Ecological distribution conflict

Ecological Distribution Conflicts (EDCs) is a term introduced in 1995 by Joan Martínez-Alier and Martin O'Connor to describe socio-environmental conflicts, i.e., the conflictive dynamics generated in the exercise of power by different social actors when they enter into disputes over natural resources, relating to issues of access, management, or impacts.

Environmental benefits and costs are often distributed in a way that causes conflict. This is mainly due to social inequality, to contested claims over territory, to the proliferation of extractive industries, and generally to the impacts of the industrialization of the economy over the past centuries. Oil, coal, mining, and agriculture industries are focal points of ecological distribution conflicts, which involve actors such as locally affected communities, states, companies and investors, and social or environmental movements.

The terms socio-environmental conflict, environmental conflict, or EDCs are sometimes used interchangeably. The study of EDCs is related to the fields of Ecological Economics, Political Ecology, and environmental justice. The latter deals with claims for the rights of affected communities in EDC cases. In many of these cases, a technical instrument known as Environmental Liabilities is used to claim payment of damages.

Intellectual history

In his 1874 lecture ‘Wage Labour and Capital’, Karl Marx introduced the idea that economic relations under capitalism are inherently exploitative, meaning economic inequality is an inevitability of the system. He theorised that this is because capitalism expands through capital accumulation, an ever-increasing process which requires the economic subjugation of parts of the population in order to function.

Building on this theory, academics in the field of political economy created the term ‘economic distribution conflicts’ to describe the conflicts that occur from this inherent economic inequality (Martinez Alier, 2003). This type of conflict typically occurs between parties with an economic relationship but unequal power dynamic, such as buyers and sellers, or debtors and creditors.

However, Martinez Allier and Martin O’Connor noticed that this term focuses solely on the economy, omitting the conflicts that do not occur from economic inequality but from the unequal distribution of environmental resources (EJOLT, 2016). In response, in 1995, they coined the term ‘ecological distribution conflict’. This type of conflict occurs at commodity frontiers, which are constantly being moved and reframed due to society's unsustainable social metabolism. These conflicts might occur between extractive industries and indigenous populations, or between polluting actors and those living on marginalised land. Its roots can still be seen in Marxian theory, as it is based on the idea that capitalism's need for expansion drives inequality and conflict.

Unfair ecological distribution can be attributed to capitalism as a system of cost-shifting. Neoclassical economics usually consider these impacts as “market failures” or “externalities” that can be valued in monetary terms and internalized into the price system. Ecological economics and political ecology scholars oppose the idea of economic commensuration that could form the basis of eco-compensation mechanisms for impacted communities. Instead, they advocate for different valuation languages such as sacredness, livelihood, rights of nature, indigenous territorial rights, archaeological values, and ecological or aesthetic value.

Since its conception, the term Ecological Distribution Conflict has been linked to research from the fields of political ecology, ecological economics, and ecofeminism. It has also been adopted into a non-academic setting through the environmental justice movement, where it branches academia and activism to assist social movements in legal struggles (see below section on environmental justice).

Types of conflicts

Ecological distribution conflicts describe social conflicts that arise from the unfair access to natural resources and the unequal burdens of environmental pollution.

For example, a factory may pollute a river thus affecting the community whose livelihood depends on the water of the river. The same can apply to the climate crisis, which may cause sea level rise on some Pacific islands. This type of damage is often not valued in the market, preventing those affected from being compensated.

Ecological conflicts are distributed at both local and global scales. Although many of these conflicts take place between the global South and the global North (e.g. an Australian mining company operating in Indonesia), many are also local conflicts within a short commodity chain (e.g. local extraction of sand and gravel for a nearby cement factory).

Ecological distribution conflicts can be classified based on the different stages of the commodity chain: during the extraction of energy sources or materials, in the transportation and production of goods, or at the final disposal of waste.

The origin of ecological distribution conflicts can be directly linked to the historical development of the industrial economy. As less than 10% of materials and energy are recycled, the industrial economy is constantly widening and deepening the limits of energy and material extraction by expanding ‘commodity frontiers’ through two main processes:

1. Spatial expansion of natural resource appropriation through territorial claims to the control and use of natural resources and associated acts of expropriation
2. Intensification of exploitation at existing sites through socio-technical innovations and new investments at the same site (e.g. open-pit mining of metal ores or coal, gas or oil fracking, or energy-intensive fishing or plantations).

Categories from the Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas)

The EJAtlas was founded and is co-directed by Leah Temper and Joan Martinez-Alier, and it is coordinated by Daniela Del Bene. Its aim is “to document, understand and analyse the political outcomes that emerge or that may emerge” from ecological distribution conflicts. It is housed at the ICTA of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Since 2012, academics and activists have collaborated to write the entries, reaching 3,500 by July 2021. It is at present financed by the ERC Advanced Grant 2016–21 to Joan Martinez-Alier for the project EnvJustice (A global movement for environmental justice) and by the Acknowl-EJ project (Academic-Activist Co-Produced Knowledge for Environmental Justice) 2016-19 funded by the ISSC to Leah Temper and co-led by Ashish Kothari.

