Environmental justice: a year of moving from concept to action

What criteria should we use to decide whether a transition policy is fair? How can we identify vulnerabilities without pigeonholing people into categories? How can we ensure that environmental justice is more than just a principle tacked onto the preamble of a climate plan? These are just some of the questions that have been occupying us for almost a year now, alongside the three local authorities involved in the Environmental Justice programme! After several months of research, reading, workshops, discussions with researchers and trips around Europe, it is time to take stock of the programme’s progress so far.

As the summer draws to a close, our questions take on a particularly stark relevance: 53 days of a heatwave, with temperatures exceeding 40 °C in parts of the country. Depending on whether you live in an attic or in a well-insulated home, whether you work outdoors or in an air-conditioned office, whether you can leave the city or not... It is now well documented just how vastly different people's ability to protect themselves is, whether in the face of climate change, pollution or the deterioration of our living conditions. Those with fewer resources to cope are often the very people who contribute least to the problem, and the policies intended to manage the transition can themselves create new inequalities when they fail to take account of people's living conditions, their capacity to act or their actual lifestyles.

A policy that is good for the climate is not automatically a fair policy: pricing measures may encourage moderation whilst placing a greater burden on certain households; the phasing out of a service may be environmentally sound but socially challenging; a 'cooling island' is only truly useful if those who need it can actually access it. These blind spots also contribute to fuelling the conflict between 'the end of the world' and 'making ends meet'. It is precisely this observation that prompted the launch of the programme.

It is therefore not enough simply to produce a new definition of environmental justice, or to enshrine it as a lofty principle in strategic documents; we must also examine the necessary paradigm shifts in the way public policy is formulated and the mechanisms that embody it; in the ways we investigate and measure, work across social and environmental policy areas, involve those affected, select the beneficiaries of a scheme, mediate, or even narrate the transition. This is what our programme focuses on. To put this into practice, we rely on a simple analytical framework: who is affected, who can take action, who benefits, who decides, and what are the unintended consequences. It is this framework that we have sought to refine throughout this first year.

We have chosen to start with the situation on the ground and the challenges faced in this regard by the three local authorities involved in the programme: the Department of Haute-Garonne, the Basque Country Urban Community, and the European Metropolis of Lille.

In Haute-Garonne, the Department already has an 'Ecological Bifurcation' roadmap that addresses both social and environmental issues. The issue, therefore, is less about convincing people and more about taking a further step: how can we make environmental justice a framework shared by all staff, given that social workers and those working in the transition sector have different professional reference points? How can we move from a mindset of 'rolling out' a roadmap to paying closer attention to working methods and local realities?

In the Basque Country, the starting point is the review of the Climate Plan: how can we move away from a highly technical approach to put 'people' back at the centre? How can we make progress on the challenges of prioritising water use, against a backdrop of water scarcity and land shortages, whilst facing coastal erosion? At the same time, the Department for Public Services and Language Policy has begun investigating perceptions of the transition: street interviews, questionnaires, interviews... An initial observation quickly emerges: the very term 'environmental justice' does not immediately resonate with everyone. 'Nothing', 'I don't know', but also 'ecology', 'equality', 'penalty' or 'politics' were among the first associations recorded. This suggests we should focus less on the institution's terminology and more on how residents experience and perceive the changes taking place.

In the Metropole of Lille, the project also began with preparations for the future Climate Plan, focusing on a very practical area: waste management policy. Behind what appears to be a technical issue - pricing, prevention, green waste collection - questions of justice quickly emerge. Who actually benefits from a service? Who bears the cost? How can we engage elected representatives on this issue in a region with such diverse social and economic profiles? The Metropolis is also running other projects on shelters and access to healthy food as part of its Action Plan for the Environment (PAT).

At the start of the programme, we identified several angles and areas of focus to more effectively embed the objective of a just transition into public policy: better understanding vulnerabilities; bridging the gaps between the professional worlds of social services and environmentalism; better targeting and redistribution; developing more inspiring governance models and narratives; and renewing our methods to better address the challenges raised by environmental justice. The first phase of the programme was devoted to exploring some of these themes; we also helped the three local authorities to conduct investigations within their own administrations and across their territories to better identify their specific issues: what issues does environmental justice raise in your area? Who might have something interesting to tell us? Which public policies or schemes would offer a good starting point for taking this work further?

How can we ask staff to change their working practices without understanding what matters most to them in their jobs? Alongside the survey conducted in each region, an initial group session enabled us to explore the concept and challenges of professional cultures, first by examining with Marine Parent-Oyena the concepts of 'real work', professional identity and attachment, and then with Xavier Perrin the research carried out in Grenoble on the ecological shift in local authority roles. This research highlights the unequal exposure of different occupations to the consequences of climate change (outdoor jobs, care work, maintenance, roadworks, park and garden maintenance, or roles involving direct contact with the public are more exposed to heat), the tension between the ecological transition and working conditions (organisations cannot be transformed without considering real work, attachments and working conditions), the challenge of distributing the burden of transformation within the administration, recognising 'invisible' jobs and the expertise they entail, and ensuring staff participation in decisions regarding what to abandon, transform, and so on.

