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Mapping the frontiers and front lines of global environmental
justice: the EJAtlas
Leah Temper1
Daniela del Bene
Joan Martinez-Alier
Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain
Abstract
This article highlights the need for collaborative research on ecological conflicts within a global perspective.
As the social metabolism of our industrial economy increases, intensifying extractive activities and the
production of waste, the related social and environmental impacts generate conflicts and resistance across the
world. This expansion of global capitalism leads to greater disconnection between the diverse geographies of
injustice along commodity chains. Yet, at the same time, through the globalization of governance processes
and Environmental Justice (EJ) movements, local political ecologies are becoming increasingly transnational
and interconnected. We first make the case for the need for new approaches to understanding such interlinked
conflicts through collaborative and engaged research between academia and civil society. We then present a
large-scale research project aimed at understanding the determinants of resource extraction and waste
disposal conflicts globally through a collaborative mapping initiative: The EJAtlas, the Global Atlas of
Environmental Justice. This article introduces the EJAtlas mapping process and its methodology, describes
the process of co-design and development of the atlas, and assesses the initial outcomes and contribution of
the tool for activism, advocacy and scientific knowledge. We explain how the atlas can enrich EJ studies by
going beyond the isolated case study approach to offer a wider systematic evidence-based enquiry into the
politics, power relations and socio-metabolic processes surrounding environmental justice struggles locally
and globally.
Key words: environmental justice, maps, ecological distribution conflicts, activist knowledge, political
ecology
Résumé
Cet article met en évidence la nécessité pour la recherche collaborative sur les conflits écologiques, avec une
perspective globale. Le métabolisme social de notre économie industrielle est en augmentation. Cette
intensifie les activités d'extraction et la production de déchets, et les impacts sociaux et environnementaux
associés générer des conflits et de la résistance. Cette expansion du capitalisme mondial conduit à une plus
grande déconnexion entre les diverses «géographies de l'injustice» à travers le filière. Pourtant, dans le même
temps, grâce à la mondialisation de la gouvernance et des mouvements pour la justice environnementale (EJ),
les écologies politiques locales sont de plus en plus transnationale et interconnecté. D'abord, nous plaidons
pour de nouvelles approches pour comprendre ces conflits interconnectés à travers la collaboration et la
recherche engagés, entre le monde universitaire et la société civile. Deuxièmement, nous présentons un projet
de recherche à grande échelle visant à comprendre les déterminants de conflits au sujet de l'extraction des
ressources et de l'élimination des déchets à travers une collaboration mondiale initiative de cartographie: le
EJAtlas, l'Atlas mondial de la Justice de l'environnement. Ce document présente les EJAtlas et sa
méthodologie, décrit le processus de co-conception et la phase de développement, et évalue les résultats
1 Dr. Leah Temper et al., Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA), Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona
(UAB), 08193, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain. Email: leah.temper "at" gmail.com. The authors are deeply grateful to the
entire EJOLT team and all the contributors who have reported and narrated their stories from the ground up, have sent
feedback on the mapping project. They have contributed to building the network of around 300 people and it would be
impossible to list all of those here. Thank you, we feel honored to learn from, share and walk with you (aprender,
compartir, caminar). We specially thank our colleague Lucia Argüelles Ramos for her work on the GIS data; the EJAtlas
web master and programmer Yakup Cetinkaya; EJOLT co-coordinator Beatriz Rodriguez Labajos for her support and
comments on a previous draft; and the anonymous reviewers. This work received funding from the EJOLT Project,
Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade, an FP7 European Commission Project (grant number 266642,
2011-2015) and by a seed grant from the ISSC under the Transformations to Sustainability Programme (T2S_PP_289).
Temper et al. The Environmental Justice Atlas
Journal of Political Ecology Vol.22, 2015 256
initiaux et la contribution de l'outil pour l'activisme, de plaidoyer et de connaissances scientifiques. Nous
expliquons comment l'Atlas peut enrichir les études EJ. Il propose une enquête fondée sur des preuves
systématiques dans la politique, les relations de pouvoir et les processus socio-métabolique environnantes
luttes de justice environnementale, localement et globalement.
Mots clés: la justice environnementale, des cartes, des conflits de distribution, les connaissances écologiques
militante, l'écologie politique
Resumen
Este artículo destaca la necesidad de realizar investigación colaborativa sobre conflictos ambientales en una
perspectiva global. Al crecer el metabolismo de las economías industriales se intensifican las actividades
extractivas y la producción de residuos, con impactos sociales y ambientales que producen conflictos y
resistencia en todo el mundo. Esa expansión del capitalismo global lleva a una desconexión entre las
geografías de la injusticia a lo largo de las largas cadenas de extracción, transporte y desecho de las
mercancías. Pero al mismo tiempo, a través de la globalización de los procesos de gobernanza y de los
movimientos de Justicia Ambiental, las ecologías políticas locales cada vez son más transnacionales y están
más interconectadas. En primer lugar, proponemos nuevos enfoques para entender esos conflictos mediante
la investigación colaborativa y comprometida entre los académicos y la sociedad civil. Presentamos después
un proyecto de investigación dirigido a entender los factores globales determinantes de los conflictos por
extracción de recursos y producción de residuos a través de una iniciativa colaborativa de mapeo: el EJAtlas,
el Atlas Global de Justicia Ambiental. Este artículo introduce este proceso de mapeo del EJAtlas y su
metodología, describe el diseño colaborativo y el desarrollo del atlas, evalúa sus resultados iniciales y su
contribución como una nueva herramienta para los activistas, los académicos, las organizaciones
ambientalistas. Explicamos cómo el atlas puede enriquecer la investigación de la Justicia Ambiental yendo
más allá de los casos individuales, ofreciendo la posibilidad de estudios sistemáticos más amplios, basados en
evidencias, sobre la política, las relaciones de poder y los procesos socio-metabólicos relacionados local y
globalmente con las luchas por la justicia ambiental.
Palabras clave: justicia ambiental, mapas, conflictos ecológico-distributivos, conocimiento activista,
political ecology
1. Introduction
Environmental conflicts are invading new spatial and symbolic spaces; emblematic examples include
the mobilization in Istanbul in defence of Gezi park (Ors 2014), the toppling of the government in
Madagascar over land-grabbing (Douguet 2013), and the aboriginal 'Idle No More' movement in Canada,
where Indigenous opposition to fracking led to a violent stand-off between the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police and Native communities in New Brunswick (Ornelas 2014). 'Fracktivism' has also made its way into
the living rooms of middle class and rural families, from the US to Poland to Tunisia, exposing new
audiences to debates about energy provision and "climate justice." In Post-Communist Romania, the 'Save
Roșia Montană' campaign against a proposed gold mine brought one million protesters to the streets of the
capital in what is now regarded as the largest civic movement in Romania since the 1989 revolution (Velicu
2012). This process has been described as the "environmentalization" of social struggles (Acselrad 2010),
whereby ecological issues are increasingly important in themselves but are also used to contest political and
scientific structures and practices.
