Environmental Justice, Political-Economic Inequalities, and Pathways to Justice with Prakash Kashwan

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0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Sharable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website Shareable.net just click the link in the show notes and now here’s the host of Cities@Tufts Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:41.3 Julian Agyeman: Welcome everybody to our first Cities@Tufts virtual colloquium of 2025. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners Shareable and the Barr foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Prakash Kashwan, who’s an Associate professor of Environmental Studies at Brandeis University, not far away from Tufts. He’s also the Chair of the Environmental Justice Concentration in the Master of Public Policy Program at Brandeis Heller School of Social Policy and Management.

0:01:38.1 Julian Agyeman: I can’t even begin to encapsulate all his research in the one paragraph that I have here, but he is a scholar who focuses on the intersections of environment development and socioeconomic and political dimensions of global environmental and climate change. His research and writings are shaped profoundly by his over two decades long engagements with global and international environmental governance, including a pre academic career in international development from 1999 to 2005. He’s the author of Democracy in the Woods, Environmental Conservation and Social justice in India, Tanzania and Mexico, Oxford University Press, 2017, the editor of Climate justice in India, Cambridge University Press, 2022 and one of the editors of the excellent journal Environmental Politics.

0:02:31.3 Julian Agyeman: He’s also co founder of the Climate Justice Network. Prakash’s talk today is Political Economic Inequalities, Policy Narratives and Pathways to Environmental and Climate Justice. I think it’s the longest title we’ve ever had Prakash. Prakash a zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:51.9 Prakash Kashwan: Thank you Professor Agyeman and everyone else who’s involved with the organization of this fantastic series. I’ve listened to several of the videos and I’ve learned so much, so I really appreciate all of your work on this series. Without taking too long, I do want to take a moment to think about the moment we are in the context, the heaviness in the air. And I just want to say that challenging as the times are, we have learned so much from fellow scholars and activists. And Julian is one of those founding leading lights of the field of environmental justice, urban sustainability, just sustainability. And. And so I really want to thank you for your leadership. Of you and many others. I won’t name all the names, but just recognizing the general community of scholars and activists in the fields of environmental justice, climate justice, and social justice more broadly. And I think it’s drawing on the wisdom of all that work that you and others have done that hopefully will stand us on solid grounds as we prepare for the next four years, 10 years, next decade or so. So with that, I want to dive right into my PowerPoint presentation.

0:04:20.5 Prakash Kashwan: And I did change the title a little bit because it threatened to become even longer. So I cut out the policy narratives part, which I wasn’t really focusing so much on as the talk took shape. So now I’m talking about environmental justice, political economic inequalities, and pathways to justice. This audience probably does not need a long introduction to environmental justice, but just highlighting the definition of environmental justice that EPA and the federal agencies use means the just treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of income, race, color, national origin, tribal affiliation, or disability. This phrase, all people has its own history.

0:05:12.3 Prakash Kashwan: As many of you might know, the environmental justice movement started with a very pointed focus on environmental racism. And one could argue that it got sanitized a little bit as it went through the process of institutionalization in federal policy making and state level policymaking. But this definition has been adopted very widely also within the EJ movement. And so that’s another point of discussion that sort of shows up in some of the literature review that I’ll share with you. So the contributions of environmental justice movement. We can’t spend enough time celebrate the contributions here in this limited format, but just to recognize that environmental justice movement has almost single handedly change the conversation and the policy and political debates on not just environment, but climate change and many other areas of policymaking and politics.

0:06:13.5 Prakash Kashwan: Having recognized those contributions, I think there’s also a very rich scholarship on environmental justice that talks about multiple histories, regional political economies, the EJ paradigm. There are methodological debates and policy engagements that have come about. And all of these scholars and scholar activists, they have shed light on different dimensions and aspects. So it’s a very rich body of literature. It has expanded starting from the toxic waste disposal to going on to conservation, food justice, carbon pollution, climate change, global climate governance, national and international case studies. So it has expanded tremendously in its scope and reach as it has gone. We will talk quite a bit about the whole paradigm of just sustainability. But there’s another sort of very active debate within the EJ scholarship that has focused on this idea of what is the role of the state and are the EJ agents, groups and movements, by working with the state, are they able to leverage this state for advancing emancipatory EJ outcomes or are they being co opted? And there’s a very vigorous some of these scholars, David Pellow, Laura Pulido and Jill Harrison and many others who have made tremendous contributions. You will hear glimpses of this debate, even though I don’t directly address their critique and the way they are framing this debate.

