ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interaction between solidarity, territorial cohesion and environmental justice within the European Union (EU). It considers how the spatial focus at the heart of territorial cohesion, and the funding streams attached, provide a novel and significant way to address environmental inequality. Solidarity can exist not only between Member States and people but also, and significantly in light of the objective to achieve territorial cohesion, between places. The pursuit of environmental justice through the concept of territorial cohesion accepts the central tension at the heart of cohesion policy that the disparity cohesion aims to redress is itself an inevitable consequence of enhanced competition which its programmes aim to promote. The call for environmental justice began in the 1970s in the United States when community activists highlighted environmental degradation in their neighbourhoods resulting from ‘locally undesirable land uses’. The evaluation of cohesion policy suggests that there are real substantive advances in the transposition and implementation of EU environmental law.
