ABSTRACT This narrative case study used semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and archival research to document the ongoing environmental injustices faced by the predominately Black residents of Ezra Prentice Homes, a public housing complex adjacent to the Port of Albany in the South End of Albany, New York. We highlighted the context of the relocation of minorities to this public housing complex for the construction of the Empire State Plaza, and impacts to residents from polluting port industrial activities and heavy-duty diesel trucks. Using a social justice Theory of Change framework, we evaluated the diversity of outcomes and relevance of an innovative suite of advocacy tools employed by policy activists and discussed the factors constraining the resolution of continued environmental injustices. We observed a complex legacy of environmental racism, power struggles, and an ongoing mindset of expendability of marginalised public housing residents targeting this community for hosting locally unwanted land uses and delayed long-term solutions. While policy activists employed a diversity of advocacy tools instrumental in winning lawsuits, expanding their base of support, attracting media, and bringing widespread state and national visibility to the struggles and necessary solutions for protecting residents, this “middle coalition” facilitated successful yet temporary policy outcomes in terms of long-term protections for residents. This research fills an important gap in the environmental justice literature that explores the phenomenon of public housing complexes inappropriately sited adjacent to polluting port facilities. Future research is needed to better understand community risk perceptions related to public housing and long-term public policy responses.

ABSTRACT This paper reports on tensions between decarbonisation and energy poverty priorities in Great Britain’s liberalised electricity markets. Switching electricity suppliers in this market can result in significant benefits for those on bad deals. Further benefits are determined by the regulator. However, many of the energy poor lack the capabilities to switch and access these benefits. Community organisations play an important role in providing such access through remedial action. Using the capabilities approach, this paper combines quantitative and qualitative organisational data analysis at a community level to reveal an increasing share of the population who could benefit from switching and who agree to switching. At the same time, eligibility for one-off discounts on electricity bills to support the energy poor has increased sharply in recent years. This data points towards climate mitigation policies and market structures which benefit wealthier groups at the expense of more deprived groups who lack capabilities. At the micro scale, data access and intermediation at various levels and scales can help support more targeted interventions that facilitate well-being and enhanced capabilities. At the macro level, liberalised retail electricity markets need to be accommodated by safety nets and supportive institutional arrangements to avoid competitive pressures translating into complexity and opacity for consumers. Failure to equitably address capability conflicts, also framed as energy justice tensions and trade-offs, risks reinforcing and creating new injustices.

ABSTRACT In the context of a growing emphasis on research and application of citizen engagement methods in environmental planning and management (e.g. Reed 2008; Von Korff et al. 2010), we compare three collaborative activities aimed at finding innovative coastal policy solutions in the Netherlands. In these activities, participants across the citizen, science and policy divide were involved in designing nature-based interventions for specific areas in the Netherlands. The activities are compared in terms of the theoretical promise stakeholder engagement holds for influencing participants’ understanding of the respective bio-geophysical systems, the actor networks and for effecting knowledge sharing. We find local knowledge offers the potential for crafting coastal policy solutions to fit the specific bio-geophysical and societal context. The empirical analysis revealed the deep competence of local people, who generally understand their lived environment in a systemic way, and the knowledge that can be harvested to broaden and enrich the design space for coastal solutions – in addition to a willingness on the part of the stakeholders to collaborate in developing local solutions for sustainable futures. Although measures to reduce power differences and enable local knowledge inclusion served to broaden the design space for innovative solutions in our case studies, they also constrained the scientific and technical quality of the contributions from professional experts such as bio-geophysical scientists, engineers, spatial planners and policy analysts. As such, future work addressing the dilemma of integrating high quality professional inputs into coastal policy solutions founded on local expertise is advocated.

ABSTRACT In line with social exchange theory, this case study explores how a previously indifferent and unsympathetic local community participates in the conservation of Touran National Park through community-based tourism. An in-depth analysis of local community members, local authorities, and NGOs revealed that due to changes in society's socio-cultural structure, the community’s awareness of conservation has significantly increased and resulted in active participation in natural and cultural heritage. The findings provide an alternative to social exchange theory, suggesting that benefits should generally outweigh human social interaction and behaviour calculus costs. Furthermore, rural youth and women have become much more prominent despite many public participation dilemmas and rigid government structures. Finally, theoretical and practical implications for future research are discussed.

ABSTRACT Sacramento, California’s capital city has not, until recently, had the kind of cohesive and effective environmental justice (EJ) movement as seen in several other regions around the state or country. However, in the past 15 years, a variety of new forms of EJ organising are producing a vibrant if uneven movement. This article examines how and why this transformation has occurred and what challenges the movement has faced and which persist. I propose that the rise of the EJ movement in Sacramento can be traced to an explicit articulation of an EJ master frame, the development of an increasingly dense network of EJ-oriented organisations, the mobilisation of a grassroots base of residents, and several state-led EJ policy initiatives that have created openings for community mobilisation. The article begins by presenting a theoretical framework to understand the formation and development of social movements. This is followed by an overview of local environmental injustices and a series of focused case studies of key EJ struggles in the region. Finally, it closes with a discussion of the dynamic rise of the Sacramento EJ movement and further questions to track its continued development.

