“democracy”, “participation”, “citizenship”, “domination”, “justice” and “liberalism”;
– the classification2 of EDIs into six metathemes: “environmental politics and environmental change”, “environmental ethics”, “agrifood”, “sustainable development”, “environmental technologies and management” and “transitions”, to explore their political content via the Internet;
– the association of EDI metathemes with expressions from political/anti-political or politicized/depoliticized discussions in French and English in order to collect a relevant corpus on the Internet;
– a thorough reading of the collected corpus.
This chapter will help us to identify and characterize the political/anti-political trend of EDIs.
1.3. Environmental and development issues (EDIs) between the political and anti-political or politics and depoliticization: what are the trends?
1.3.1. Issues of environmental politics and environmental change
Environmental politics generally address water and air pollution issues, waste and ecosystem management issues and biodiversity protection issues. These issues are addressed in terms of political-legal regimes (polity), public policy (policy) or political action (politics). They also address issues of environmental change, which are changes in the climate system, hydrological systems of freshwater supply and agricultural food production systems. These changes represent large-scale risks to the sustainability of these systems. Voß and Bornemann (2011) propose an analytical and political framework for environmental governance. In this model, the authors distinguish three dimensions: a first dimension referring to the substantive problems and solutions of policy; a second covering the structural side of polity such as norms, procedures and political culture; and a third dimension of politics representing the actualized side of the policy process where actors with divergent views and interests interact.
1.3.1.1. Environmental justice: a category which cuts across environmental politics
Climate change is a contributor to environmental injustice. Indeed, the issue of climate change provides an opportunity to broaden the scope of environmental justice. The latter is not reduced to the issue of access to environmental resources nor to the problem of the unequal distribution of environmental costs. It involves a recognition of “plural modes of being in the environment” (Centemeri et al. 2016).
In the field of international environmental politics, several environmental issues seem to have become urgent, such as:
– the question of the degree of shared responsibility for climate change between rich and poor countries (Roberts and Parks 2007a, 2007b);
– the issue of ecological debt and the injustice of climate change combined with the effects of poverty and environmental degradation (Magrath 2010);
– the issue of intergenerational domination, which can stem from a violation of the freedom of future generations through climate change (Beckman 2016).
Environmental justice is also considered both as a category of collective action social movements (political action) and of action in public environmental policies as well as a political-legal category. The history of the idea of environmental justice is influenced by two contexts: the context of social mobilizations and the academic context (Fol and Pflieger 2010).
In the context of social mobilizations, the notion of environmental justice, which is derived from the concept of environmental racism, has given rise to a social movement that has adapted the frameworks of action of other social movements such as academics and political actors. The term “justice” has been preferable to “equity” by the social movements of environmentalists, which refers to broadly militant usage (Fol and Pflieger 2010). Related to this trend are:
– local and global environmental politics initiatives (Blanchon et al. 2009) in response to local social movements denouncing situations of environmental injustice, such as exposure to an environmental impact, as well as situations of unequal access to environmental resources and the marginalization of inhabitants around protected areas (Blowers and Leroy 1994; Dozzi 2008; Faburel 2008; Gobert 2008; Gardin 2012);
– other social movements of environmental politics are responses to global initiatives that introduce social equity into environmental protection. These movements use political ecology as a theoretical tool (Robbins 2012). Political ecology also provides a theoretical basis for discussing issues of “democratization of environmental explanation” in scientific practice between scientific expertise and public participation as a factor of environmental governance (Forsyth 2003).
Epistemologically, these two types of environmental politics initiatives demonstrate two conceptions of justice: justice as an essentially local struggle and fight characterized by the bottom-up approach deriving from the North American current; and justice as the governmental top-down approach illustrated mainly by increasingly less sectoral environmental public policies (Gardin 2012).
According to Fol and Pflieger (2010), in the academic context, debates on environmental justice have diverged into two main areas:
– distributive justice dealing with the identification of team beneficiaries and services with high environmental efficiency, such as public transport, sewage treatment plants and other infrastructure. It seeks to distribute justice in the light of environmental harm and effects according to social categories;
– corrective justice dealing with the correction of the effects of actions and policies causing harm.
These two dimensions appear complementary because this academic debate on distributive justice is geared towards the implementation of corrective environmental policies. According to the authors (Fol and Pflieger 2010), several criticisms are made on the uses of the notion of environmental justice. These criticisms reflect the debate between the political and anti-political realm within environmental politics.
1.3.1.2. A risk of depoliticization
Environmental governance has not escaped the risk of “depoliticization” through the claim that this type of social interaction on environmental issues is apolitical (McCarthy 2013).
Green economy and ecological modernization discourses are basically depoliticized (or post-politicized) environmental discourses because they advance a view by some dominant actors that certain issues of environmental degradation such as climate change cannot be a subject of debate nor democratic decision-making. The choice between certain mechanisms of political practices, such as market practices to avoid adverse environmental effects, constitutes a neoliberal mechanism for the depoliticization of environmental politics. This mechanism makes it possible to maintain power relations brought about by the market by trying to make them unquestionable by representing the environment as external to society (Felli 2015).
In the field of political theories, several authors agree that climate change discourses and research are “symptoms of a post-political condition” (Swyngedouw 2010; MacGregor 2014a; Pepermans and Maeseele 2014; Maeseele 2015). The post-political perspective, aimed at building social, rational and moral consensus on climate change problems and solutions, is criticized by a second politicized perspective that sees climate change as inherent to representations that are the result of
