Exploring environmental justice in Sweden : How to improve planning for environmental sustainability and social equity in an “eco-friendly” context

• Environmental challenges, especially climate change, are highly discussed topics in the Swedish public debate, but questions about who is causing the problems and who is affected by them are seldom asked. This also applies to questions of who defines what should be regarded as acute environmental problems and what constitutes high-quality environments. This paper explores how environmental (in)justice issues can be framed in a Swedish social context, drawing from three cases: municipal promotion of eco-friendly lifestyles, large-scale infrastructure planning, and planners’ attitudes towards justice. The three cases deal not only with distributional, procedural, and substantive aspects of justice, as is common within the US environmental justice framework, but also with discursive dimensions of justice. We argue that elucidating such examples of environmental (in)justices is crucial to nuance the mainstream, consensus-oriented sustainability discourse in Sweden.

Keyword

Planning; environmental justice

SOCIAL SCIENCES

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)