This paper examines the ways in which environmental justice (EJ)-in its myriad forms-has developed as a concrete and material challenge to the dominant (neo-liberal) discourse of ecological modernisation. The concept of 'environmental justice' is problematised and the fast conceptual transfer beyond the borders of the US, where it originated. The shift in the concept of environmental justice is explored in two urban environments in Toronto, Canada, and Hermanus, South Africa, with a specific emphasis on urban water policies and politics and their relation to concerns of environmental justice. The term 'environmental justice' in the context of urban environments must be defined within this context for each site under study; the paper argues against a universalising use of the term. In localising the term 'environmental justice', it is not proposed that its use be restricted to a specific site, but that its use is embedded in a multiscalar urban world specific to a particular site. It is argued specifically that what is and is not environmentally just cannot be discussed merely from the point of view of localised differentials in the exposure to environmental costs or benefits. Instead, the articulated scales of justice are explored in and among the case study cities. It is argued that in reality, injustice perceptions and justice demands are constructed through relative, scale-sensitive political and discursive processes.

Scaling discourse analysis refers to the necessity to consider environmental discourse a multi-dimensional and diversified practice. Depending on the various levels of state and society at which environmental policies are applied and depending on the geographical scale at which their solution is sought, we have to differentiate both policy processes and outcomes in environmental politics. We introduce the importance of scale in mapping the multiple trajectories through which complex and intertwined relations of power produce and reproduce uneven geographies in the area of urban environmental policy. More specifically, we are seeking to cast light on the relationships between scale, discourse and the politics of urban environments. Using an approach influenced by urban political ecology, the relevant discourses here are constructed in a triangle of terms: urban, ecology and policy. In this triangle, there are no givens and invariables. Its three points are constituted through contested discourses and practices. We approach our analysis from an understanding of urban water policies in two municipalities Namibia and South Africa as the outcome of a discursive and material practice operating at various levels of state and society and as an integral part of wider processes of social and political change.

This paper analyzes the role of the hydrosocial cycle in producing and sustaining uneven geographies of capitalist agriculture in the Ceres Valley, a major center of South Africa's high-value deciduous fruit industry. I explore ways in which the mobilization, appropriation, and transformation of water resources become intertwined with and reinforce the radicalized capitalist relations that have characterized the local political economy of export fruit production since the 19th century. These relations have solidified over time as they have been able to adapt to shifting political-economic and politicalecological dynamics. Focusing on the postapartheid period, I examine how white agrarian capital has been able to maintain and even strengthen its dominance over the regional economy despite the dramatic shuffling of political and economic priorities. I pay particular attention to how the fatal combination of the liberalization of agricultural markets and the financialization of water supply becomes articulated through interconnected sociospatial processes of dispossession, devaluation, and disinvestment. I argue that questions of access to and control over the hydrosocial cycle not only reveal how marginalized and radicalized social actors-farm workers, small-scale farmers, township residents-become differentially articulated with and disarticulated from existing and emerging circuits of capital accumulation. It also opens promising analytical and political avenues through which to illuminate and confront uneven geographies of capitalist development in ways that highlight the linked sociospatial processes of production and social reproduction.

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