THE UTOPIAN GOAL OF ATTEMPTING TO DELIVER ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE USING SEA
Anna McLauchlan () and
Elsa João ()
Additional contact information
Anna McLauchlan: School of Applied Social Sciences University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Elsa João: David Livingstone Centre for Sustainability, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management (JEAPM), 2011, vol. 13, issue 01, 129-158
Abstract:
Environmental justice is a contested concept. However, it became a high-level policy objective in the United States and, internationally, policy advocates and academics have identified environmental justice as a fundamental part of sustainable development. Policy appraisal, in particular Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), has been cited as a main tool to deliver environmental justice policy. Scotland, a devolved government within the UK, made a high-level policy commitment to environmental justice and linked its delivery to SEA. To evaluate how this was put into practice, this paper analyses Scottish SEA documents produced between 2003 and 2007. The study found that SEA practice in Scotland wasnotdirected towards empirical assessment of environmental justice. More fundamentally, because assessments always reflect specific values, there is no incontestable way to represent environmental justice or injustice empirically. Therefore, this paper argues that environmental justice remains a Utopian goal, with no indisputable means to be achieved.
Keywords: Strategic environmental assessment; environmental justice; policy objective; sustainable development; distributional analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S146433321100381X
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:jeapmx:v:13:y:2011:i:01:n:s146433321100381x
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
DOI: 10.1142/S146433321100381X
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management (JEAPM) is currently edited by Thomas Fischer
More articles in Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management (JEAPM) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().