As for the insights gleaned from our study trips across Europe, we can draw a parallel with the City of Vienna's practical guide *Gender Mainstreaming Made Easy*. This guide embodies the importance not only of raising staff awareness, but also of transforming administrative practices by identifying the levers needed to move from a subject perceived as specialised (gender equality) to an issue that is systematically addressed from the design through to the implementation and evaluation of public policies. Differentiating data, examining the actual capacity to use a service, analysing the distributional effects of public spending, and reviewing decision-making processes... These are all administrative starting points that can be applied to the issue of environmental justice, transforming a general principle into very concrete questions.

Discussing environmental justice inevitably leads us to ask: who are the vulnerable groups (households in precarious circumstances? The elderly? Workers exposed to heat? People living far from transport links?... ) And, above all, who defines them as such? To this end, we have sought to refine our analytical tools, starting by examining the insights offered by Manon Loisel and Nicolas Rio to candidates in the recent local elections, and their call to consider who gains and who loses out under a given policy: who currently benefits from a particular piece of infrastructure, a pricing scheme, a subsidy or a service? Who has the necessary resources to benefit from a transition policy? This question avoids reducing environmental justice to a compensatory policy aimed at the poorest once decisions have been taken, but instead invites us to question the very conception of public policy.

To take this further, we also looked at the systemic approach, and how it encourages us to examine the unintended consequences of a policy, for example by starting with what it produces even though this was not its initial objective. Finally, we also looked at the 'controversy mapping' approach, an analytical method that involves mapping out the actors, their arguments, their relationships and the issues at stake in a controversy, in order to make a complex and contentious debate more comprehensible. To help readers engage with each of these approaches, we have outlined some very practical first steps, which can be found here.

This first year has, first and foremost, produced a body of material: resources drawn from research, European initiatives, and so on. It has also gradually fostered a community of inquiry amongst local authorities, where questions are beginning to circulate from one region to another. Finally, it has enabled us to identify a series of administrative issues on which we would like to focus our investigation more closely in order to better define the problems before devising tools and approaches to address them:

Territorial climate, air and energy plans: what would a PCAET look like if it incorporated environmental justice not merely as an additional social component, but also as a cross-cutting framework for analysing transition and adaptation choices? How can we move from a PCAET centred on the effectiveness of environmental measures to one that systematically asks: ‘For whom? At what cost? With what benefits? What risks? And what is the actual capacity to act?’

Waste management policy: what levers are available to ensure that, beyond the overall objective of reducing tonnage, responsibilities, efforts, nuisances and benefits are distributed more fairly? Who is actually able to reduce or sort their waste? Is incentive-based pricing always fair? How should costs – and also the negative impacts – be distributed? How can we overcome biases and preconceptions in the design and implementation of these policies?

Climate shelters: how can we move beyond an infrastructure-centred response to also question the reality and intensity of usage, or indeed who decides what constitutes a good climate shelter? How can we move from a map of cool places to a territorial guarantee of access to cool spaces, prioritising those with the fewest resources to protect themselves?

Targeting vulnerable people in public policies: how can we move beyond the abstract notion of the ‘vulnerable public’ (by focusing, for example, on the situations that create vulnerability)? How can we prevent targeting from leading to stigmatisation or non-take-up? What does it mean, for a public scheme, to adapt to vulnerabilities (rather than the other way round)?

Developing expertise on environmental justice issues: what does it mean to build competence in the field of environmental justice? How can we move from a willingness to seek solutions to the ability to analyse dilemmas? How can we harness the experiential knowledge of different departments and make environmental justice a catalyst for breaking down silos?

Above all, this first year has enabled us to formulate our questions more precisely, to identify a number of gaps and concrete ‘entry points’ for integrating environmental justice into the fabric of public policy-making. The next step will be to continue our analysis by exploring each of the administrative areas identified, in order to pinpoint the paradigm shifts implied by an approach based on environmental justice. This analysis, carried out by our team, will also enable us, in France and/or at European level, to identify concrete cases to understand how these changes are being implemented in policies, organisational structures and administrative practices. Finally, in collaboration with our partner local authorities, we will develop experimental scenarios for some of the identified areas, for example: testing different evaluation criteria for a PCAET, a questionnaire framework for waste policy, new methods for identifying vulnerabilities, as well as protocols for cooperation between social and environmental services, etc.