At the same time local political ecologies are becoming increasingly transnational and interlinked
across space. Grandmothers are chaining themselves to earth-moving machinery in Texas in cross-
continental pipeline blockades against tar sands oil from Canada (Temper et al. 2013). Famous court cases
confront giant oil or mining companies such as Chevron (Texaco), Shell, and Rio Tinto in their home
countries, as activists attempt to pierce the veil of corporate impunity (Pigrau et al. 2012). New points of
convergence between movements are manifold, as campaigns around biofuels and food sovereignty, land-
grabbing, climate and food justice address sectors such as agriculture, energy generation, water management
and financial markets simultaneously. This blurring of governance boundaries presents challenges for
campaigners and social movements as they navigate new institutional structures (Borras, Franco, and Wang
2013).
Recent Environmental Justice (EJ) scholarship has focused on how contemporary capitalism is
reconfiguring the geographies of environmental justice (Pellow 2007, 2009; Sikor and Newell 2014). Yet this
has only gone partway in responding to long-standing critiques from geographers that consider EJ literature
Temper et al. The Environmental Justice Atlas
Journal of Political Ecology Vol.22, 2015 257
as theoretically weak and dispersed (Holifield, Porter and Walker 2009). For example, Swyngedouw and
Heynen (2003) charge that the EJ focus on local case studies does not lend itself to generalization. Further,
they contend that analyzing dynamics only at local scales risks overlooking crucial processes and relations
generating environmental inequalities at broader regional, national, and global scales.
Clearly, these new terrains of conflict and resistance call for a deeper systematic evidence-based
enquiry into the politics, power relations and socio-metabolic processes surrounding environmental justice
struggles. It is to this end that a large-scale research initiative was created to increase understanding of the
constituents and determinants of resource extraction and waste disposal conflicts in the world within a
framework of engaged research with the movements struggling for social and environmental equity and
democratization of decision-making. This article offers an explanation of the origins and motivation of that
project, and in particular, of a tool created to systematize information about environmental justice conflicts:
the EJAtlas, the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice2 (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The EJ Atlas homepage. www.EJAtlas.org
This tool was set up and is managed by the authors of this article at the ICTA, Universitat Autònoma
de Barcelona, Spain. We started in 2012 with funding from the European FP7 programme for research on
'Science in Society' for the EJOLT project3 that we also coordinated. EJOLT had 23 partners from around
the world, academic institutions and activists groups. EJAtlas draws on inventories of conflicts developed by
activist organizations, supplemented with further research.
In the following sections, we offer an outline of our theoretical framing, rooted in activist knowledge.
We then explain the contents of the database with its categories and filtering possibilities, and give more
detail on the methodology used for building up the EJAtlas. We also present some first results of the mapping
process and a reflection on how this initiative can contribute to enrich EJ research and the field of political
ecology. The final section presents the conclusions and suggests new elements for the research agenda for
environmental justice scholarship.
2. Background: the emerging global environmental justice framework
The Environmental Justice movement was born in the 1980s among Black and Latino communities in
the U.S. It was later theorized, first by sociologist Robert Bullard (1990), largely in relation to concerns
about the unequal distribution of social and environmental costs between different social groups according to
2 EJAtlas webpage: www.EJAtlas.org
3 EJOLT project website: www.ejolt.org
Temper et al. The Environmental Justice Atlas
Journal of Political Ecology Vol.22, 2015 258
distinctions of race/ethnicity, social class, gender, age, and location. EJ issues were often portrayed as a
matter of socio-spatial distribution of "bads" (emissions, toxins) and "goods" (parks, green spaces, services)
and called attention to the link between pollution, race and poverty (Bullard 1993). Statistical proof of the
existence of "environmental racism" was established (Bryant and Mohai 1992). Academically, this field of
study was not classified as political ecology but as environmental sociology.
At the same time, over the last thirty years the field of political ecology has grown, largely in
geography and anthropology (Bryant 2015; Bryant and Bailey, 1997; Johnston 2001; Peet and Watts 2004;
Peet, Robbins and Watts 2011; Peluso and Watts 2001; Perrault, Bridge and McCarthy 2015). Political
ecologists have mainly (though not exclusively) studied environmental injustices in the global South.
There was a clear overlap in content between political ecology and studies of environmental justice.
Over time, the view of EJ has broadened beyond the distribution of environmental hazards, first by activists
and then by academics (Martinez-Alier et al. 2014), extending the concept materially, spatially, and
politically (Bullard 2005; Schlosberg 2013; Walker 2009 a,b; Walker 2012). It has expanded to include
multidimensional and interlinked aspects of justice related to distribution, recognition, and participation
(Schlosberg 2007).
The globalizing of EJ (Martinez-Alier et al. 2015; Schlosberg 2004) has occurred horizontally; for
instance, the U.S. EJ movement inspired similar claims in Brazil (Acselrad 2010), South Africa and Scotland
(Dunion and Scandrett 2003). It has also occurred vertically, to encompass concerns beyond national borders,
such as trade agreements, transfers of wastes, climate change, and the Rights of Nature (Schlosberg 2013).
Transnational EJ issues such as trade in toxic waste has been explored by Clapp (1994) and Pellow (2007);
debates on climate change and climate justice by Chatterton, Featherstone, and Routledge (2013), and long
before them by Agarwal and Narain (1991), while the notion of an "ecological debt" from North to South,
was born in Latin America in 1991 (Robleto and Marcelo 1992), and has now been developed further
(Goeminne and Paredis 2010; Rice 2009; Robert and Parks 2007; Warlenius et al. 2015).
The breadth of issues and contestations in EJ research has coalesced with political economy, since
"environmental inequality is a global phenomenon routinely generated by the normal workings of
international political economy" (Szasz and Meuser 1997). This in turn demands greater attention to the link
between trade and environmental degradation and a "richer, multidimensional understanding of the different
ways in which environmental justice and space are co-constituted" (Walker 2009a). As Robbins (2012)
points out, a mine, a dam, or a road in the forest are not isolated objects but connected sites where value
flows, where accumulation occurs, and injustices expand. A trade perspective makes visible the spatial
fractures or disconnections between the sites of consumption and production of environmental goods and
bads through their localized effects (Giljum and Eisenmenger 2004; Muradian et al. 2012). Mapping the
interconnected sites of injustice and patterns of exploitation along these commodity chains allows a deeper
analysis of how power produces prevailing distributions of risk, and it highlights the relational nature of risk
(Robbins 2014).