ABSTRACT Mzedi dumpsite is the only city-run waste facility in the city of Blantyre, Malawi. Although the entire site is city-owned, the periphery of the dumping site has been used for agricultural purposes for generations, but has become a space of contestation between growers, the city, and dump managers, as unregulated dumping has swelled the boundaries of the site, spilling waste into the surrounding fields, accentuating growing pressure for land. Drawing on extensive ethnographic, qualitative fieldwork with growers and other stakeholders within the city of Blantyre, the purpose of this article is to understand and explain the complicated factors and relationships that influence the production of maize on and around the Mzedi dumpsite, while contextualising the motivations that drive growers to cultivate a space that is broadly understood by themselves as hazardous. Building on a previously developed conceptual framework, the investigation utilises a Foucauldian lens to analyse how growers conceptualise and problematise the ways in which Mzedi, and its waste, affects their lives and their crops. Findings suggest that growers’ motivations for planting in the vicinity of Mzedi are complex but can broadly attributed to three factors: an historical connection to the land, a lack of other available space, and a belief that the organic waste stored at the dumpsite makes the surrounding land fertile, and suitable for agriculture. These findings contribute towards our understanding of how populations in the Global South conceptualise and problematise “waste”.

ABSTRACT In the circular economy discourse it is stressed that products ought to be repairable and that repair work is assumed to be growing. However, repair can be organised and performed in different ways – by corporate entities, independent repairers, laypersons and communities. Some corporations are integrating repair and maintenance into their offering, while simultaneously restricting consumers to open, repair or modify their products. In opposition to such developments, there is a movement for “right to repair”, which works for consumers’ legal rights to repair and modify products, pushing for the free availability of spare parts and manuals. Recent years have also seen a growth of repair cafés and other forms of DIY community repair spaces. This paper explores the discourses of DIY community repair through two Swedish case studies – an NGO-led nationwide repair campaign and a local government initiative of open DIY repair spaces. Our case studies show how DIY community repair works towards enabling all, particularly marginalised groups, to participate and live well in a low-impact future. In contrast to the mainstream circular economy discourse, the purpose of community repair is not only about repairing broken stuff and reducing waste, but about building social relations and practicing non-consumerist forms of citizenship. By elucidating these different perspectives on repair – who is to perform it, with what skills and for what purposes – we highlight how the transition to future, more circular economies, can be enacted and steered in ways that allow for different roles and powers for citizen-consumers.

ABSTRACT While the existence and significance of transnational municipal networks (TMNs) in the realm of environmental governance have been well documented, the implementation and impacts of their local programmes, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, remain underexplored. This paper contributes to addressing this gap of knowledge by examining what obstructs or facilitates TMNs’ local actions and the extent to which they can catalyse wider transformative impacts on local environmental governance. We focus on an urban wetlands programme implemented by ICLEI Africa from 2015 to 2018 in 9 district and 2 metropolitan municipalities in South Africa – the Local Action for Biodiversity: Wetlands SA (LAB Wetlands SA) Programme. From an insider perspective, this paper reviews the implementation of the LAB Wetlands SA Programme in three locations, namely the Overberg, iLembe, and Frances Baard District Municipalities of South Africa. Based on comparative analysis, the paper identifies three key influential factors – political buy-in, policy champions and institutional capacity – that interact in combination to affect the practices of the LAB Wetlands SA Programme. These three factors are closely interlinked and strongly depend on the social, economic, political and cultural aspects of local context. In advancing local environmental actions and promoting transformative environmental governance, the design and practices of TMNs’ local programmes and projects must be informed by, tailored to, and able to adapt to the local context.

ABSTRACT Sustainability in Kuwait requires more realistic pricing for currently highly subsidised water, to discourage wasteful usage. There is, however, strong public resistance to eliminating water subsidies. This research explores reasons for this consumer resistance, using qualitative in-depth interviews. The issues in this affluent society are not really about economics at all, but stem from perceptions about government responsibility to citizens, fairness, and weak top-of-mind awareness of environmental/sustainability issues when actually using water. When considering the issues more carefully, there is substantial willingness to pay for tap water with policies perceived as fair, supported by an effective communications campaign. Policy-makers can use such data to develop a comprehensive water pricing campaign that will minimise political resistance and contribute to a much more sustainable urban water management.

ABSTRACT Effective management of natural resources often requires diverse strategies implemented by a variety of conservation practitioners. Despite stark gender inequality challenges in many regions of the world, women can and do play a fundamental role in conservation initiatives in rural and other communities. However, examples of women’s involvement in conservation initiatives, notably in Latin America, are limited in the literature. We conducted interview-based research to learn more about the role that a women-led group named the Asociación de Desarrollo Comunal de Mujeres de la Barra de Santiago (AMBAS) – plays in sea turtle and other conservation initiatives in an artisanal fishing community in rural El Salvador. We identified four major themes from interview and survey responses (1. gender challenges; 2. interest in helping the environment; 3. local ecological knowledge; 4. community perceptions) that underscore the value of incorporating women’s ecological knowledge into conservation efforts while also drawing attention to the continued challenges that women face in environmental decision making. These data also suggest that conservation strategies that provide both environmental and economic benefits can inspire conservation commitment, regardless of whether they are led by men or women. This study contributes to the nascent dataset of examples highlighting the essential roles of women in conservation, and reinforces the notion that multi-gender participation is essential to maximise positive impact in conservation and wildlife recovery.