of color already between the 1940s and 1960s (cf. Taylor 2000: 534). However, an activist discourse explicitly mentioning environmental justice was not brought to the national scale until the mass protests against a PCB landfill in Warren County took place in 1982 (Bullard 1993: 3). In the years following, the presence of racial discrimination has been a distinct feature of the US environmental justice movement while debates about the significance of class or race determining social inequalities have always continued (cf. Smith 2007: 27f.). However, in its early years, the movement has missed the chance to convincingly anchor its claims within an overarching framework of social discrimination. This became obvious with criticism of being caught up in contradictions, as implied in the well known ‘NIMBY’ (‘Not in my backyard!’) allegation, or of blaming industry for environmental bads while demanding more jobs (cf. Block and Whitehead 1999). Harvey notes that still ‘there is a long and arduous road to travel to take the environmental justice movement beyond the phase of rhetorical flourishes, media successes and symbolic politics, into a world of strong coherent political organizing and practical revolutionary action’ (Harvey 1999: 185). Whoever considers ‘environmental justice’ a fixed political or research approach, readily transferable to other cultural settings, should carefully reflect on this skepticism.

Furthermore, although the early grassroots activists have marked themselves off from what they called ‘the mainstream environmental movement’ – that is, established environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth, The Sierra Club, or the Environmental Defense Fund – the environmental justice movement has been affiliated with streams denouncing inequalities in global incidences of environmental harm that give birth to environmental movements of the poor (Martinez-Alier 2002: 54). However, the environmental justice movement has never explicitly placed itself within these streams. Yet, its struggles and actions have always been addressed to environmental quality within local neighborhoods.¹

Whereas the aforementioned characteristics aptly describe the environmental justice movement, they are not sufficient for defining its objective, the call for justice. So far, dozens of reports have been published, focusing on whether certain environmental conditions vary by race, income, or education. However, instead of elaborating on justice, the majority of them equate justice with equality and injustice with inequality. Justice in environmental justice discourse is thus framed as an egalitarian issue, equality being regarded a central and genuine objective of justice. In egalitarian philosophical streams, equality either refers to goods or resources (Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls) or to capability to function or opportunities (Richard Arneson, Amartya Sen). The main objection to the egalitarian concepts is that by referring to justice as being relational they fail to address the nature of elementary rights – the dignity of humankind, for instance, is such an elementary, absolute standard (cf. Krebs 2001).

The humanist non-egalitarians, in contrast, do not consider equality as being a central aim (Heinrichs et al. 2004). Instead, they highlight both fundamental rights, as the right for life, health, freedom, or property, and several principles of distribution, such as the qualification principle, the principle of desert, or the principle of free exchange. Equality and the relational concept of justice are not excluded deterministically, though. The principle of desert, for instance, may include aspects of proportional, though not numerical equality (Krebs 2001). The US environmental justice paradigm, instead, reflects a narrow understanding of justice, since it is restricted to a certain group – ethnic minorities or people of color, respectively. We hold that this feature of the US environmental justice frame is too limited to be meaningfully applied to most European societies.

Unperturbed by sometimes overdrawn criticism, the US environmental justice movement has continuously been institutionalizing this topic for about 30 years now, supported by a high level of mobilization. During the era Clinton notable progress was made, e.g., with the Office of Environmental Justice which provides an annual research funding, or the Executive Order 12898, defining environmental justice a goal for each federal authority. And there are own research institutions such as Clark Atlanta University's Environmental Justice Resource Center with its chair Robert D. Bullard. However, despite numerous successful attempts to raise environmental justice to political acceptance, much of the progress made was undermined by later developments. Most recently this became obvious with the impacts of Hurricane Katrina (Cutter and Emrich 2006; Daly 2006; Woodhouse 2007). However, already before Katrina the US EPA was heavily criticized for neither having developed visions nor strategic plans with respect to environmental justice, and for not having set up attainable milestones (Office of Inspector General 2004).