Meanwhile the politics of EJ have taken on a transnational and transdisciplinary character (Routledge
2003; Sikor and Newell 2014), as a dialogue between action or activist research and a growing network of
activists, scholars, and non-governmental organizations that form part of what has been termed a new "global
brand of environmental justice" (Agyeman 2014). This assemblage offers an opportunity for the innovative
approaches to research and engagement that some EJ scholars have called for.
Activist-led research, an epistemological need in EJ studies
'Environmental justice' is a social movement and a research subject. EJ was from the start a
community-led science: data gathering was carried out by the communities themselves, as a form of citizen
science or popular epidemiology. Citizens have monitored the places where they "live, work and play" and
tracked public environmental health (Brown 1987). For example, the pattern of illness in the famous Love
Canal case was discovered by Lois Gibbs with the help of local "situated knowledge" (Haraway 1988) about
the underground stream beds or swales that ran through the area, when she discovered that the illnesses
clustered along the swales (Couch and Kroll-Smith 2000; Gibbs 1982).
Many researchers in EJ studies engage with communities through processes explicitly named
Participatory Action and Collaborative Research (Bacon et al. 2013). Yet while such forms of engagement
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Journal of Political Ecology Vol.22, 2015 259
attempt to more actively include communities in the process of knowledge production, social movements
often remain as objects of study, rather than being recognized as producers of knowledge in their own right.
In contrast, in discussions related to socio-environmental conflicts, activists participate on equal terms
with experts from public administrations, universities or companies. In this respect, Martinez-Alier et al.
(2014, 2015) demonstrate how concepts in political ecology are very often grassroots concepts, from
'biopiracy' to 'climate justice.' Activist work contributes to theory, that in turn is further used and enhanced by
academics and by civil society groups. EJ can thus be considered a field of social praxis which draws from
and integrates theory and practice in a mutually informing dialogue (Sze and London 2008).
In this light, the concept of activist knowledge (sensu Escobar 2008) argues that social movements are
important spaces of knowledge production and that movements are not only enacting politics through protest
and cultural contestation but are generating diverse types of knowledge. This destabilizes the boundary
between activist and academic (or other expert) domains, calling for new forms of science production (Casas-
Cortés et al. 2008). This type of science raises the possibility for collaboration between environmentalists
and scientists, developing 'science with the people' rather than for the people, especially in those fields
characterized by "irreducible uncertainties and ethical complexities" (Conde 2014; Funtowicz and Ravetz
1994:198).
There are several reasons for the new global EJ framework to maintain a tight connection with such an
engaged model of science. First, environmental problems are complex, interdisciplinary, and sometimes
emerging; having been created by new technologies, industries and new patterns of energy and material flows
through the economy (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1991). This leads to uncertainties and inevitable ignorance. For
this reason, an important stream of research in EJ studies, led by scholars in Science and Technology Studies,
focuses on the contestations between expert 'scientific' environmental knowledge and local or Indigenous
knowledge, highlighting how the development and application of scientific knowledge is inherently a
political process that expresses and exercises power in the service of particular social, economic or political
ends (Jasanoff 2004; Nadasdy 2011).
In debates over technology, and in situations of uncertainty, scientific knowledge is wielded by
different actors in contestation over the nature of legitimate environmental knowledge. EJ struggles are often
about one version of "knowing nature" that is imposed, while other forms of knowledge are discounted or
erased (Goldman, Nadasdy and Turner 2011). EJ activists aim to make issues of risk and the uncertainties of
knowledge explicit, and in the process to remove the legitimacy of specialists in defining, in isolation, the
parameters of the problem and the arguments most relevant to decision-making (Porto 2012). This manifests
as a distrust not of science itself but as a critique to the privileging of expert and technocratic perspectives
over local experience without questioning the objectivity and neutrality of science. This can be summed up
with the intertwined questions of "Whose knowledge?" and "Knowledge for whom?" (Haraway 1988; de
Sousa Santos 2007). In socio-environmental conflicts, no expertise can claim any monopoly on what is true,
as the knowledge on these issues are based on a "plurality of legitimate perspectives" (Funtowicz and Ravetz
1993: 204).
Second, in this battle for scientific legitimacy, EJ activists engage in a range of strategies of
knowledge production or what Casa-Cortes et al. (2008) term "knowledge practices." These include the
collection and analysis of data on local health and the local environment, becoming experts themselves on
relevant subjects to contest scientific knowledge, forming coalitions with scientists and building citizen–
scientist collaborations to advance their claims and seek legitimacy for their views. Conde (2014) used the
term "Activism Mobilizing Science" (AMS) to denote the process whereby activists and scientists co-produce
new and alternative knowledge that gives local organizations visibility and legitimacy, and empowers them
to challenge the manufactured uncertainty produced by the state or companies.
Finally, the practices involved in activist research production, distribution and reception are conducive
to regenerating instances of collective agency, bringing about an innovative sense of political participation
and re-invigorating political imaginaries (Casas-Cortés 2009). Through these processes, impacted
communities transform from "vulnerabilized" to collective subjects (Porto 2012). Campaign work may have
deep-reaching and radically innovative policy implications that can shape and inform academic theory.
Academics also need to recognize their privileged position to expose the processes leading to and
reproducing inequalities. Research activists and activist scholars can straddle the line between the academy
and activism, overcoming this dichotomy (Crampton 2009), while creating emancipatory theory and a new
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Journal of Political Ecology Vol.22, 2015 260
(critical) research praxis. As Sousa Santos (2014) suggests in his work on epistemologies, this kind of
research is not focused on a movement or a specific group of people, but together with them and based on an
"ecology of knowledges" and the "restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternized
knowledges" (Mignolo, 2007:451).
While the need for collaboration is often acknowledged by scholars (Fuller and Kitchin 2004; Hale
2008) and activists (Jakobsen 2012), so far, there has not been a space of interaction that enables
collaborative research on EJ conflicts at a global scale. This is precisely what the research initiative described
in the following section advocated.
The EJOLT project
As mentioned in Section 1, 'Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities, and Trade' (EJOLT) is a
European Commission funded research project, whose aim is bringing science and society together to analyse
and understand socio-environmental conflicts from an environmental justice perspective (Martinez-Alier et
al. 2011). To fulfill this objective, EJOLT based its work on two-way communication between activism and
science in the development and use of concepts which are common in the EJ literature, such as 'Ecological
Debt' and 'Ecologically Unequal Exchange.' Coordinated at ICTA-UAB, the project brought together 23
research and activist organizations from around the world. The project ran from 2011 to 2015. The EJOLT
project has produced many substantial reports and academic articles, documentary films and on-line courses.
One of its main products has been the EJAtlas.
