ABSTRACT

Environmental justice activism and scholarship in South and Southeast Asia has focused on a wide range of rural and urban issues, including struggles for access to and control of land, water, and forests by Indigenous and peasant communities, and class-based inequities in access to environmental goods and exposure to environmental harms in urban metropolises. This chapter considers some prominent struggles against environmental injustices in rural and urban South and Southeast Asia. The struggles discussed do not always explicitly identify environmental justice as their goal, but can be viewed as making claims similar to those of environmental justice movements, since they draw attention to marginalized social groups which suffer the burdens of environmental pollution and dispossession, and challenge the lack of public participation in environmental decision-making. The chapter also considers how environmental justice is becoming part of national environmental policy objectives in the region, though whether this will ultimately contribute to preventing and penalizing environmental injustices remains to be seen.