Following this overview into the far more complex history of environmental justice in the United States, we will now turn our focus to debates on environmental justice in Europe, highlighting the UK and Germany. These two countries can serve as a comparative touchstone for recent debates on environmental justice on a European level since in the UK the topic has attracted attention for some 15 years, whereas in Germany the debate has only started in recent years.

The discourse on environmental justice in the UK can be regarded as the best established in Europe, perhaps due to the tradition of the ‘geography of poverty and deprivation’ of the 1970s (Maschewsky 2006: 11). Environmental justice activism in the UK dates back to the late 1980s (Agyeman 2002) and the campaigns on ethnic minorities’ access to recreation opportunities in the countryside (see also below), which had been covered by two of UK's main quality papers in the early 1990s. Despite the absence of a civil rights movement as in the USA, the topic was shouldered by third sector organizations (Agyeman 2000), mainly by the established environmental movement. In 2004, a study by the Sustainable Development Research Network (SDRN) sorted the available data on Great Britain and came to the conclusion that, despite research on the environment and social justice being a relatively new and poorly explored area of inquiry in the UK, environmental justice is a real and substantive problem within the UK (Sustainable Development Research Network 2004: ii).

However, various engagements concerning environmental justice in the UK existed before this report was published (cf. Stephens et al. 2001; Agyeman 2002). One has been preoccupied with the exclusiveness of the ‘countryside’ with its widespread tourist image of England as being, among other things, a peaceful rural, ecologically green, and demographically white area (Commission for Racial Equity 1995). It represents a geographical space where ethnic minorities inevitably feel – and obviously are – not welcome (Agyeman and Spooner 1997). Those invisible barriers to environmental goods are regarded as environmental injustices as well (Agyeman 2002).

A second issue of concern has been the unequal exposure to air pollution. Most forcefully uttered by ‘Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland’, it has received stronger attention. It was shown that 66 percent of all carcinogenic chemical substances are emitted in socially deprived areas, which make up only 10 percent of Great Britain's territory (Friends of the Earth 2001).

The ‘Environmental Justice Action Plan’ by Friends of the Earth (FoE) Scotland represents a third most well known approach, which has put special emphasis on the worldwide consumption of net renewable environmental resources, raising the issue of fair shares between the South and the North (Sandrett et al. 2000). This topic is also taken up by discussions on whether environmental justice could contribute to the sustainability discourse. In order to address both ecological sustainability and environmental justice, a new reading refers to a ‘just sustainability’ (Agyeman and Evans 2004: 154).

These foci indicate a certain thematic broadness in recent engagements with environmental justice in the UK by NGOs and concerned academics. The topic is further addressed at the political level via oral commitments and political visions. For instance, a 2002 speech of the Scottish First Minister, McConnell, contained a clear statement towards environmental justice, and the UK Environment Agency has issued a position paper entitled ‘Addressing environmental inequalities’ in 2004.²

Altogether, compared to the US, the British environmental justice related discourses have been drawing a wider circle of themes including the distribution of environmental goods, such as healthy living conditions and access to recreational opportunities. Additionally, the focus has not explicitly been on race, but rather on social class, which regarding social inequality has forever dominated race in European societies. It has, therefore, been argued that the US frame and the emergent mobilization for environmental justice in the UK cannot be compared, ‘because of major differences in US planning and zoning laws, … and because of differences in the sitting of industrial facilities, the power of the US civil rights movement and because of the coalition building around environmental justice issues’ (Agyeman 2002: 43).

Although differences between North American and European approaches to environmental policies and technological controversies are indeed widespread (e.g., Vogel 1986; Vig and Faure 2004; Jasanoff 2005), the focus on differences in the social background of environmental justice is often limited to spatial and racial segregation. However, these have rarely been recognized as a pivotal problem in most European countries, German society being a case in point (Friedrichs 2001).