0:07:47.1 Prakash Kashwan: And finally, there’s been a lot of work on EJ policy, especially from the school that is, I went for my graduate studies at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Evan Rehnquist did some early work on grappling with the empirical questions, methodological questions, and David Konisky, now at the same school. But also folks like Mendy’s have done quite a bit of work sort of connecting the EJ debate to do specific sort of policy debates. And there’s also a more nascent kind of debate about globalization of EJ movement. And if you think about nationalization in the same sense that we think of globalization, the diffusion of EJ movements and scholarship from one region within the US to another region, and there are different origin stories. So the California EJ movement traces its trajectory back to the farm workers labor unions and farm workers unions, which is a different trajectory. And Tracy Perkins recent book is fantastic in just tracing these trajectories, but also showing what it means for us to take those alternative histories and trajectories seriously. And what does it tell us about where the EJ movement and the EJ policy engagements need to go? I’ve done some work engaging with this idea that now there’s a globalization of EJ movement.

0:09:11.2 Prakash Kashwan: John Martinez Elliott has written about this and I provided an initial critique of that kind of argument. So the main anchor that I want to use for this talk is in the just sustainability paradigm. And one reason I wanted to give you that kind of broad overview of the EJ scholarship and movement is to say that there are so many rich debates that one it’s impossible to do justice to all of those debates in the same talk, but also to push the debates and discussion beyond the sort of the basic argument that often get repeated within the context of say climate change, where some of the climate policy scholars are discovering EJ now and they’re bringing it in. And I’m afraid some of them are rediscovering the wheel because they haven’t actually engaged with the whole suite of EJ debates as they’ve unfolded over the years. So just sustainability again, I think this audience knows a lot about just sustainability, so I’ll jump through this. But the idea was to integrate questions of EJ into the debates on sustainability and sustainable development. And this definition of sustainability, which was an expanded definition of sustainability from the popular definition that we often see in the literature is by Kulin and co-authors, the need to ensure a better quality of life for all.

0:10:38.1 Prakash Kashwan: So you see the phrase all showing for all showing up here again now and into the future in a just and equitable manner. This last part is really important and I haven’t actually seen a lot of advancement of this particular part of the debate which is that all of this has to be done whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems. So both sustainable and… One could argue that actually sustainable development community has not taken these limits very seriously, but also to then think about what it means for the program of an agenda of EJ as such. And again, just sustainability has blossomed into this multifaceted dense literature talking about alternative economic models, the approaches to co production of knowledge and policy agendas and policy models, intragenerational and intergenerational questions, and then reimagining needs. Thinking about good old man Gandhi who said there’s plenty to meet everybody’s needs, but not everybody’s wants. And so the just sustainability paradigm has sought to expand the the EJ debate beyond critiquing and fending off the bad effect of environmental toxic and waste disposal and hasn’t brought in this idea that a functioning thriving environment is also a prerequisite for the advancement of environmental justice and social justice. So this particular statement, a poor environment is not only a symptom of existing injustices, rather a functioning environment provides the necessary conditions to achieve social justice.

0:12:23.3 Prakash Kashwan: Now, all of this has brought us a long way from where we started in we as in the EJ movement started in the ’70s and some would argue even before then. And there’s a lot of scope to do a lot more meaningful work. The way I have understood this advancement of EJ literature, coming from a slightly different trajectory from the political economy and policy side, is that there are these main pillars of this argument rest on a couple of different kinds of arguments. One, that environmental bads also contribute to social injustices. Again, this argument is very familiar to this audience. Then there’s a second bit of argument which has been highlighted quite a bit and developed quite a bit by the just sustainability paradigm, which is that environmental goods, which is that good environment, protected environment, conservation, clean air, and along with alternative economic paradigms, et cetera, is a prerequisite for social and environmental justice. And this, I would argue that this also aligns with a body of work in economics, ecological economics, and some of the policy work that some of us have done, which talks about this inequality hypothesis, that environmental inequality, because it also hampers industrial regulation, inequalities are bad for the environment, and at the same time, they’re also bad for society.

