Environmental justice and low carbon transitions
Cutting across all the centre’s themes, a research cluster on Environmental Justice and Low Carbon Transitions was established in 2024 with funding for four PhD projects by the Institute for Advanced Studies. This cluster addresses the triple environmental crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, but also the socio-ecological contradictions in their political responses, especially decarbonization policies.
Through our four interdisciplinary PhD research projects and their respective supervisory teams, but also a wider community of scholars from across the Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences, the cluster develops novel analyses and policies that are informed by our cutting-edge research findings.
The overall objectives of this cluster are to:
- analyse situations of environmental injustice and understand the underlying power relations and dynamics, especially those caused by low carbon transformation;
- propose new, innovative, and creative solutions to address environmental injustice and other contradictions caused by the important and inevitable societal transformation;
- empower local communities and grassroots initiatives in their fight for more environmental justice.
Strand 1: a focus on lives
Strand 1 focuses on lives and includes local struggles of environmental rights defenders, human-animal conflicts, animal rights, rights of nature, as well as the climate justice movement.
Projects are concerned with norms that alleviate concrete situations of environmental injustice, for example the emergence of the human right to a healthy, clean, and sustainable environment, rights of nature or concrete climate litigation cases.
Strand 2: policies and processes
Strand 2 investigates the policy-making process across places and at different decision-making levels.
Environmental, climate and decarbonisation policy decisions are tightly integrated with economic, agricultural and energy policies. They relate to conservation policy, but frequently also to foreign policies, geopolitics and debates around the regulation of the carbon heavy global political economy and its financial instruments. Potential projects could look at multi-level environmental policy making, and the local justice impacts in socio-political places.
Strand 3: issues caused by rapid low carbon transition
Strand 3 explicitly focuses on the issues caused by a rapid low carbon transition, starting from ecosystem- and biodiversity impacts of large projects within specific spaces or physical geographies.
This also includes potential conflict implications of emission reduction projects. Research projects in this strand identify important interventions in particular spaces and across global decarbonisation value chains, such as critical mineral mining, to help making transitions just and sustainable.
Our approaches tie in well with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
The projects will benefit from the expertise of our inter-disciplinary supervisory teams, which comprises backgrounds from politics, law, sociology, social work, criminology, geography, economics, ecology, and biodiversity. In addition to this, students will have regular exchanges via our professional environmental justice network, which offers placements, and expertise, and works with students and academic staff on policy innovations in the area of environmental justice.
People
Current members of staff, PhD students and Honorary staff engaged with our environmental justice and low carbon transitions research.
Cluster Leads
Professor Andrea Schapper: andrea.schapper@stir.ac.uk
Dr Clemens Hoffmann: clemens.hoffmann@stir.ac.uk
PhD Students
Lawrence East: d.east1@stir.ac.uk
Effie Nash: e.j.nash@stir.ac.uk
Catriona Davidson: c.h.davidson@stir.ac.uk
Tafadzwa Makara: tafadzwa.makara@stir.ac.uk