In Germany, environmental justice issues first emerged in debates on environmental health. However, not until the mid 1990s was substantial research conducted on health inequality with respect to environmental diseases. Only in the late 1990s, a first report commissioned by the German Bundestag was published, which stated that socially disadvantaged people are more often exposed to outdoor air pollution than the better off and suffer more frequently from environmental diseases (Heinrich et al. 1998). Notwithstanding, the term environmental justice (or its German counterpart, Umweltgerechtigkeit) was not yet mentioned. It was but in 2001, when environmental justice was introduced the first time as a new theme encompassing social policy, environmental policy, and Public Health in Germany (Maschewsky 2001). Since then, the topic has gained more attention – first and foremost in the health sciences as an issue encompassing the social distribution of environmental burdens and environmental health inequalities (cf. Mielck and Heinrich 2002; Bolte and Mielck 2004; Mielck and Bolte 2004; Bolte 2006). Later, it was also taken up by other disciplines, such as environmental and landscape planning (cf. Köckler 2006) and other actors, such as the German bishop's conference.³ The number of workshops and conferences addressing environmental justice has been growing steadily as well. However, compared to the UK, in Germany research on environmental justice is still rare (Elvers 2007: 26). Notwithstanding, the British and the German discourse have in common that environmental justice has been introduced by a top down process, instead of being framed by a grassroots movement, as has been the case in the United States. Furthermore, there is a pronounced heterogeneity of topics, referring to the distribution of both environmental bads and the access to environmental goods on local and regional scales, as well as global and intergenerational issues of the distribution of environmental resources and risks (cf. Heinrichs et al. 2004).

Against the background of different readings of environmental justice in North America and Europe, we propose a more pluralistic approach which defines environmental justice neither with respect to certain social groups nor with respect to certain distributions of environmental goods or bads, but as a process taking into account the heterogeneity of debates evolving around the topic as a functional prerequisite for the achievement of environmental justice. Basically, we understand environmental justice as an emergent feature to be addressed in a process of environmental decision-making, in which the strong moral imperative of justice which was recently reaffirmed by Robert D. Bullard⁴ is to be continuously accommodated to social reality, such as different stakeholders’ interests, changing legal frames, and several possible output scenarios. To talk about an emergent feature should help to better understand the way events relevant to environmental justice are arising out of a multiplicity of dimensions and sometimes relatively simple social interactions (cf. Krohn and Küppers 1992; Sawyer 2005). With the notion of emergence, environmental justice can be understood as not being completely designed, controlled, or predicted, but as result of a process which is affected from the properties and activities of several dimensions. To bring together different shades of environmental justice, we revealed and discussed these recurring themes until an overall scheme of eight dimensions was agreed upon. These dimensions reoccurred in the literature, but they have not been integrated into a general model yet, although, as we have shown above, the debates in the environmental justice literature, at least implicitly, often call for exactly this. In the following we thus discuss these eight dimensions in order to subsequently suggest how they can be bundled, and how they may be causally and temporally related to each other in a dynamic and quite often iterative process, which has a commitment to continuous improvement.

The US environmental justice movement's focus on landfills, incinerators, garbage dumps, and highways was spurred by debates on adverse health effects resulting from exposure to harmful substances, to ambient air or groundwater pollution, or even to higher risks of accidents, and so forth. However, regarding the famous Love Canal accident in upstate New York in 1978 (cf. Levine 1982), according to Aaron Wildavsky there had been no proper scientific study which had proven causal influences of the chemicals’ infiltration into the groundwater on actual diseases, neither in adults, nor in children (Wildavsky 1997: 152).