0:13:56.9 Prakash Kashwan: So all in all, if you look at this literature, it clubs all the bad outcomes together. Bad environment, bad social justice outcome, bad EJ outcomes, and then all the good arguments that good environmental outcomes will reinforce the justice agenda as well as the pursuit of justice. And in all of this, I would argue that this literature still has three gaps, by and large, right? There’s been some work, but by and large, in the general sort of understanding of the field, I think there are three major gaps. One is that because of this good and bad sort of pooling of environmental and social outcomes, the literature is yet to get into a lot of critical scrutiny of the contested nature of the agenda of environment, because environmental protection is not one thing. There are many different ways and different ideologies of environmental protection that need to be scrutinized, and that has been done in other literatures, but it hasn’t somehow been fully integrated into the literature on EJ and just sustainability. And that’s really important because different ideological foundations of environmental protection are entangled with the dominant economic paradigm that the just sustainability argument has rightly criticized.

0:15:17.8 Prakash Kashwan: There’s an innate coherence to the argument that I’m making here. It’s coherent with just sustainability. And in that sense, one could argue that I’m trying to add to those arguments. This literature also has yet to take political and economic inequalities seriously in the sense that it has yet to deeply ask this question, what do political economic inequalities do to the kind of environmental policies, paradigms, and programs that come up in different societies? So not just on the environmental bad side, but also on the environmental good side. And then there’s this role of the state debate from the EJ literature. But there’s a different side to this kind of argument in the policy and institution literature. So that’s my, the lay of the landscape and how I’ve seen the gaps. But as I said, we look, really look forward to the discussions onto the extent to which we all are on the same page about this particular characterization of the literature and the gaps. So with this I want to first provide you some evidence about what do when I say critical scrutiny of the environmental protection paradigms, policies and programs. And one argument I want to make is that environmental protection, please put that in scare quotes.

0:16:41.5 Prakash Kashwan: “Environmental protection can produce both good and bad social justice outcomes, good and bad environmental justice outcomes.” So that’s first I want to show you quite a bit of evidence to make that argument and then use that argument to bring us to the current moment and what it means to think about this in the context, particularly in the context of renewable energy transition here in the US So my main focus here is on looking at the percentage of national territory that countries have set aside the agenda of nature protection. Now I know it’s a bit of a jump from talking about mostly about domestic environmental justice, but I’ll come back to it. Please stay with me for a while. It’ll all fit together. Hopefully it will. This graph shows you that if we go back to 1990 and please look at the green line, which is what we are concerned about, we’re not thinking so much about the marina area national jurisdiction right now. So green line shows you the global percentage of protected land globally, which has gone up from about 8% in 1990 to about 17% in 2022, 2023.

0:18:10.0 Prakash Kashwan: So it’s really almost gone up like 2.5 times in an era that has been full of neoliberal economic extractive development. And that context is really important because of the argument that is sometimes made about the fundamental contradictions between economic development and environmental protection. Here I’m showing you that one form of environmental protection has kept pace with the extractive development that we have seen over past quarter of a century, 35, 40 years. You could take this, expand this graph and you’ll see the same sort of trajectory which some of you who are in economics and public policy, this sort of contradicts some of the very popular economic arguments about nature conservation, poverty, development and so forth. But anyway, to come back to this progression of nature conservation, with the progression of nature conservation, we have seen a lot of conflicts around these conservation projects.

0:19:17.0 Prakash Kashwan: There’s another paradox here. The first paradox was the co evolution of extractive economic development and this nature conservation protected area based nature conservation. The second paradox is that all the countries that has big, large protected areas also have lots of conflicts around it. Which again calls into question ideas about how if you don’t do environmental protection in a way that takes the people along, then you won’t be able to do environmental protection.

0:19:48.0 Prakash Kashwan: It sort of questions that popular narrative which sometimes also shows up in the conservation, justice and EJ kind of literatures and debates to grapple with these two paradoxes. What I did was to look at the variation in the percentage of national territory that is set aside as protected area within countries. Greenland was not so popular. I did not actually include Greenland, even though it shows in the red color. I want you to be thinking about all of the other areas in red, particularly those in Africa. Red color, if you can see the legend at the bottom, is the countries that have more than 25% of their national territory set aside for nature protected areas. I want us to think about Africa in particular, because these are some of the poorest countries with some of the poorest people in the world, and they have more than a quarter of their national territories set aside as nature protected areas.

0:21:02.2 Prakash Kashwan: Tanzania, a country that I’ve studied, has 40% of its national territory under declared as set aside exclusively for protection of nature under these protected areas. This begs the question, how is it that first, why is it that these poor countries are deciding to set aside these large tracts of land for nature protection when they can clearly use that land, as economists would have us believe, that they would first like to use that land to do extractive economic development and poverty alleviation? Of course, there’s this popular argument about the conflict between poverty and environment again in the literature on environmental economics and so forth.

