Environmental justice and conceptions of the green economy

Green economy has become one of the most fashionable terms in global environmental public policy discussions and forums. Despite this popularity, and its being selected as one of the organizing themes of the United Nations Rio+20 Conference in Brazil, June 2012, its prospects as an effective mobilization tool for global environmental sustainability scholarship and practice remains unclear. A major reason for this is that much like its precursor concepts such as environmental sustainability and sustainable development, green economy is a woolly concept which lends itself to many interpretations. Hence, rather than resolve long-standing controversies, green economy merely reinvigorates existing debates over the visions, actors and policies best suited to secure a more sustainable future for all. In this review article, we aim to fill an important gap in scholarship by suggesting various ways in which green economy may be organized and synthesized as a concept, and especially in terms of its relationship with the idea of social and environmental justice. Accordingly, we offer a systemization of possible interpretations of green economy mapped onto a synthesis of existing typologies of environmental justice. This classification provides the context for future analysis of which, and how, various notions of green economy link with various conceptions of justice.

Climate justice in a carbon budget

The fact of a carbon budget given commitment to limiting global-mean temperature increase to below 2°C warming relative to pre-industrial levels makes CO2 emissions a scarce resource. This fact has significant consequences for the ethics of climate change. The paper highlights some of these consequences with respect to (a) applying principles of distributive justice to the allocation of rights to emissions and the costs of mitigation and adaptation, (b) compensation for the harms and risks of climate change, (c) radical new ideas about a place for criminal justice in tackling climate change, and (d) catastrophe ethics.

Circles of support and accountability: criminal justice volunteers as the 'Deliberative public'

This paper provides a review of the role played by volunteers within one particular offender management and reintegration scheme in the United Kingdom. Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) draw on the expertise of volunteer members of the public to create supportive monitoring frameworks around sex offenders following their release from prison. The paper presents evidence as to the motivations of these volunteers, and argues that they play a crucial role in the success of the scheme, as they provide an instrumentally-useful form of reintegrative social contact to a socially-excluded offender population, and perform a symbolically important role as representatives of the wider community in taking ownership of offender management practices on behalf of the wider society. This is particularly significant in grounding those processes in the communicative practices of the social sphere, providing powerful reasons for intervention that reinforce the work that COSA do.

Procedural justice, not absorptive capacity, matters in multinational enterprise ICT transfers

This paper empirically tests the effectiveness of information and communications technology (ICT) knowledge transfer and adoption in the multinational enterprise (MNE) as an issue of critical importance to contemporary MNE functioning. In contrast to mainstream thinking on absorptive capacity, but in line with prevailing international business theory, our research supports the proposition that perceptions of procedural justice, rather than absorptive capacity, determine effectiveness, especially in cases of high tacit knowledge transfers. Data was collected from senior ICT representatives in 86 Canadian subsidiaries of foreign owned MNEs. Each of these subsidiaries recently experienced a significant ICT transfer imposed by the parent organization. Support was found for the main propositions: Procedural justice significantly predicted successful ICT transfer and adoption, while absorptive capacity was not significant. These findings are consistent even when knowledge tacitness was high. The perceived success of the ICT transfer as well as its adoption varied widely across these firms. The potential reasons for this divergence in effectiveness are manifold, but our findings suggest that in situations of substantial knowledge tacitness, a higher level of procedural justice, rather than a higher level of absorptive capacity, is critical to effective transfer and adoption.

Looking back, moving forward: drama, disability and social justice

The aim of this chapter is to briefly outline how disability has been represented in theatre, what access disabled people have had to drama and theatre in the past, and what might be achieved in the pursuit of social justice with young people in relation to awareness of and provision for disability. It will focus in particular on how disability has been addressed in drama education and what assumptions have been made regarding drama and disability in education. In considering such issues one might perceive manifestations of what Freebody and Finneran (2013) recognise as an overlapping and ‘somewhat artificially created dichotomy between drama for social justice and drama about social justice.’ This chapter will examine some examples of how drama has been used to give students in mainstream schools insights into disability, and the philosophy that underpins the drama curriculum of one special school where the focus is on drama as social justice: the argument being that in some cases simply doing drama is, in effect, a manifestation of social justice. Finally, some of the progress made in recent years regarding access and engagement will be addressed through specific reference to the authors’ on-going work into ‘performing social research’ (Shah, 2013) and how theatres are increasingly attempting to give more access to disabled young people and their families by offering ‘relaxed performances.’

Social connection and practice-dependence: some recent developments in the global justice literature

This review essay discusses two recent attempts to reform the framework in which issues of international and global justice are discussed: Iris Marion Young’s ‘social connection’ model and the practice-dependent approach, here exemplified by Ayelet Banai, Miriam Ronzoni and Christian Schemmel’s edited collection. I argue that while Young’s model may fit some issues of international or global justice, it misconceives the problems that many of them pose. Indeed, its difficulties point precisely in the direction of practice dependence as it is presented by Banai et al. I go on to discuss what seem to be the strengths of that method, and particularly Banai et al.’s defence of it against the common claim that it is biased towards the status quo. I also discuss Andrea Sangiovanni and Kate MacDonald’s contributions to the collection.

Procedural justice in procurement management and inclusive interorganizational relations: an institutional perspective

This paper applies the concept of procedural justice to one of the most important focal points of interorganizational relations: the purchaser–supplier relationship. The few extant studies of the concept in the purchaser–supplier domain have overlooked an important aspect of this key relationship: that is, inclusiveness in procurement. This is despite the fact that interest in the specific empirical context of supply chain links between large purchasing organizations (LPOs) and ethnic minority suppliers (EMSs) from disadvantaged communities proceeds apace on both sides of the Atlantic. Institutional theory is used to examine the form that procedural justice takes in eight case studies of LPOs from the private and public sectors, which actively engage with inclusive procurement management initiatives in England. The guiding question is twofold: ‘What may LPO approaches to installing procedural justice in procurement management entail?’ and ‘How are these approaches shaped?’ This paper identifies specific approaches to installing procedural justice for inclusive procurement and submits theoretical propositions about how these are shaped. The study contributes to a macro-level assessment of procedural justice, i.e. interorganizational procedural justice, as a significant aspect of inclusive interorganizational relationships, which is a domain in need of theoretical development.

Climate justice and the international regime: before, during and after Paris

With a focus on key themes and debates, this article aims to illustrate and assess how the interaction between justice and politics has shaped the international regime and defined the nature of the international agreement that was signed in COP21 Paris. The work demonstrates that despite the rise of neo-conservatism and self-interested power politics, questions of global distributive justice remain a central aspect of the international politics of climate change. However, while it is relatively easy to demonstrate that international climate politics is not beyond the reach of moral contestations, the assessment of exactly how much impact justice has on climate policies and the broader normative structures of the climate governance regime remains a very difficult task. As the world digests the Paris Agreement, it is vital that the current state of justice issues within the international climate change regime is comprehensively understood by scholars of climate justice and by academics and practitioners, not least because how these intractable issues of justice are dealt with (or not) will be a crucial factor in determining the effectiveness of the emerging climate regime.