This is to illustrate that a definition of ‘impact’ should not be restricted to influences of the natural environment. Caused by environmental burdens or accidents, the socio-spatial structure of a certain neighborhood can be at risk to collapse as well – in terms of economic and social aspects. Structural disadvantages, for instance, diminish the attractiveness of a residential area which promotes displacement of affluent households. Since the area will become unattractive, rents will fall, ultimately leading to an agglomeration of the poor. Typical problems of those mainly urban areas marked by poverty are inequalities in health, well-being, and health care accessibility (Kamp et al. 2003). Proof of environmental (in)justice should thus take into account that the individual may be affected by both social and natural environments.

Environmental conditions appear to have the worst impact in terms of health effects. The preamble to the constitution of the World Health Organization in 1947 refers to health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Health thus includes the subjective assessment of personal well-being. To indicate this relationship, the term ‘health-related quality of life’ is used in Public Health. It refers to three attributes: physical and psychological functioning, social integration, and physical and psychological well-being. This broad understanding of the various pathways through which environmental conditions can affect everyday life is based on taking each person as an expert for his or her own well-being. Although there are indicators to assess the quality of life, most of them refer to subjective evaluations. Hence, if the idea is to extend environmental justice to include infrastructures allowing for leading a socially and physically ‘healthy’ life, the perspective has to transcend an image of humans limited to a medical and biological perspective. The recent European constructions of environmental justice already concede to this important plurality of effects by taking the so-called environmental goods into account, both as regards ambient air quality (SNIFFER 2005) and infrastructure (Sustainable Development Research Network 2004).

The major environmental justice debates refer to either actual or potential consequences of an environmental arrangement. However, as regards the future, consequences of action cannot be determined with absolute certainty, not even the consequences which are due to one's own decisions (Luhmann 2003: 21). A prior assessment is thus only possible by estimating probabilities. The measures to be taken in order to prevent adverse effects causing environmental injustice depend on the magnitude of uncertainty which is involved in this risk assessment. Applied to an environmental justice policy this will be one of the most challenging fields of potential conflict.

Given that risk assessors conclude that there is a certain risk to human health by operating a facility, the discussion will continue with the question, whether this risk is acceptable or not. The answer to this question is open. However, if knowledge is lacking to perform any risk assessment, the answer is more difficult: one has either to await a surprising event, that is, not to seek to prevent the occurrence of an event, but to accept that the event will happen anyway (Lakoff 2007), and potentially to take precautionary measures (Myers and Raffensperger 2006). Regarding this dimension, opponents of a certain environmental regulation will most likely attempt to prove that the respective environmental regulation carries incalculable dangers which require precautionary action. Proponents instead will claim that there can never be complete certainty and will try selling remaining risks as acceptable. Hence, in order to not get into cessation, policy concerned with environmental justice has to take uncertainties as integral parts of impact assessment and find ways to proactively encounter them (cf. Tannert et al. 2007).

Conflicts about impacts of environmental regulations also arise concerning the verification of cause and effect. Since the pathways harmful substances may possibly take in entering the human organism are as diverse as their biological effects, attributing particular health effects to certain substances and linking these to specific sources is actually only possible for a minor fraction of emissions.

As a consequence, causalities between social deprivation and environmental pollution are often hard to establish. So were some studies able to verify environmental injustice, whereas others seriously rejected such claims. The causes for such contradictions have been attributed to methodological shortcomings (cf. Anderton et al. 1994; Williams 1996; Bowen 2002), but they may also be partly due to different scientific and societal perceptions of the toxicity of potentially harmful substances. As Wildavsky puts it: ‘Citizens evaluating potential dangers should be alert to the numerous ways in which clues apparently point in one direction only to end in blind alleys or to lead in another’ (Wildavsky 1997: 410). Therefore, proof of exposure and effect should not be based on scientific methods and appropriate controls only. The verification of environmental burdens must acknowledge that besides scientific evidence of toxicity individual, perhaps different, perceptions of risk and hazard do exist (cf. Kraus et al. 1992; Slovic et al. 1995). As was the case with uncertainties (see section c), again questions of science and rationality enter the process of environmental justice.