All research activities in the project have been the result of a collaborative and collective effort
between activists/academics and members of Environmental Justice Organizations (EJOs). EJOs are civil
society organizations locally or globally involved in conflicts over the unequal distribution of environmental
entitlements, burdens of pollution, and uneven access to natural resources and environmental services. They
may be registered as formal NGOs, as local committees, or as social movements, advocacy and action
platforms. They focus on the link between the need for environmental security, health, and the defence of
human and community rights. This is a type of environmentalism different from nature or wilderness
conservationism. It comprises the "environmentalism of the poor" (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997),
understood as the defence of the environment to ensure livelihood for those directly impacted by conflicts
over resource extraction and disposal of wastes.
Through the bottom-up methodology of the EJOLT project, there was an attempt to shift the mode of
engagement in research to create a more relational-symmetrical approach to the co-creation of knowledge
production. This exercise is embedded in a previously little-explored interface between ecological economics
and social metabolism, social movement theory and political ecology, as well as critical cartography,
expanded on in the following section. The intersection of these areas of research, through a multi-scale
approach provides the opportunity to contribute and enrich all of these disciplines while extending the theory
of global environmental justice.
A global socio-metabolic perspective
According to many scholars, the main underlying driver of ecological conflicts is the constantly
expanding metabolic profile of the global economy (Martinez-Alier et al. 2010). Despite some differences in
the geographies of extraction and political economic dynamics and actors shifting over time, the search for
new materials and energy sources will continue leading the expansion of extraction frontiers into new
locations, setting the conditions for new socio-environmental conflicts.
The concept of social metabolism (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007) refers to the physical
throughput of the economic system, in terms of the energy and materials associated with economic activities,
either as direct or indirect inputs or wastes. Material flow analysis, along with other methods from ecological
economics and industrial ecology, can elucidate the metabolic patterns driving environmental change and
give further insights into how uneven flows of matter and energy (Fischer-Kowalski 1997) and
transformations in the extraction and provision of natural resources characterize different socio-ecological
transitions (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007) and to novel forms of social contestations. Geographically
uneven and socially unequal metabolic processes in fact are key to understanding environmental inequality,
which in turn reinforces and at the same time reflects overt forms of hierarchy and exploitation.
We hold therefore that combining material and energy flow analysis with a commodity chain
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Journal of Political Ecology Vol.22, 2015 261
perspective from political ecology helps visualize linkages between the use of materials and energy by some
social actors and the environmental impacts experienced by others, often in geographically distant locations.
It also brings further attention to the relations between global economic processes and inter-dependencies
between resource use patterns in some world regions and socio-economic dynamics in the places of
extraction. The concept of "global commodity chains" (LeBillon 2000; Mintz 1985; Raikes et al. 2000) can
help in this; they have been defined as a "series of interlinked exchanges through which a commodity and its
constituents pass from extraction or harvesting through production to end use" (Ribot 1998: 307-308). The
embedded nature of power relations in the chain, who gains and who loses, are key questions of political
ecology in examining commodity chains. The conflicts take place all along the different nodes of commodity
chains, from extraction to final disposal.
One useful approach in understanding commodity chains from the social metabolic perspective is the
theory of ecologically unequal exchange: it posits that developed countries externalize their consumption-
based environmental costs to less-developed countries, which increase environmental degradation within the
latter (Hornborg 1998, 2005). With the use of biophysical indicators the literature demonstrates how wealthy
countries have achieved economic prosperity through the over-utilization of the world's limited pool of
natural resources and waste sinks, and by shifting environmental degradation to the global commons and to
the developing world. As Hornborg (1998) puts it, a structural condition for the functioning of the
metropolitan industrialized areas is to enjoy favourable terms of trade to appropriate materials and energy,
and also land and labour. Peripheral areas have physical trade deficits by volume, meaning exports are larger
than imports, and they suffer disproportionately from negative environmental impacts, without compensation
for local or global externalities. This dislocation between those suffering the harms and those reaping the
benefits of the global political economic system has been termed "environmental load displacement"
(Muradian and Martinez-Alier 2001). Such asymmetries cause many complaints at commodity extraction
frontiers (Moore 2000).
At the same time, the internationalization of production and lengthening of commodity chains
increases the disconnection between producers and consumers and modifies the governance spaces available
for the pursuit of justice (Robbins 2014). A global perspective brings to the fore the larger scale processes of
participation that are made available through new institutional connections and governance spaces in which
different actors stake their claims.
In this regard, we are also concerned with lines of enquiry from social movement theory that seek to
explain why and how social mobilization occurs, how marginalized groups can access alternative sources of
power, mobilize resources and create networks based on shared identities moving towards social
transformation (Della Porta and Ruch 2002; Tarrow 1991; Tilly 1993). Environmental justice movements can
be examined productively at local scales and as they organize into transnational coalitions across space and
places (Keck and Sikkink 1998).
3. The need for global scrutiny of socio-environmental conflicts: The EJAtlas
Struggles over the burdens of pollution and over the appropriation of natural resources and public
space, arise from inequalities of power in the hegemonic organization of industrial social-metabolism, and
imbalances in the terms of decision-making processes and institutional practices (Porto and Pacheco 2009).
Conflicts manifest when the local actors whose fundamental rights are affected, claim redistributions or
recognition, which are often part of, or lead to larger gender, class, caste and ethnic struggles.
Political ecology focuses on research on such socio- environmental conflicts (or equally, ecological
distribution conflicts), which is undertaken at either the case study level or sometimes at the national,
regional or sectoral level (Bebbington et al. 2013; Urkidi 2010; Veuthey and Gerber 2011). While in-depth
case study analysis yields valuable analytical inputs, there is a need to develop innovative tools for analysis
that can transcend individual cases and identify patterns, relationships between cases and actors' perspectives
on how such conflicts are shaped by the larger political economy. Such an effort will help consolidate a more
general theory of extractivism-related conflicts - which is still a work in progress.
The EJAtlas project aims to fill this gap in research and co-sharing of knowledge on EJ struggles. The
'Global Atlas of Environmental Justice: Mapping ecological conflicts and spaces of resistance' is an online
database and interactive map that documents socio-environmental conflicts, defined as mobilizations by local
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Journal of Political Ecology Vol.22, 2015 262
communities against particular economic activities whereby environmental impacts are a key element of their
grievances.
These conflicts usually arise from structural inequalities of income and power. Dimensions of
environmental justice include the distribution of burdens of pollution and access to environmental resources,
the right to participate in decision-making, and the recognition of alternate world-views and understandings
of development. In the act of claiming redistributions, these conflicts are often part of, or lead to larger
gender, class, caste, and ethnic struggles, and help to move the economy into a more sustainable direction.
The EJAtlas provides a tool for knowledge, for activism and advocacy: to help denounce cases of
environmental injustice; to encourage dialogue and the interchange of experiences, ideas, data, and action
strategies; to provide a resource with reports of concrete cases, legal disputes, and other relevant matters; to
sensitize the media, opinion-makers and public opinion; to put pressure on politicians and policy-makers to
implement public policies conducive to EJ; to develop and strengthen strategies of international articulation
on EJ, and to contribute to new processes of knowledge creation within an EJ perspective.
