Environmental justice in Scotland: policy, pedagogy and praxis

In the first decade of Scottish devolution, environmental justice became a significant component of environmental policy for the Scottish Executive, especially under First Minister Jack McConnell. This paper analyses how a discourse developed within policy narratives which separated environmental justice from economic growth and the interests of capital. In particular, it explores the role which research has played in justifying this discourse. By contrast, an alternative discourse has developed through reflexive and dialogical research associated with the praxis of the environmental organization Friends of the Earth Scotland. This alternative discourse is embedded in the embryonic environmental justice movement in Scotland, and identifies environmental justice as a social conflict which exposes negative externalities at the heart of economic development.


Context and methodology
Research into environmental justice, particularly in the UK, has tended to focus on distributional patterns of environmental costs and benefits amongst social categories. This paper will argue that environmental justice should be seen more as a discourse embedded in social movement, always provisional and contested, and reflecting interests.
In his analysis of the US environmental justice movement, Harvey (1999) noted that 'Discourses do not exist in isolation from beliefs, social relations, institutional structures, material practices, or power relations. Discourses internalize effects from all of these domains while reciprocally entering in, though never as pure mirror images, to all of the other moments of the social process' (Harvey 1999 p 159). Discourses of environmental justice in Scotland have developed in research and policy narratives and they reflect powerful social interests. But such dialogues are also constructed by activists around the communities and social movement with which they identify. A more dynamic understanding of environmental justice emerges from dialogue with activists struggling for what they identify as environmental justice.
This research is based on the decade from 1998 to 2007, during which time the author worked (until July 2005) for Friends of the Earth Scotland (FoES) and as organizer for a course in environmental justice for community activists. Environmental justice became part of a policy discourse amongst Scottish policy makers at this time, when opportunities existed for affecting the power balance between social interests in the newly devolved Scotland 1 . FoES's role in introducing the concept of environmental justice to the Scottish Executive is widely recognized (FoES 1999, Dunion 2003, Maschewsky 2005, Agyeman 2005). This paper concerns the first two terms of the Scottish parliament with a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition in the Scottish Executive. The Executive adopted environmental justice as policy, initially with an interpretation close to that of FoES, but subsequently these interpretations diverged. Mainstream policy discourse has increasingly restricted environmental justice to policy areas which do not challenge economic growth. On the basis of FoES's approach to dialogue with activists, an alternative discourse can be identified which is broader, and tends to reflect diverse peripheral communities whose common interests challenge a purely economistic interpretation of development.
A range of qualitative methods have been used, including participant observation (as an employee and activist with FoES); dialogue with grassroots activists in the structured context of Freirean pedagogy; interviews with civil servants, NGO staff and other policy makers and stake holders; analysis of policy documents and research reports; and critical reflexive interactions between these and with myself as situated practitioner. Selection of interviewees was constrained by the inevitable combination of very few people being involved in the early stages of policy generation, and by many of these speaking strictly 'off the record'. Some 30 people have contributed to the author's analysis in different ways, ranging from more formal semi-structured through less formal opportunistic interviews, to informal discussions in the context of other meetings.
This multi-method approach is what Denzin and Lincoln (2005) refer to as 'bricolage', the making of quilts. Baxter and Eyles (1997) highlight the need for rigour in qualitative methodology, where the 'use of multiple methods enables triangulation . . . but simply using two or three different methods does not necessarily guarantee more rigorous results' (p 508). However for Denzin and Lincoln (2005) 'Triangulation is not a tool or a strategy of validation but an alternative to validation . . . The combination of multiple methodological practices, empirical materials, perspectives and observers in a single study is best understood, then, as a strategy that adds rigor, breadth, complexity, richness, and depth to any inquiry' (p 5).
Denzin and Lincoln categorize a range of sources of rigour or validity in qualitative research, based on different theoretical paradigms (Denzin and Lincoln 2005, p 24). Adopting a constructivist paradigm, Baxter and Eyles (1997) identify criteria for validity which include credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability. The paradigm adopted in this research would come under Denzin and Lincoln's Cultural Studies and Marxist paradigms, and the criteria for validity are therefore based on praxis, criticality, social texts, emancipatory theory and dialectics. It is the argument of this paper, moreover, that the findings of constructivist research in Scotland have contributed to a policy discourse inimical to environmental justice, whereas rigour is achieved by a process of dialogue with the experience of those affected by environmental injustices and who struggle, individually and collectively, against them.