One basic assumption of justice holds that humans shall treat one another in an appropriate manner, that is, in a way which is acceptable to all involved (Koller 1995). Justice is thus more specific than equality. In a humanist, non-egalitarian perspective (cf. Krebs 2001), inequality is neither unjust per se nor a necessary precondition for injustice. Hence, identifying certain groups as more exposed to environmental hazards than others does not provide sufficient ground to claim injustice.

If inequality is not sufficient, how then can injustice be determined? One possibility is by proving for arbitrariness. According to the German Federal Constitutional Court, it is assumed when no ‘objective’ necessities justifying inequalities are given. However, one can discuss whether such necessities are subjective, because they vary with the degree of individual involvement in a decision-making process. Therefore, we suggest to follow Heiman (1996) who points out that environmental justice requires more than a ‘just’ exposure distribution, namely democratic participation in decision-making. We thus argue that environmental justice needs to be supplemented by deliberative democracy (e.g., Fishkin 1991; Habermas 1992; Benhabib 1996) in terms of consensual decision-making. Thereby, equality actually becomes a prerequisite to establishing environmental justice in terms of deliberate reciprocal considerations of stakeholders’ interests.

Since the proof of environmental injustice does often refer to the notion of disproportion, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed a standardized procedure (Office of Inspector General 2004): firstly, the EPA scans residential areas for disproportionately large shares of poor and (ethnic) minorities. By analyzing environmental and health data, these areas are then screened for disproportional impact. However, one of the criticisms against this procedure was that there are too many varying definitions of poverty used in the various geographical regions monitored by the EPA, which are not sufficiently harmonized (ibid).

Contrary to the EPA, we propose to start detecting environmental injustice by analyzing certain spatial units (these may be residential areas, communities, or other agglomerations) for disproportional burdens. In a second step, these units should be scrutinized for impaired quality of life and poor subjective well-being. Statistical data, personal questionnaires, or expert opinions, for instance, could contribute to that analysis similarly. Only if in a third step of investigation disproportionate affection of already deprived social groups can be proven, environmental injustice can be presumed. Income and education are valuable indicators contributing to this step, but they should be accomplished by additional analyses of the social structure in order to prevent any kind of social discrimination, e.g., by religion, ethnic origin, or age.

According to the British Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), environmental justice related policy should ensure that adverse conditions faced by the least powerful are tackled first (Stephens et al. 2001). However, there might be conflicts between environmental and social policy. Environmental protection laws are often perceived as even promoting injustice. Such is the case when the public is stirred by the imposition of certain taxes on fuel, as the so-called eco-tax in Germany. Of course, environmental legislation will always be at risk of being perceived as unjust, since such impositions usually exert higher pressures on low-income households. Hence, both environmental movement and environmental legislation are well-advised to adequately consider questions of social justice in their regular processing (cf. Elkins 2005).

To do so, a proactive ‘policy mix’ focusing on socio-environmental policy is required. It has to be related to the wide range of questions which occur when environmental quality is to be improved for everyone and not at the expense of social political goals, such as the allocation of jobs to regions of high unemployment. The UK Environment Agency has already been addressing this alliance of environmental and social questions in several reports and positions. The German Federal Environmental Agency has recently begun to consider this issue as well.⁵

It has often been stated that stakeholder involvement in the process of decision making is one of the essentials of political acceptance (e.g., Wynne 1996; Dryzek 2000; Fischer 2000; Carolan 2006). Apart from the possibility that participation might be (mis-)used for manipulative purposes to attain political acceptance, disclosing information is the first step in the ladder of participation, to allude to Arnstein's classical approach to the issue (Arnstein 1969). In order to arrange for civic participation in a process of environmental justice, not only the intended regulations, but also the process of decision-making including the involved expertise, arguments, and perspectives has to be disclosed to the stakeholders – the industry, authorities, and the public which might be affected. A transparent and comprehensive information policy is therefore an important precondition for further steps of participation, such as consultation and cooperative decision-making. In order to foster the right to information, public involvement in decision–making, and access to courts of justice in environmental issues, the Aarhus Convention was adopted in 1998. The Convention refers to all actions and regulations relating to the environment, human health, and cultural heritage, as well as to the interactions between them. Each person is guaranteed unrestricted access to information on the above-mentioned issues. These developments are part of broader discourses in governance research and policy arenas on participative and interactive policymaking (Fischer 2000; Tatenhove and Leroy 2003; Heinrichs 2005).