Finally, the database aims to develop a system whereby environmental conflicts can be described,
analyzed, compared and interpreted, where quantitative data from the activity at the source of the discontent
can be gathered and where patterns of mobilization, such as the frequency of participation of indigenous
groups in such conflicts, the rates of success in stopping extractive projects or introducing new regulations
can be discerned and productive lessons can be learned.
While the historical EJ emphasis was on urban exposure to toxics, the EJAtlas gives focus to rural
conflicts in which diminished or denied access to local environmental resources, their degradation and
corporate enclosures dramatically affect local communities and their livelihood security. We hold that EJ for
rural people and their communities has as much to do with whether they are able to exercise rights to own,
access and use the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend, as it does with the quality of the
resources themselves (IUCN 2007). While political ecology had its origins in rural issues, the EJAtlas also
wants to represent brown issue agendas such as access to sanitation and poor waste management.
Further, while most of case studies on environmental conflicts focus on the extraction phase, EJAtlas
also reports conflicts related to rising CO2 emissions (REDD or CDM projects, for example), as well as
conflicts related to special waste disposal such as in ship-breaking yards in India and Bangladesh (Demaria
2010).
The unit of analysis is the project-based campaign or specific place-based struggle, which sometimes
express in influential protest events or in broader campaigns. The observations move from the specific
offending economic activity to the related social struggles that mobilize against the misdistribution of costs
and benefits, or the lack of consultation and representation in decision-making. These contestations are made
visible through legal cases, campaigning, petitions, meetings, demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, threats, civil
disobedience, collective violence, and other forms of action (Tilly 1993).
In sum, the main criteria applied for the identification of conflict cases are the following:
1. Economic activity or legislation that has actual or potential negative environmental and
social outcomes
2. Claims by environmental justice organization(s) that such harm occurred or is likely to
occur as a result of this activity, and mobilization
3. Reporting of that particular conflict in one or more media stories.
The three criteria apply simultaneously to almost all cases collected.4 By 'economic activity' we mean
a local project with resource extraction, waste disposal, or transport infrastructure. But it could be also a new
state-level initiative, for instance a water policy implying a change in water rights.
Due to the extent of the task, the Atlas cannot be exhaustive. It grows together with the advancement
of research and the involvement of more collaborators, activists, and activist scholars. The EJAtlas can be
seen as one more initiative using geo-spatial information and new spatial media to advance, legitimate, and
4 Given that cases often involve impacts on minority and maligned groups, in some instances the cases will not be
covered in mainstream or national media sources but rather in local municipal media or in minority language articles or
websites.
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secure political claims (Elwood and Leszcynski 2012), including also some well known maps made by
EJOLT partners such as FIOCRUZ in Brazil (Porto, Pacheco and Leroy 2013) and OCMAL in Latin
America. Elwood (2010: 352) refers to this as "knowledge politics": the ways in which individuals and
institutions leverage digital spatial data and spatial technologies in negotiating social, political, and economic
processes. "New spatial media, critical cartography, participatory research, and activist-based knowledge
represent new opportunities for activist, civic, grassroots, Indigenous groups and scholars to leverage web-
based geographic information technologies in their research and in their efforts to effect social change."
(Elwood and Leszcynski 2012).
One recent example similar to EJAtlas although at smaller scale, is WellWatch, a USA webtool
designed to create a collaborative space for communities and academics to monitor, study, and respond
effectively to the emerging shale gas industry (Wylie and Albright 2014). Following Crampton's suggestion
(2009), these tools can help transcend the expert/amateur or expert/grassroots activist dichotomy, while
creating a new spatial knowledge politics. These new politics aim to establish recognition and authority
through witnessing, peer validation and transparency of data sources rather than through academic peer-
review.
Process and aim
We briefly touched upon the methodology for the data gathering in the Introduction, and this is
represented in Figure 2. As Environmental Justice was from the start a community-led science, the harvesting
of data in the mapping process was carried out by the communities themselves, as a form of citizen science,
drawing on the concept of activist knowledge which is at the core of the whole EJOLT project. Many
researchers in EJ studies engage with communities through processes of Participatory Action and
Collaborative Research (Bacon et al. 2013), and such forms of engagement attempt to include communities
in the process of knowledge production more actively, and to recognize them as producers of knowledge in
their own right.
Through the bottom-up methodology of the EJOLT project, there is therefore an attempt to shift the
mode of engagement in research to create a more relational-symmetrical approach to the co-creation of
knowledge production. In the initial phase, contributors (partners of the EJOLT project and later also outside
collaborators) were invited by the authors, as editors of the EJAtlas, to take part in the mapping. The
contributors (both activists and academics) had engaged in activism or in documenting activism around
particular struggles. Cases were often jointly co-produced; academics draft versions which are then sent to
local groups for review and elaboration, or vice-versa. Their data sources include field trips and first-hand
experience, official reports, EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessments), interviews with stakeholders, court
decisions, online research, academic papers, as well as 'grey literature', all of which are then referenced in the
corresponding box (Table 1). Entries are geo-located on a world map (Figure 3), based on the data provided.
Once data is entered, it goes through a moderation process at the ICTA - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona,
where the editors coordinate the work, fact-check and follow up on feedback and comments to ensure quality
control for clarity, completeness and reliability of sources. Finally the case is published online.
While the EJAtlas aims to portray important and emblematic conflicts by geographical zone and
thematic area, due to the bottom-up methodology and the variable quality of information available, the
methodology for representation differs somewhat across regions, sometimes based on existing networks or on
informal canvassing of relevant environmental organizations/activists within the country, or perhaps on
tracking particularly vital public policies and investment trends if the case is time-sensitive.5 Some of the
challenges are linked to lack of reporting, or reporting in national languages. The aim is to present the most
representative and significant environmental conflicts, as chosen by the activist experts, scholars and on-the-
ground journalists.
5 In some countries a participatory process was undertaken amongst a large EJ community to choose the most relevant
and emblematic cases. For example, in the US a survey was administered to the over 200 EJ leaders, activist groups and
scholars by collaborators at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment. They identified
influential cases in recent American history. Most cases in the EJAtlas from the US come from this University of
Michigan group (with Prof. Paul Mohai).
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Figure 2: The process of data collection (source: authors)
The EJAtlas mapping process draws on previous work from activists and scholars collecting
information about environmental conflicts. These initiatives include that of EJOLT project partners Fundacao
Oswaldo Cruz (FIOCRUZ), who along with the Brazilian network of Environmental Justice built a map of
around 600 cases in Brazil. The Centro di Documentazione sui Conflitti Ambientali (CDCA) in Rome has
documented emblematic ecological conflicts since 2007. Partners including the Latin American Observatory
of Mining Conflicts (OCMAL), GRAIN, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM), and Oilwatch continue to
support and document community struggles against mining, for food sovereignty and against land grabbing,
against deforestation and tree plantations, and against fossil fuel extraction, respectively. Kousis et al.'s study
of environmental protest-case studies in Southern Europe (1998) and work done by Gerber (2011) and WRM
(2003), on conflicts on tree plantations, also provided methodological insights about data collection on
environmental conflicts.
