• DOI:10.1080/09644016.2013.755387
• Corpus ID: 144436972

Theorising environmental justice: the expanding sphere of a discourse

@article{Schlosberg2013TheorisingEJ,
  title={Theorising environmental justice: the expanding sphere of a discourse},
  author={David Schlosberg},
  journal={Environmental Politics},
  year={2013},
  volume={22},
  pages={37 - 55}
}

• D. Schlosberg
• Published 1 February 2013
• Sociology
• Environmental Politics

Environmental justice has been a central concern in a range of disciplines, and both the concept and its coverage have expanded substantially in the past two decades. I examine this development in three key ways. First, I explore how early work on environmental justice pushed beyond many boundaries: it challenged the very notion of ‘environment’, examined the construction of injustice beyond inequity, and illustrated the potential of pluralistic conceptions of social justice. More recently, there has been a spatial expansion of the use of the term, horizontally into a broader range of issues, vertically into examinations of the global nature of environmental injustices, and conceptually to the human relationship with the non-human world. Further, I argue that recent extensions of the environmental justice frame move the discourse into a new realm – where environment and nature are understood to create the conditions for social justice.