However, whereas for instance the European Environmental Information directives, exemplarily may stand for the implementation of top-down approaches, the public's readiness to apply them is their required bottom-up counterpart. Since any information would be meaningless if there were no users to apply it, the effectiveness of the environmental information laws depends on the people who engage in their use. This points to the need to strengthen the empowerment of civil society in order to create a more participatory democracy (Barber 1984). By underlining this communicative aspect, a pluralistic concept of environmental justice becomes reciprocal in terms of a more discursive information practice in order to increase involvement in and acceptance of environmental decision-making.

By means of distinguishing several facets the above-mentioned eight dimensions are descriptive categories. However, in terms of pointing at desirable outputs of environmental policies they can be considered prescriptive as well. First and foremost we suggest understanding them as decision fields, referring to certain comprehensive areas of action, emerging whenever an environmental regulation is blamed for promoting injustice. The analysis of potential adverse impacts associated with a regulation in question (dimensions a and b) can be described as a step of problem identification (‘analysis’). The assessment of probability and severity of the effects on human beings, including the handling of uncertainties (dimensions c and d) refers to a step of turning both scientific knowledge and ignorance to practical guidance (‘transformation’). Moral reflections in terms of social justice and equality (dimensions e and f) can be regarded as just a third component in a process of environmental justice – the evaluation of afore defined impacts (‘interpretation’). Finally, many debates concerning environmental justice mainly focus on empowerment and political participation. They refer to a phase of ‘implementation’ and address certain policy fields and the need to public involvement (dimensions g and h).

There is no doubt, that in social reality these dimensions are not neatly organized within linear sequences. They hold their own dynamics. But, instead of considering them in isolation, as has been the case in many debates on environmental justice, we contend, that these eight dimensions of action can be classified into a four-fold process model of environmental justice, indicating that they follow in a certain order which is both triggered by certain environmental regulations and – if stable enough – at the same time influencing environmental regulation (see Figure 1). In this regard our working model should help to frame the core dimensions of environmental justice and may help to catalyze environmental justice in ongoing (and often: iterative) negotiation processes.

Environmental justice will not be achieved until in each of the four areas of action outlined above (analysis, transformation, interpretation, and implementation) a decision is made on the respective issues, which is then picked up by the next step. However, external influences, be they scientific developments, new regulatory frameworks, changing moral conventions, or changing stakeholder involvements, can influence this kind of process at every phase. When this process continues cyclically, adapting to these changing circumstances without being disrupted, we call it a robust process of achieving environmental justice.

Our notion of robustness comes close to the usage in research on technical and biological systems. Carlson and Doyle, for instance, refer to robustness as ‘the maintenance of some desired system characteristics despite fluctuations in the behavior of its component parts or its environment’ (Carlson and Doyle 2002). Translated to our field of environmental justice, a robust strategy is characterized as a process where the overall integrity of the process can be upheld, although issues change and the process continues to evolve as it moves out of one phase of the cycle into another, in response to changes in actors, policies, and ecological factors. A process promises to become more robust in each iteration of the cycle the more democratic the process develops and outside experts as well as ‘uncertified experts’ (Collins and Evans 2002) are allowed to participate in it. Certainly, mistakes, setbacks, and failures may occur, but such an iterative framework allows integrating adjustments to previous decisions and new social and (sometimes) natural conditions. If we view environmental justice as a process of one or more ‘loops’ between different parts of society and its ecological or social aspects, conflicts, and debates taking place between authorities and stakeholders, environmental justice becomes negotiated.