While providing extraordinarily valuable lessons, the examples mentioned above are limited by
geographic or thematic boundaries. Only in some cases were the databases referenced actually open for
interactive public participation. The EJAtlas aims to fill this gap and to provide a tool for activism and
advocacy:
• to help denounce cases of environmental injustice;
• to encourage dialogue and interchange of experiences, ideas, data, and strategies of actions;
• to provide a resource with reports of concrete cases, legal disputes, and other relevant
matters;
• to sensitize the media, opinion-makers and public opinion;
• to put pressure on politicians and policy-makers to implement public policies conducive to
EJ;
• to develop and strengthen strategies of international articulation on EJ,
• …and to contribute to new processes of knowledge creation with an EJ perspective.
As the project and collaborators expand to achieve more even coverage, the emphasis on certain geographical
regions should hopefully be reduced.
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In addition to advice received from the official partners of EJOLT, the design of data collection and
some improvements in database management occurred through collaboration with some of the transnational
advocacy networks that act as nodes for mobilization and research, both around thematic issues, such as
International Rivers, La Via Campesina, Oilwatch, 350.org, Climate Justice Action, Friends of the Earth
International, and Global Alliance Against Incineration (GAIA). There were also the campaigns against
corporate entities or specific projects, including those of Monsanto, Rio Tinto, Vale, and Vedanta; as well as
a wide range of activist-academic researchers working in different countries and at the regional level. Web
and programming experts built the database platform online and improved it to make it more attractive and
user-friendly according to needs and suggestions gathered from a wide audience and pool of experts and
activists on the ground.
Figure 3: Examples of two geo-located cases in the EJatlas. Source: ejatlas.org
All contents of the form (Table 1) were jointly debated during the first year of the EJOLT project,
drawing from the structure of the previous databases mentioned and modified to meet partner concerns.
Following a trial period of data entry, the form was further modified and made more exhaustive. The form
departs from a source of ecological intervention, a disruption activity, or a government policy.
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Table 1: The EJAtlas database form.
The case is classified according to ten primary types (listed in Figure 4 on the horizontal axis, e.g. Biomass
and Land Conflicts, Waste Management) as well as a secondary conflict type specifying the disruptive
activity (e.g. deforestation, incinerators, see Table 2). This activity in turn creates or threatens various
combinations of ecosystem offences, which lead to environmental, societal and health impacts. Social
struggles follow against the inequitable distribution of costs and benefits, or lack of consultation or
representation in decision-making and a lack of recognition of alternative territorial and social visions. This is
schematized through sections of the site analyzing sources of environmental disturbance, impacts, responses
from the claimants and any outcomes.
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Land acquisition conflicts 371
Mineral ore exploration 273
Water access rights and entitlements 243
Dams and water distribution
conflicts 201
Deforestation 177
Tailings from mines 151
Oil and gas exploration and
extraction 145
Landfills, toxic waste treatment,
uncontrolled dump sites 130
Plantation conflicts (incl. Pulp) 127
Mineral processing 107
Transport infrastructure networks (roads,
railways, hydroways, canals and
pipelines) 105
Pollution related to transport (spills,
dust, emissions) 94
Intensive food production
(monoculture and livestock) 88
Establishment of reserves/national
parks 72
Urban development conflicts 71
Thermal power plants 67
Chemical industries 54
Coal extraction and processing 53
Tourism facilities (ski resorts,
hotels, marinas) 47
Wetlands and coastal zone
management 46
Agro-fuels and biomass energy
plants 46
REDD/CDM 44
Other industries 41
Agro-toxics 40
Oil and gas refining 39
Aquaculture and fisheries 37
Incinerators 35
Water treatment and access to
sanitation (access to sewage) 35
Manufacturing activities 34
Building materials extraction
(quarries, sand, gravel) 34
Interbasin water transfers/
transboundary water conflicts 31
Ports and airport projects 31
Table 2: Distribution of cases by 2nd level category as of May 2015.
Sub-platforms and featured maps
While recognizing the need for a global perspective, the EJAtlas is most effective when accessible in local
languages and at local or national scales. Several country sub-maps have been created, key examples being
Colombia, Turkey and Italy. The map of environmental resistance in Turkey was exhibited on a tree during
the Gezi Park demonstrations in Istanbul in June 2013 (followed by an online map in Turkish 6). It
contributed to a critical discussion in Turkish media and across civil society about contested large
infrastructure projects in the country (Ozkaynak et al. 2013). The Italian sub-platform7 of the EJAtlas was
launched in March 2015 and awakened significant debate in Italy. A participative process for the selection of
cases and preparation of database forms has been made for the Italian sub-platform, where a group of
researchers from the EJOLT partner CDCA conducted an extensive survey across Italy with NGOs,
committees, scholars, environmentalists, and journalists, etc. They identified the top 24 cases of conflict in
the country to be included in the global map, and later expanded the coverage to 80 cases which were
presented in the national platform.
Featured Maps, developed in the last phase of the project, integrate geospatial indicators and aim to be
visual tools for telling stories and explaining interconnections across space and time (Figure 4). They
illustrate socioeconomic indicators as intensity/choropleth maps (i.e. GDP, poverty or material extraction)
representing different types of land uses and biophysical parameters (i.e. pasture lands, forests, location of
mines, protected areas or water scarce areas). For example the Fracking Frenzy featured map (Figure 3),
created in collaboration with Friends of the Earth Europe, combines conflict information with geodata such
as shale basins and plays, information on companies and reserves, and baseline water and groundwater stress.
Country maps track the history of environmental concern and mobilization, awareness raising and legal
actions taken at national level across several years or decades. Other thematic maps, like the Climate Debt
map (4igure 4) illustrates cartographically the extent and relevance of one of the most urgent concepts born
out of ecological economics and social metabolism studies.
6 Available at http://www.direncevre.org/.
More information at http://www.ejolt.org/2013/12/turkeys-map-of-environmental-injustices-is-now-online
7 The Atlante Italiano dei Conflitti Ambientali is available at http://ejolt.cdca.it/
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Figure 4: Examples of 'Featured Maps': Fracking Frenzy (in collaboration with Friends of the
Earth showing the Shale Basins and Plays and Baseline Water Stress layers), Mining Conflicts
in Latin America (showing mining conflicts, activists killed and mining facilities) and Climate
Debt (with Rikard Warlenius). Source: www.ejatlas.org
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4. The Atlas in practice
Public reception and press
The EJAtlas was first launched on 19th March 2014 at the United Nations Environmental office in
Brussels, with about 920 conflict cases. As of late August 2015 the EJAtlas contains over 1,560 cases (and
growing, as research proceeds and new collaborations are established). Among the most represented types of
conflicts in the EJAtlas are those about the industrial extraction of natural resources (oil and gas extraction,
mining, deforestation, etc.), land acquisition, water management and also conflicts over waste disposal
(incinerators and landfills). See Table 2.
