Understanding Environmental Justice Capital in China—A New Framework to Study Environmental Justice in Contexts

Abstract

Environmental justice has drew worldwide attention since the 1982 protest in USA to against duping toxic waste. In the globalization era, worldwide scholars and environmental activists are actively engaged in related studies and social movements. However, these researches and movements usually ignore the influences of local contexts on local environmental justice configurations, including related researches in China. Whilst, evidences have been provided that different forms of capital from contexts, such as economic, social, political, natural capital and cultural capital, will affect the local concept of environmental justice. That is to say environmental justice should have different discourse from what has been researched in western countries in different contexts. Thus, this research will discuss the common ground of environmental justice study framework and promote the new conceptual framework "environmental justice capital" for having a better understanding environmental justice in contexts. Additionally, the framework of "environmental justice capital" will be put in Chinese contexts as an preliminary discussion to get an initial image of environmental justice in China.

Can green city branding support China's Sponge City Programme?

“…Cities developed as dense highrise agglomerations centred on congested business districts and where industrial premises have dominated (Yang et al 2010;Guan et al 2018). Economic growth was the main goal, and while growth was rapid and transformative, environmental and quality of life issues were marginalised (Ng 2002;Li et al 2017;Shao et al 2020). Urbanisation was characterised by escalating energy use, habitat loss, biodiversity decline, gross air pollution, exacerbation of urban heat island effects, and serious hydrological problems (Guan et al 2018;.…”