Introduction

Discussing environmental justice in any societal context, including multinational contexts relevant to globalization debates, requires an examination of fundamental principles and the disentanglement of the concept from the particular legal background. While open for slightly different understandings, a narrow, traditional notion of environmental justice would be based on the concept's obvious roots in American theory related to social or distributive justice, where the disadvantaged – in particular minorities, indigenous peoples and certain socioeconomic groups – were the beneficiaries. In this form it has even been addressed by a Presidential order. But, like the term ‘sustainable development’, environmental justice has received currency or been invoked to reinvigorate long-standing debates. Thus, a concept originally focused on landfills and industrial sites has played a prominent role in critiques of globalization through its application to issues such as climate change and its intergenerational attributes. In sociological or environmental studies literature, ‘environment-related justice’ has been invoked in terms of intra-generational distributive justice, intergenerational justice, and ecological justice (just treatment of non-human entities in nature).

Certain limitations are apparent in order to ascertain a functional concept of environmental justice in the field of comparative law. As ecological justice – that is, a notion of justice that extends beyond human interaction to nature itself – is hardly recognized in law, a functional concept of environmental justice must rely on intra-generational distributive justice and the less-developed field of intergenerational justice.