The platform allows users to browse conflicts by conflict type, country, company, and commodity as
well as to filter across all relevant fields in the database. The public can access the data and also leave a
comment, adding pictures, videos and .pdf documents on the case. The opportunity for interaction among
EJAtlas members, collaborators and the general public aims at strengthening and widening contacts and
exchanges, as well as improving the quality and exhaustiveness of the reporting.
To assess patterns of public use in early 2015 we distributed an online survey which was completed
by nearly 80 users, belonging to academic institutions, NGOs, and international institutions such as the Inter-
American Development Bank, the UNEP and UNESCO. By May 2015, almost 400,000 separate users had
visited the webpage, opening almost 1 million pages. Since the launch the EJAtlas has been mentioned in the
press over 150 times in 21 countries including Science Magazine, Le Monde, the BBC, The Guardian and
including coverage from many countries including Uruguay, Panama, Argentina, Madagascar, Belgium,
Bulgaria, Italy, and many others. From India, the country with most cases in the EJAtlas, the Live Mint of the
Wall Street Journal noted in 2014 that:
The Indian and global lists are far from comprehensive, but the information is scalable and can
quickly incorporate data and critical perspectives. It's a list that cannot be wished away by the
government's blocking of such websites, or accusations that it's a conspiracy of Maoist rebels,
of "pseudo-intellectuals" or "pseudo-secularists"…. Unless India adopts the don't-give-a-damn
approach of China, in the game of public relations truth-or-dare there is nowhere for India to
cut and run. The increasing globalization of social networking, activism and accountability
makes it so…... Human rights scrutiny of business is increasing. Deal with it.
One year later, in March 2015, Live Mint described again and analyzed the growing EJAtlas from an
Indian point of view.8
On 15th August 2015, journalist John Vidal published a full page in The Guardian acknowledging
EJOLT's work and commenting at length on some of the mining conflicts so far uploaded to the EJAtlas. In
Figure 4 we show a small selection of press reports. In Colombia, top newspapers carried full-page spreads
on several conflicts included. The launch coincided with a drought in the eastern part of the country that
brought to the fore problems of oil extraction, featured on the cover of La Semana with the title
"Environmental Nightmare." Using data from the EJAtlas, an article in El Espectador by Carlos Andrés
Baquero showed the incidence of environmental conflicts in areas inhabited by Indigenous or Afro-
Colombian minorities. He showed that of the 72 cases already uploaded, they were involved in 42 of them, a
proportion much higher than in the population as a whole. Indigenous people are affected twice as much as
Afro-Colombians.
Use by activists
The tool is used by affected communities and other web users for connecting with other communities,
for campaigning and advocacy, for publicising environmental conflicts and for doing other political work
with the data. More cases are emerging directly from activists working with local communities as the EJAtlas
gains wider recognition; one under-reported case, for example, was brought to the attention of the Aarhus
Convention9 (the Ile-Alatau State National nature park case in Kazakhstan10) after inclusion in the EJAtlas
8 http://tinyurl.com/p7wunvt and http://tinyurl.com/oe69vr2
9 http://aarhusclearinghouse.unece.org/news/1000793
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and from related media coverage. Another case was brought to public attention by a project partner after an
activist, Naim Prelvujak, was arrested on 18th August 2014 resisting a landfill in Montenegro located in a
historical site for the cultural heritage of minority Albanian Christians, the very spot where the resistance
against the Ottoman Empire in defense of Albanian Christianity started in 1710. While this conflict had been
reported only in the local press, being included in the EJAtlas was important for the community to feel their
voice was being heard more widely, particularly in view of Montenegro's aspirations to join the EU.
Figure 5: The EJAtlas in the press – some international and local echoes. Source: authors'
collage based on Google.
Pedagogy and analysis
Pedagogical uses have included initiatives for inclusion in high school curricula and in higher
education. Further, the EJAltas is being used extensively in online courses on resource politics and
environmental justice, and has become an important tool for case study selection for researchers and
journalists. Moreover, efforts are now being put in place to insert the EJAtlas in a teaching kit to introduce
Environmental Justice to school students in the frame of an external collaboration with a consortium of
NGOs.11
10 http://EJAtlas.org/conflict/protect-kok-zhailau-ile-alatau-state-national-nature-park-kazakhstan
11 The teaching kit is a forthcoming product of the SAME World project, more info here: http://tinyurl.com/qc5s8zg
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Beyond the pedagogical, public awareness values and policy attention on EJ, the EJAtlas, through the
collection of a large dataset of geo-located case studies provides a tool for what we term 'comparative
political ecology' or in some cases 'statistical political ecology' — comparative analysis of many emblematic
and historical cases across thematic issues and across spatial and temporal scales. Few efforts have been
made so far in this direction, but we believe such approach has a strong potential in explaining why particular
environmental and social outcomes are to be found in one place rather than in another, or why specific social
groups react with similar means or using similar counter-arguments. It provides a means to understand
commonalities, to get a glimpse of the great variety of roles that EJOs play in environmental conflicts, and
constitutes a solid basis for case study selection or comparisons, queries, and country and thematic based
analyses.
Such analyses, combining qualitative and quantitative methods and co-produced with activists, can be
seen as a source of engaged knowledge creation, which is increasingly being recognised as a pertinent
method to inform scientific debate with policy implications. Historical and political analysis at the nation-
state level based on the database has been undertaken by Perez-Rincon (2014), who for example, gives a
broad overview on socio-environmental conflicts in Colombia, due to the increasing "reprimarization" of its
economy with the mining sector leading the trend and specialization of new export products such as coal and
palm oil. He has also correlated conflicts in Colombia with a spatial analysis of variables such as the
presence of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations and biodiversity hot-spots, establishing that these
groups are the most affected by EJ conflicts. Further work is being done on conflicts related to changes in the
social metabolism in Turkey (Özkaynak 2015), Madagascar (Douguet 2015) and Ecuador (Latorre et al.
2015).
An EJOLT report analyzing 364 mining conflicts from the EJAtlas (Özkaynak et al. 2015) firstly
applied social network analysis to study the nature of the relationships both among corporations involved in
the mining activity, and EJOs resisting mining projects. Such a network analysis can demonstrate how
assemblages of activists converge and coordinate against corporate entities across disparate locations as well
as indicating the density of connections between activist, corporate, financial and state actors (Kumar 2014).