Adoption of environmental justice in Scotland
Influenced by the growing international awareness of environmental justice issues, FoES launched a campaign for environmental justice to coincide with the inauguration of the Scottish Parliament in 1999(FoES 1999. Unlike the narrative in the US, which focused primarily on environmental racism, FoES's initial understanding of environmental justice sought to link local class-based environmental maldistributions with global inequalities in resource consumption. The latter drew on the Sustainable Europe project, which assessed sustainability gaps in several European countries by comparing actual resource consumption with the environmental space (see Carley and Spapens 1998, McLaren et al 1998, McLaren 2003. The injustice reflected in the overuse of resources by the minority in the North at the expense of the global South was connected to local injustices through the campaign slogan 'no less than a decent environment for all, with no more than our fair share of the earth's resources' (FoES 1999). Agyeman (2005) has more recently classified this approach as 'Just Sustainability'.
At a local level, Scotland had seen a number of local campaigns in environmental pollution hotspots, largely in working class areas, many of which FoES had supported. In response to these locally based environmental problems, FoES ran a series of activities aimed at mobilizing and supporting resistant communities, building capacity and linking them into the national policy-making process. The issues faced by these communities were varied and included waste landfill, opencast coal mining, gravel quarrying, fish farming, incinerators, industrial pollution, road building and semiconductor factories (see Dunion 2003, Dunion and (1) environmental justice is a form of social justice, involving both process and outcome (although he gave no substantive view on what that outcome would be like); (2) it is linked to traditional concerns of the labour movement and social democratic politics; (3) it includes both local and international environmental inequalities (but stops short of recognizing the connection that the affluence of the developed world has often been at expense of a historical legacy of colonial exploitation); (4) it includes resource consumption (i.e., carbon emissions), environmental damage (e.g., waste landfills) and neglect (litter and graffiti); (5) it should be combined with 'economic progress'.
This policy initiative stimulated a range of activity within the Scottish Executive's civil service and non-departmental public bodies. The focus here is on Executive policy and commissioned research which illustrates the shifts in the discourse on environmental justice.

Scottish Executive policy on environmental justice
Land-use planning and pollution control are policy areas most directly affected by environmental justice. At the time of McConnell's speech, Scottish Planning Policy 16 (SPP16) on opencast coal was under revision, and subsequently included strengthened community participation and constraints on cumulative impact (Scottish Executive 2005a).
Secondly, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) clarified its statutory responsibility towards environmental justice (Poustie 2004), including strengthening enforcement in disproportionately affected communities. However, this occurred against an alternative and more long-standing strategy for the agency: that pollution prevention is more effective when the SEPA works closely with businesses operating potentially polluting facilities (Gemmell 2003, cf Charleson andKind 2003). This latter approach has led to community criticisms of being too close to industry.
By the end of 2005, the Scottish Executive published its first review of progress on environmental justice (Scottish Executive 2005b). This substantial list of activities was challenged by research by Maschewsky (2005), who suggested that the Executive 'follow[ed] an 'embedded' political approach, 'smuggling' environmental justice into existing programs . . . with little or no demand on altering targets, priorities and funding-schemes'.
Development planning allocates space to, and sets constraints on, different types of development. It can thus influence the distribution of environmentally damaging (and enhancing) activities. The Planning etc (Scotland) Act 2006 (Scottish Parliament 2006) therefore provides probably the most significant opportunity for the provision of environmental justice.
The Planning Bill was driven by two competing reported weaknesses in the current planning system. Business interests have argued that the planning system is inefficient and that decisions need to be speeded up. Community groups, however, have expressed a lack of trust in the system: opportunities to participate are constrained and seem to make little difference to outcomes. Many people involved in local environmental injustice campaigns report an experience of the planning system which is remote and stacked in the interests of developers, and environmentalists have generally agreed, pointing out that unsustainable development is seldom prevented.
Following extensive consultation, the published Bill and subsequent Act contained concessions to both sets of interests. From the perspective of environmental justice, it introduces mechanisms to facilitate public involvement in planning and decision making.
It also introduces a requirement for the strategic environmental assessment of new developments which fulfils but goes beyond requirements from the European Commission.
It introduces a mechanism called a 'good neighbour agreement', which is a voluntary agreement between a developer and a community body, to constrain the activities of a new development. This initiative has been successful in the US when backed up with legal or economic sanctions (Lewis and Henkels 1998), was introduced into Scotland by FoES (see FoES 2004) and considered in Poustie's 2004 report. Whilst the version in the Act is not a strong constraint on developers, it is at least enforceable once agreed.
