Environmental justice as a (potentially) hegemonic concept: a historical look at competing interests between the MST and indigenous people in Brazil

Abstract

This article explores the need to recognise and compensate the plurality of environmental justice claims, while paying close attention to the outcomes of the most marginalised groupscultural and ecologicalin political decision-making to avoid vestiges of hegemony. The early history of the Movimiento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST) serves as a case study in which environmental justice claims clash with indigenous rights claims. In recent decades, the MST has refused settling Amazonian indigenous territories, consistent with the organisation's Via Campesina platform, which focuses on redistributing the 50% of national territory controlled privately by Brazil's richest 4%. Yet, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Brazil's military government pitted landless peasants and indigenous people's struggles against each other, circumventing land reform potentially disruptive to the country's de facto colonial fazenda land system. This tactic pressured competing groupslandless peasants and indigenous peopleto fight against each other, concluding predictably: the most powerful factions ended up getting their way, conceding less in negotiations than their less-advantageously positioned, marginalised counterparts. When marginalised groups gain concessions in environmental justice struggles, often the goods comprising those concessions come at a cost to marginalised groups with even less political visibility. Hegemonic structures of power remain non-negotiable in the process of alleviating other injustices in perceived zero-sum politics. Such systemic displacement and dispersion of violence in systems built on violence suggests hegemony affects not just to other marginalised groups, but to nonhumans too. ARTICLE HISTORY

Environmental governance under Bolsonaro: dismantling institutions, curtailing participation, delegitimising opposition

“…To fully understand the processes through which Brazilian environmental protection arrangements are being reshaped, one must analyse the subjective dimensions of efforts that seek to legitimise Bolsonaro’s environmental agenda. The two-pronged approach we propose allows analysts to better assess the ways and extent to which the once rich tapestry of plural environmental claims that characterised Brazil (see Hendlin 2019 ) has been reduced under the Bolsonaro regime.…”

How Policy and Development Agencies Led to the Degradation of Indigenous Resources, Institutions, and Social-Ecological Systems in Nepal: Some Insights and Opinions

“…The literature stated that socio-politically powerful groups can strategically block resource owners to use their own's resources or following better practices for vested interests [35,36]. Specifically, international hegemony theory postulates that such social groups or countries often use non-military force or other non-coercive measures to meddle in government decisions or social behaviors of other groups or countries and reap benefits from them [35].…”

“…Some other political ecology literature stated that socio-politically powerful vested interest groups may have strategically blocked others in using some resources or practices [35,36,39,56,57]. Specifically, international hegemony theory postulates that vested interest countries tactically use non-military force, ideology, socially constructed values, or other non-coercive measures to meddle policy decisions and societies' behaviors of other countries to reap benefits from them [35,37,39,57].…”

“…Experts especially of developed countries have clutched international climate forestry policies for the best interest and benefit of their home countries [36,111,124,126]. Most policies are not friendly in Nepal contexts.…”

Environmental Justice and Indigenous Environmental Justice

“…However, such a framing of EJ ignores the social, cultural, and institutional contexts in which environmental injustices take place and the historical and contemporary systematic acts of discrimination against marginalised populations (including Indigenous peoples and other non-White non-Indigenous communities in settler-colonial societies, members of lower-incomes and lower-castes in India, and formerly colonised peoples throughout the Global South) which all play substantial roles in creating environmental injustices. A distributive-framing of EJ (along with environmental racism) therefore misses crucial opportunities to critique the parts of colonialism and capitalism in its relation to different subjectivities and how it creates place-based and culturally-situated environmental injustices (Hendlin 2019 ; Jackson 2018 ; Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003 ; Whyte 2014 , 2016a ). More recent EJ scholarship demonstrates that the narrow focus on equitable distribution largely ignores the broader social, cultural, and institutional contexts in which environmental injustices take place and the role that capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy plays in legitimising, driving and deepening environmental inequities (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2018 ; McGregor 2015 ; Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003 ; Sze and London 2008 ; Walker 2009 ).…”