Environmental Justice in World Politics

All environmental problems in one way or another are involved in the question of justice. The concept of “environmental justice ” has been in circulation for some time underlining the justice dimension of environmental issues. Given the globalization of environmental problems since 1970s, the environmental justice discourse has been increasingly used to frame various international or global environmental issues like toxic waste trade, ozone depletion, biodiversity protection, and global warming.1 There is now quite a number of phrases that can help us to think environmental justice outside state borders: “global environmental justice, ” “transnational environmental justice, ” “international environmental justice, ” and “international environmental equity.”2 Environmental scholars using these terms often fail to draw meaningful distinctions among them. I argue that this multiplicity of phrases signifies more than an inadvertent inflation of terminology. The terminological diversity we encounter in IR literature actually corresponds to different modes of environmental justice in world politics. Environmental issues in world politics are often studied along three spatial dimensions: international, transnational, and global. Despite the fact that these three dimensions are intertwined in the real world, we can draw analytical distinctions among them. The international