In the interests of business, however, the Act introduces a hierarchy of planning applications, removing 'National' and 'Major' Developments from the remit of the local authority, leaving open the possibility (highlighted in environmentalists' campaigns) that this could be used to drive through locally or nationally unpopular developments. Moreover, the Act rejects giving objectors ('third parties') the right to appeal planning decisions. After sustained campaigning by environmentalists and a reluctant consultation on third-party right of appeal prior to publication of the Bill, respondents were divided more or less exclusively along the lines of business interests against, and community and environmental interests for. The outcome reflects the interests of business.
Whilst environmental justice has been embraced by the Scottish Executive, this has not been permitted to interfere with the high-skill, innovative and entrepreneurial economic development strategies A Smart, Successful Scotland andFramework for Economic Development in Scotland (Scottish Executive 2004a, 2004b). These policies aim at 'sustainable economic growth' without acknowledgment of environmental costs. Significantly, Scottish Enterprise was never involved in environmental justice policy, and business groups have not regarded it as a sufficient threat to mount a significant lobby (in comparison with sustainable development policy; see Sklair 2003). Environmental justice policy was not regarded as a threat to the interests of business. In the words of one senior civil servant: 'Ministers are not going to interfere with the market'.
The area of policy development which has perhaps made the greatest attempt to address both economic development and environmental justice is the Scottish Executive's policy on sustainable development: Choosing our Future (Scottish Executive 2005c). This document is Scotland's contribution to the UK framework for sustainable development, One Future-Different Paths (Defra 2005). Choosing our Future essentially brings together a range of Scottish Executive policies with a view to demonstrating how they integrate into a coherent approach to sustainable development. Unlike other national policies, it includes a section on environmental justice, although the phrase does not occur anywhere except in this section. Economic growth is moreover the policy's 'top priority-but not at any cost . . .. The challenge is to make economic growth sustainable, breaking the link with environmental damage' (p 4). Here, clearly, is the legitimation for the policy discourse. By breaking the links, environmental justice becomes a distinct area of policy from economic growth.
This policy division between entrepreneurial growth and more socially equitable interpretations of environmental justice lie at the heart of its progress through policy. Policy which has adopted environmental justice has tended to be outside the economic sphere. Furthermore, it is arguably because the narratives of sustainable economic growth conflict with the valuation of socio-environmental conditions associated with environmental justice that it is possible for diverse local campaigns to identify collectively with an environmental justice 'movement' (Martinez-Alier 2003). People living in the most deprived areas are more likely to experience the poorest air quality (Fairburn et al (2005) Executive Summary, emphasis in original).

Scottish Executive commissioned research on environmental justice
Thus, whilst there is evidence of direct correlation with deprivation in some polluting activities, there is no such evidence with others, including such iconic pollution hotspots as landfills, quarries and opencast sites. This is in part a result of the method of analysis, through categorizing 'environments' according to pollution sources (industrial pollution, landfills); enforcement responsibilities (river quality, air quality); or planning categories (green space, woodland). Amongst senior civil servants and politicians, however, this outcome has been interpreted as restricting policy implementation to forms of environmental damage where a correlation can be demonstrated.
Curtice et al (2005) investigated perceptions of environmental justice in deprived communities through interviews, where environmental justice is taken to include both polluting industry and 'environmental incivilities'. 'An "environmental incivility" is any aspect of the environment that people are capable of discerning through hearing, sight, touch or smell and about which they may be included to feel negatively'. Significantly, the study recommends that environmental policy in Scotland needs to give priority to reducing the incidence of street level incivilities and the absence of goods such as lack of green spaces, both of which appear to be more important than potential infrastructural incivilities (Curtice et al (2005) Executive Summary, emphasis added).
In other words, environmental justice policy should be focused onto issues which denigrate local environments in 'deprived' areas, i.e., litter, graffiti, dog mess, and vandalism. By focusing on the environmental concerns of people in the poorest areas, the outcome of the research regards major polluters and infrastructure projects (which tend to be driven by economic interests) as less important than low-level incivilities.
Of course, even where major pollution sources are correlated with indices of deprivation, the reverse is seldom true (i.e., most deprived neighbourhoods do not live near to pollution sources). In the absence of an existing pollution source, or where a major industry dominates the community through longevity or provision of employment, then the environmental problems presented by respondents tend to be the 'incivilities'. Sustained educational work in such contexts can lead the same respondents to a more critical interpretation (for example, Fagan 1998, Scandrett 1999. Moreover, these 'environmental incivilities', being directly caused by fellow citizens, are more amenable to policy which does not conflict with business interests, and fit well with other Executive policies on tackling anti-social behaviour in poor areas (such as anti-social behaviour orders).