The same report (Özkaynak et al. 2015) also employed qualitative analysis, based on descriptive
statistics from the Atlas to investigate factors that configure the perception of success for EJ based on the
answers given to questions on the database form. Responses to "Do you consider this an environmental
justice success? Was environmental justice served?" and the justifications given helped understand why the
resistance movements consider a particular result as an EJ success or failure in the context of a mining
conflict. The Atlas demonstrates how social movements of resistance are able sometimes to stop, or at least
delay, the expansion of the extraction frontier, and to redraw its limits. As of May 2015, 18% of cases
documented had been qualified as successes in EJ by the respective contributor.
Özkaynak et al. (2015) also applied multivariate analysis methods to examine the defining factors in
achieving EJ success and to answer the following research questions: In which cases are mobilizations most
intense and under what circumstances can projects be stopped? Such analyses in statistical political ecology
deepen understanding of how activists perceive environmental justice achievements and can contribute to
deepening EJ theory.
This represents a small selection of the types of analyses being drawn from the Atlas within a
comparative political ecology framework. Further research will examine the effectiveness of disruptive or
direct action tactics, versus institutional forms of contention. Also how the involvement of different actors,
e.g. indigenous groups, relates to different conflict outcomes and how mobilizations and outcomes vary
across sectors, such as mining, hydroelectric dams or agro-industries given that such projects differ not only
in terms of their economic and political context, but also regarding their biophysical dimensions. For
example we aim to interrogate potential differences in conflicts related to point resources, such as mining
cases, as opposed to abundant resources, such as agricultural and land-grabs. For example Figure 6 shows the
varying intensity across conflict types, with water management and mining conflicts exhibiting the highest
intensity, down to tourism and recreation conflicts, which exhibit lower levels of conflict. The source is the
EJAtlas (with 1,354 cases in April 2015), filtered by type of conflict (10 mutually exclusive categories) and
again filtered by the intensity of the conflict according to the categories in the database forms. The statistical
significance of such differences and their social meaning, remains to be determined.
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Figure 6. Intensity of conflicts per different types. Source: authors.
Further research will examine how networked resistance and tactics differ when contesting the
activities of companies and financial institutions from the developed economies, as opposed to the
increasingly relevant role of those from the emerging economies, and examining how this shapes repertoires
of contention, alliance-building, and outcomes.
Such mapping of socio-ecological relations, institutional arrangements and environmental change at
multiple scales offers the potential for analysis that pays attention simultaneously to the workings of capital,
the makings of meaning, and ecological flows of materials and energy. At the same time, such analytical
exercises, co-produced with activists, can be seen as a source of engaged knowledge creation, which is
increasingly being recognised as a pertinent method to inform scientific debate with policy implications.
5. Conclusions
The EJAtlas provides empirical material for a research agenda that contributes to understanding how
inequalities are shaped through socio-metabolic transformations in the economy, and how they are contested
and to what outcomes. This article has introduced the theoretical framework of the EJAtlas mapping project
on ecological distribution conflicts, and the methodology behind the collective data gathering process. We
argue that this exploratory exercise holds significant promise for extending the praxis and the theory of
environmental justice and geographical scholarship:
1. By integrating further activist knowledge into analysis to contribute to the theoretical
development of EJ and through new forms of knowledge co-production;
2. Through a multi-scale framework that allows a wider geographical analysis of relationships
and interconnections between actors, struggles, and financial and metabolic flows. Such a
framework can help discern the coalitions of power that produce and benefit from
prevailing patterns of production and consumption, and the groups that suffer the most and
provide a useful point of departure for constructing coalitions or policy-based interventions
to protect the rights of vulnerable groups;
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3. And also, a geographical perspective that through geo-location and cartographic data allows
an interface between the natural and social sciences, revealing features of the territory and
social, institutional and cultural processes.
Further specific questions will surely emerge in a process of co-design with partners and other
stakeholders, building on the need to understand environmental changes as social processes embedded in
specific social and ecological systems (Mauser et al. 2013). This form of co-production of knowledge does
not come without its tensions and risks. The blurring of the boundaries between academia and the world
beyond can sometimes lead to undermining the system which maintains academic power, as it can be seen to
compromise the pedagogical authority of education (Fuller and Kitchin 2004). This has been an important
question within the process of co-production of knowledge in the EJAtlas. A key challenge has been to
combine activist knowledge with scientific rigour and peer-review processes. This invariably leads to
tensions and "colliding epistemologies which can be immensely productive in themselves" (Brown and
Knopp 2008). A deeper future enquiry and a critical reflection into the epistemology of the EJAtlas should
examine the politics and strategies of representation and question voices and authorship, however this is a
task that must be reserved for its own article as we do not have space to engage fully with the range of issues
that have presented themselves here. This could provide a deeper assessment of whether the EJAtlas is a
repository of stories and struggles that is accessible to people with a sociopolitical agenda that could
transform "power hierarchies embedded in research" (Nagar and Ali 2003).
The process of the design and creation of the EJAtlas is a collaborative, iterative process in
participatory GIS that is still unfolding (Kitchin et al., 2013). The online EJAtlas is a living document, and its
contents, form and layers of information are constantly being expanded, co-created with its users through a
process of continual co-design. Through this "performative epistemology of research" the project endeavors
to bring to the forefront hidden and alternative understandings of the world, and while doing so, making them
"potential objects of policy and politics" (Gibson-Graham 2008:620).
Through cooperation with EJOs and their networks in a 'hybrid research collective' we hope to further
develop and contribute to the concept of a global EJ movement that is already growing, and that will continue
to cohere globally, to formulate more strategic positions and be more inclusive, at the same time as it takes
on local difference. We hope to be able to describe these processes and to analyze new concepts coming from
grassroots movements, and to map roughly the patterns in the participation of women leaders, of Indigenous
Peoples, of local and international EJOs, of labour unions and religious groups, of helpful scientists, of
judicial instances, and their different ways of intervening in conflicts for environmental injustice. As conflicts
intensify, especially along the commodity extraction frontiers and through the creation of new commodities,
we aim to research, exchange and disseminate information. Beyond academic research in political ecology,
the EJAtlas aims to be socially and politically relevant by 'naming and shaming' the actors behind injustices.
It can also serve as a tool for activists by illustrating critical environmental issues and informing public
debate over the distribution of risks, burdens and benefits, and the claims of local communities.
Our hope is that EJAtlas can serve as a tool that can benefit from case studies but also go beyond
them, for fruitful comparisons across time and space in a comparative political ecology supported and
informed by new statistical insights. We hope it supports the voices from EJ movements that argue that
ecological modernization and the 'greening of the economy' will not address social and environmental
injustices, and that only a radical reduction and restructuring of global social metabolism, and eradication of
impunity, combined with a community-based definition of needs and priorities can begin to address the joint
challenges of environmental and social crises.
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