The EJ Atlas identifies ten categories of ecological distribution conflicts:

1. Biodiversity conservation conflicts:
2. Biomass and land conflicts (Forests, Agriculture, Fisheries and Livestock Management)
3. Fossil Fuels and Climate Justice/Energy
4. Industrial and Utilities Conflicts
5. Infrastructure and Built Environment
6. Mineral Ores and Building Materials Extraction
7. Nuclear
8. Tourism Recreation
9. Waste Management
10. Water Management

Social movements

Ecological distribution conflicts have given rise to many environmental justice movements around the globe. As many scholars advocate, these conflicts often represent an opportunity of enhancing sustainable processes through the action of social movements around the globe. However It's important to contextualize the dynamics that drive the conflict towards an environmental justice success or a failure.

Globally, around 17% of all environmental conflicts registered in the EJAtlas report environmental justices 'successes, such as stopping an unsustainable project or redistributing resources in a more egalitarian way.

Movements usually shape “their repertoires of contention’ as protest forms and direct actions, which are influenced by national and local backgrounds. In environmental justice struggles, the biophysical characteristics of the conflict can further shape the forms of mobilization and direct action. Resistance strategies can take advantage of ‘biophysical opportunity structures’, where they attempt to identify, change or disrupt the damaging ecological processes they are confronting towards their cause.

Finally, the ‘collective action frames’ of movements emerging in response to environmental conflicts becomes very powerful when they challenge the mainstream relationship of human societies with the environment. These frames are often expressed through pithy protest slogans, that we refer to as the ‘vocabulary of environmental justice’ and which includes concepts and phrases such as ‘environmental racism’, ‘tree plantations are not forests’, ‘keep the oil in the soil’, ‘keep the coal in the hole’ and the like, resonating and empathizing with those communities affected by EDC.

Ways of expression of environmental justice movements.

It is possible to register two main approaches adopted by the social movements in the EDCs that can lead to a synergetic and sustainable transformation:

• Intramodal conflicts: related to the distribution of environmental benefits within an established pattern of resource use between several social groups. Related movements may be arguing for a reduction of environmental hazards through improved governance or technology, together with a more equitable distribution of environmental goods and bads (reducing environmental hazards through improved governance or technology or struggling for a fairer distribution of environmental resources)
• Intermodal conflicts: they defend a particular mode of resource use against industrial societies' transformation of it. (Ex. Galician farmers who fought to preserve communal land from attempts of industrialization, Pray Lang movement in Cambodia, whose aim of creation was/is protecting Cambodian forests, successfully preventing the government from implementing an extraction project).

In this division movement such as La Via Campesina (LVC), or the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) can be considered in the halfway between these two approaches. In their defense of peasant agriculture and against large-scale capitalist industrial agriculture, both LVC and the IPC have fundamentally contributed to promoting agroecology as a sustainable agriculture model across the globe, adopting an intermodal approach against industrial agriculture and providing new sources of education to poor communities that could incentive an aware integration in the redistribution of resources. A similar attitude has shaped the action of the Brazilian Landless Farmworkers movement (MST) in the way it has struggled with the idea of productivity and the use of chemical products by several agribusiness realities that destroy resources rich in fertility and biodiversity.

Such movements often question the dominant form of valuation of resource uses (i.e. monetary values and cost-benefit analyses) and renegotiate the values deemed relevant for sustainability. Sometimes, particularly when the resistance weakens, demands for monetary compensation are made (in a framework of ‘weak sustainability’). The same groups, at other times or when feeling stronger, might argue in terms of values which are not commensurate with money, such as indigenous territorial rights, irreversible ecological values, human right to health or the sacredness of redefining the very economic, ecological and social principles behind particular uses of the Mother Earth, implicitly defending a conception of ‘strong sustainability’. In contesting and environment, such intermodal conflicts are those that are most clearly forced towards broader sustainability transitions.

Use in legal cases

The concept of ecological distribution conflicts (EDCs) was introduced to facilitate a systematic documentation and analysis of socio-environmental conflicts and to produce a more coherent body of academic, activist, and legal work around them. In some cases that have been taken to the litigation stage, at times with the help of grassroots environmental justice movements, the claims of locally affected communities have been recognized and reparations have been made.

Environmental justice comprises multiple dimensions; that can be described as recognition, distributive, or procedural (or participation) justice.

The recognition paradigm relates to the recognition of the personal dignity of all individuals involved. It entails the expression and acknowledgement of all the experiences of environmental change, as well as of different valuations of the natural environment (which can be related to spirituality, health, leisure, or economic well-being, among others).

The distributive paradigm tends to focus the social justice analysis on the allocation of material goods, such as resources, income and wealth, or on the distribution of social standing. Distributive justice hence relates to the benefits and burdens felt by the various actors involved, and usually is concerned with seeking restoration, reparation, or compensation for the burdens.

Procedural (or participation) justice relates to the fairness of the process of environmental policy- and decision-making. As Bell explains, “one of the reasons for the unfair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens is that the decisions that transform the environment are usually made by people who enjoy the benefits rather than the burdens”. Inequalities of political authority, power and influence shape environmental decision-making. Principles of procedural environmental justice include ensuring equality, proportionality, and plurality in these processes. Ensuring procedural justice is a means to facilitate fair distribution and recognition of environmental impacts.

Litigation cases mostly seek a fair distributional outcome, although they sometimes mobilize more than one dimension of environmental justice.