ABSTRACT
Environmental justice is emerging as a critical concept for environmental governance, policies, and law in counterpoint to the current sustainable development paradigm, which is attached to hegemonic discourses, practices, and institutions. Environmental justice – a concept developed by social movements, first in the United States and then in the Global South – has been put forward as a critical matrix of structural inequalities in the global social metabolism. In the domain of law, environmental justice is the core concept of a critical approach to current legal solutions, which mostly respond to the global environmental crisis by endorsing a managerial approach that is blind to injustices embedded in the hegemonic processes of social reproduction. In particular, sustainable development, as it has been engrained in the core of European Union (EU) law, defines the foundations of EU environmental policies and law. This chapter provides a critical appraisal of EU fundamental law, exploring the extent to which environmental justice approaches can be developed from the current framework, which focuses on sustainable development. Accordingly, it identifies weaknesses in EU law on environmental justice and explores alternative readings of EU law for use in environmental conflicts to protect the most vulnerable in a context of global ecological crisis.