What is interesting about these two Scottish Executive commissioned reports is that they have enabled the conception of environmental justice espoused by McConnell to be narrowed in favour of certain social interests, especially the interests of capital, even though the process of initiating and commissioning the research, and its execution and methodology, were all rigorous. The reception given to these two pieces of research by policy makers demonstrates a shift in emphasis. Fairburn et al (2005) is treated as a solid piece of background evidence which can be used to close down speculation and narrow the focus of the debate. Because no evidence was identified of correlation between landfill sites and deprivation, or of multiple hot spots across Scotland, so policy should be directed to areas where correlations are identified, such as air quality, and to local solutions. Curtice et al's research has been received enthusiastically as evidence of an environmental maldistribution which affects the psychosocial health of the most deprived. Moreover, here is an environmental justice problem which can be tackled through existing approaches to local economic development and antisocial behaviour.
Environmental justice research and policy have not addressed communities engaging in a collective struggle against unwanted local polluters. It has also moved away from the economic issue of the companies who cause pollution and the reasons why.
All research embeds interests. The questions which are asked, the methodologies of assessment, and the conventions of interpretation all involve socially embedded choices. This is not to denigrate the research, or to imply that these pieces of research consciously promote an ideological position. On the contrary, as Wynne (1994) has pointed out, social assumptions are intrinsic to established research principles, and policy is strengthened by submitting these to contestation. As research which falls within a constructivist paradigm (Denzin and Lincoln 2005), this Scottish Executive commissioned research implies an objective reality which can, at some point in time, be sampled by external researchers with at least an approximation of objectivity.

Pedagogical generation of knowledge on environmental justice
A contrast may be drawn here between the policy interpretations of research whose empirical data are derived from census/GIS and single-point interviews, and the data derived qualitatively from participant observation and ongoing dialogue with representatives of a collective struggle. Whilst the rigour of the Executive sponsored research can scarcely be faulted, there are inevitable implications of data categorization which has facilitated interests hostile to a strong interpretation of environmental justice. FoES has also revised its interpretations, but in ways that represent a different balance of interests. An alternative discourse emerges from research conducted through a combination of qualitative methods. The discourse described below is the product of the author's interpretation: it is close to that of FoES, not least because the author was part of generating FoES's strategy until 2005, but the justification for this discourse lies with the author and not with FoES.
Data are drawn from participant observation, semistructured and unstructured interviews with key informants, and an ongoing reflexive dialogue with grassroots environmental justice activists through Freirean pedagogical methods. These activists are largely participants in the Higher Education Certificate (HEC) in Environmental Justice, a collaboration, since 2000, between FoES and Queen Margaret University. This two-year part-time course provides sustained support to particular communities facing local environmental problems through intensive education of key activists in these communities.
Activists are recruited by demonstrating the support of a community experiencing environmental injustice. They are community 'organic intellectuals' (sensu Gramsci 1971): leaders, mobilizers and opinion formers in the communities with which they identify; and 'movement intellectuals' (Eyerman and Jamison 1991) in the sense that they create discourses within the environmental justice movement.
Modelled on the educational philosophy of Freire (1972), the course's curriculum derives from a dialogue between the specific, local knowledge and experience of the activists facing environmental injustices, and the more general, researchbased and analytical knowledge accessible by FoES and the University. Freire argued that the purpose of education for adults is a critical consciousness which enables the oppressed to take liberating action to change their world. Traditional 'banking' education treats learners as socially disconnected units to be filled with neutral knowledge by their teacher. By contrast, Freirean education takes seriously the social context and political practice of the learners and creates dialogue between their knowledge and that of the teacher in a collective project of emancipation.
In the HEC Environmental Justice, not only is the capacity to tackle local environmental problems increased, but also knowledge is created in the form of a discourse on environmental justice (Wilkinson andScandrett 2003, Scandrett et al 2005). In this dialogical epistemology, knowledge is generated in praxis, is constantly provisional and contingent, and is validated not only against the rigours of academic criteria but also accountability to communities engaged in struggle, and their changing collective understanding.
The locus of knowledge generation of the discourse in environmental justice is the communities in which these activists act and the social movement which connects them. Both 'community' and 'social movement' have stimulated considerable debate in the literature (Shaw 2004, Eyerman and Jamison 1991, Schlosberg 1999. 'Community' 'has been contested, fought over and appropriated for different uses and interests to justify different politics, policies and practices'. (Mayo 1994 p 48), Moreover, Martin (2003) has argued for a more dynamic understanding of community, as the social space between private problems and public issues, where people collectively create identity and shape resistance to the structures which define them. 'It is in the dialectics of community, understood in this way, that people experience, collectively, the possibilities of agency within the pre-existing constraints of structure' (Martin 2003).