The framework suggested here can be considered an illustration of a complex decision framework of environmental justice as a process of conflict, negotiation, and continuous learning. In so doing, we aim to achieve, as Alvin Weinberg demanded in 1998, a shift in methodological approaches towards a better understanding of the organizational processes that shape decisions on production practices and regulatory enforcement strategies with respect to environmental justice (Weinberg 1998). Furthermore, we see our approach in line with David Pellow (2000), who called for environmental justice research that pays special attention to multistakeholder realities. Our framework outlines a type of strategy and application that tries not to juxtapose the importance of science, policy, and economic interests with the socially determined ideas of human community, but to integrate them. However, the current readings of environmental justice do not comply with the acceleration of life in European societies and its steady social change with many surprising turns. Therefore, our motive was to elaborate on a more pluralistic concept of environmental justice. This concept should reflect the manifold ways of human–environment interaction as well as the diversified social structures in contemporary European societies.

Our reading of environmental justice, integrating eight fields into four major stages (Figure 1), however, is not restricted to sociological descriptions of decision processes towards environmental justice. Moreover, it might hopefully serve to identify both the level and dimension which individual issues, we called them dimensions, actually refer to. Consider an expert which has to assess the impact of a certain political regulation in terms of possible health effects. Following our proposal, she would first define the level of action she is concerned with. Now, irrespective of her exact conclusions, she would take into account that health effects can occur in multiple environments and on different effect levels. However, neither the examination level nor the individual dimensions on that level provide sufficient grounds to decide on justice. Here, additional considerations are indicated, perhaps including both other experts and the concerned people themselves.

Justice and equity have traditionally been taken as the only dimension of environmental justice. But, as we have outlined in this paper, they need to be considered as merely one – albeit crucial – aspect among various others. We finally suggest that environmentally just processes must be based on two generic prerequisites. (1) The pivotal point is the possibility of establishing continuous feedback of results into the next step of the planning and implementation process. This feedback leads to a better understanding of both the political conditions as well as the relationships between different stakeholders involved. (2) Consensus building, sacrifice, and compromise will become the norm for environmentally just processes in the future. Successful processes of environmental justice will be vested in all stakeholders through processes of iterative and mutual learning.

Altogether, this paper should be understood as a call for understanding and conceptualizing environmental justice as processes that are robust enough to ‘listen’ to different interest constellations as well as able to attune to both unexpected changes and knowledge gaps. Setbacks should be considered as opportunities, since the process of learning discussed above allows for feedback of both positive and negative experiences into the next cycle. Environmental justice will thus not be achieved in struggles of citizens against authorities, but in cooperation, through reciprocal intermediation of the intentions which motivate the respective actions of each party.

We wish to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments.

Horst-Dietrich Elvers is a research associate at the Department of Sociology at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, from where he also received his Ph.D. in sociology in 2005. Prior to this appointment he was at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany and at the research group Bioethics and Science Communication at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin, Germany. Besides environmental justice, his research has been focusing on social inequality, Public Health, risk communication and scientific uncertainty.

Matthias Gross is a senior research scientist in the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ in Leipzig, Germany and a founding editor of the journal Nature & Culture. Prior to his appointment he taught and held research appointments, among other places, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Bielefeld University, and Loyola University Chicago. His current research focuses on the interaction between science and its publics in remediation strategies of contaminated sites and post-mining landscapes.

Harald Heinrichs is Junior-Professor for Sustainable Development and Participation at the University of Lüneburg, Germany. He obtained his PhD in sociology from the University of Stuttgart, held teaching appointments at the Universities of Düsseldorf and Münster, and was a visiting fellow at Tufts University, Medford, USA. His research interests include environmental sociology, risk communication and the sustainability discourse, as well as participation processes.