Moreover, social movements have been described as 'communities of practice' (Crowther et al 2006) in which discourses are forged and identity is formed by its participants. Both the negotiation of community and the building of social movement are therefore processes of learning. In this case the (fledgling) environmental justice movement in Scotland can be understood as a community of communities, and the HEC Environmental Justice as a pedagogical contribution to generating the movement's discourse. The use of community and social movement as a locus for knowledge generation places the struggles for collective self-definition amongst social actors at the heart of the discourse of environmental justice. Participants have identified that their community shares sufficient interests and is affected by a common environmental problem which they have classed (and FoES has accepted) as an environmental injustice.
The movement in Scotland raises some interesting questions about environmental justice discourse.
First, not all the participants are deprived, although they are disproportionately from communities which are poor, working class, discriminated against, geographically or culturally isolated or in some other way politically marginalized. The patterns of environmental maldistribution are more complex than simple correlations between poverty and a damaged environment. Movement participants may perceive injustices mediated by various social stratifications.
In Beck's 1992 'risk society' analysis, collective struggle is no longer characterized by traditional identities such as class. Developing this, Blowers has argued that environmentally damaging land uses tend to be in geographically peripheral locations which may reflect diverse social categories of peripheralization (Blowers and Leroy 1994).
This can lead to resistance movements which cross social factors not peripheralized by the environmental location. This is not to say that class is irrelevant, but that class is mediated by other social factors, often with more geographically segregated distributions. That the poorest live in the worst environment may often be true, but sometimes other social determinants with a more geographical distribution will be more deterministic, in which case resistance may come from diverse class fractions. In the US, environmental racism is only possible because of high levels of de facto racial segregation, thus enabling environmental justice struggles to be defined in civil rights terms (Martinez-Alier 2003). In Scotland, the absence of a correlation between waste landfills and social deprivation is not evidence that no environmental injustice is occurring.
Secondly, participants regard infrastructure and polluting industries as much a significant cause of environmental injustice as environmental problems of poor communities not facing these industries: each group is able to identify its experience as environmental injustice.
Where the environmental dysfunction of deprived areas not adjacent to a polluting facility is considered to be an environmental injustice, it is understood not as 'incivility'-i.e., an activity which one citizen inflicts on another-but as injustice by neglect-for example, poorly maintained public housing or inappropriate transport schemes. The focus is therefore framed in terms of the (ir)responsibility of the state rather than the antisocial behaviour of their fellow residents.
Finally, there is a sense in which the diverse contexts in which they are active are held together by connected valorization of the environment, just as Martinez-Alier (2003) has understood the environmentalism of the poor as a conflict between languages of valuation incommensurate with the economics of the market. Environmental valuation, moreover, is constructed in that interface between the public and private, in the dialectic of community, where cultural values are interpreted by individuals together.
Environmental justice fundamentally conflicts with markets which distribute benefits and costs according to purchasing power. Market distributions reflect the preference of money, not of citizens, and the economic logic of the market seeks to externalize costs including onto the environment (Martinez-Alier 2003). Diverse communities experience the effects of economic environmental externality. These are often, but are not necessarily, the poorest, and they interface with other inequalities which may not be geographically distributed. Whilst drawing primarily on evidence from the global South, Martinez-Alier (2003) argues that environmental justice struggles in the North and environmentalism of the poor in the South, and in history, are common phenomena in the sense that they employ alternative languages of valuation, in conflict with an economic analysis which renders the cost of the environment inadequate to prevent development.
Environmental justice policy formation may be understood as an attempt by the state to absorb the contradiction between the logic of 'sustained economic growth' and social con-flict over incommensurable valuations. Risking a crisis of legitimation, the state seeks to allocate concessions according to the balance of forces between social interests and their movements (Hay 1994). In Scotland, the space occupied by environmental justice in policy narrative has developed outside the boundaries set by the market economy.
The sources of environmental justice in the economic logic of externalizing costs, and distributing these to the peripheries of different social stratifications, is lost when environmental justice is restricted to correlations with deprivation, or perceptions of the deprived (important though these are). Understanding environmental justice as socially embedded discourses reflecting interests allows a more dynamic interpretation of both state policy and social movement formation.
Environmental injustices are therefore not so much discovered by research (and then responded to by policy makers), as constructed by social processes of which research is part. The question is not which discourse is most valid, in the sense of representing an objective reality, but rather what are the political implications of two discourses, the validity of which can be justified in different ways. What part does it play in social movement as 'cognitive praxis' (Eyerman and Jamison 1991)? That is not to resign to relativism, but rather to ground a materialism in a reality which is significant enough for people to mobilize campaigns around.