0:21:48.3 Prakash Kashwan: And so I run some very simple multivariate regression analysis and looked at the way in which political and economic inequalities mediate the designation or allocation of land for nature protection. The argument would be that inequality plays some role in this. As you can suspect that if you have unequal societies, those societies political decision making will not reflect the popular will. Right? Political inequalities, economic inequalities. If you have economic inequalities, very rich people can use poverty as a form of poverty alleviation and some kind of income programs as a form of incentives to promote the kind of nature protection programs that they want to promote. So there are many different ways in which economic inequality obviously plays a role. And similarly, poor leaders in poor, economically less advanced economies would have incentives to sign on to these programs if they come with some kind of economic support for park development or agency development and so forth. I Look at how political and economic inequality plays into this agenda of nature protection. And I’ll skip through the models and robustness tests and all of that. I went through a very torturous and painful review process, but in the end it all worked out.

0:23:24.0 Prakash Kashwan: And so the highlight results from this analysis are that democracy itself has positive effect on the percentage of national territory under protected area. If you control for everything else, democracy itself is actually associated positively with the larger area of national territory under protected areas. Now, there’s some dynamics going on here between European protected areas, which are different from African protected areas. But please stay with me and we can talk about rest of this stuff later. But this democratic dividend is undermined by increasing inequality within democracies. So if you take the sample of all the strong democracies and then see how, if you vary inequality within democracies, what happens to protected areas. What we see in this data set of 137 countries is that as economic inequality increases within democracies, the percentage of national territory set aside as protected area goes down. So democracy kicks in. And if you have inequality but strong democratic institutions, people who are subjected to unjust policies, they can protest and they can put some brakes on protected areas. That’s the basic argument, but this is the main finding here. Countries with poor democratic institutions and high economic inequalities, especially in Africa, have the largest percentage of national territories declared as protected areas.

0:25:09.1 Prakash Kashwan: In a nutshell, this global movement on conservation has ridden on poverty and lack of democracy, poverty and authoritarianism, if you will, to expand into global south territories. That’s the sort of the story here in the book Democracy in the woods that Julian mentioned in his very kind introduction. I unpack that whole thing. I’m not throwing you some crass empirical findings without sort of contextual understanding of those topics, but empirical analysis has its own sort of importance. Now these kinds of issues have traveled into or permeated into the ongoing debates on nature based solutions and nature based climate restoration and ecosystem restoration. So many of you may have heard there was this famous map, global map, prepared by Strasberg and colleagues. What they did was they, they said that if we wanted to look for three kinds of outcomes, so they created a global model and used remotely sensed imagery as well as geospatial analysis and spatial statistics to then say if we wanted to maximize the benefits of climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation, and we wanted to do it at. At the minimum cost, globally speaking. So minimum cost requires cheap land and cheap labor. Right? The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things is the kind of reference here.

0:26:46.1 Prakash Kashwan: And so cheap land, cheap labor takes you to all the places that you see on this map highlighted in dark red. So these are the lands that if you, again, if you take a look at the legend on the top right hand corner, These are top 5% and top 10% global priority areas for restoring back to nature. I want to repeat this again. This is a proposal that these lands in the red color should be restored lock, stock and barrel. These lands should be restored back to pre human restoration status. That’s the argument here. And of course you ask what happens to the most densely populated region in the world, which is South Asia and Southeast Asia, because it’s all red. Essentially, cheap land and cheap labor needs to give way to the agenda of nature restoration. Now what we did, we took this map, a group of us, we took this map and we said, okay, what if we insert some basic social and economic variables into this map? So we brought in economic inequality, political inequality, food insecurity, those kinds of variables that you think would be obviously related to this agenda of restoration because you’re restoring lands back to nature so all the farmland goes away and so forth.

0:28:18.0 Prakash Kashwan: What we found was that if you follow that top 15% restoration priority areas, almost all of agricultural land in Equatorial Guinea, Philippines, Nicaragua, Nepal, Indonesia, more than 80%, close to about 90% of agricultural land in some of these largest countries is supposed to be restored back to nature. What we found was that the map not remember, these scholars did not decide to prioritize. So I’m reading through the second bullet on the left side of the screen here. This map ends up prioritizing, right? Prioritizes in the sense that this is how things work out in the real world. When you’re looking for cheap land and cheap labor. It prioritizes restoration in countries that are poorer, more populated, more economically unequal, less food insecure, and that employed more people in agriculture. So all the wrong kinds of variables on the wrong side of the restoration priority areas. These equity effects hold, not just internationally. So it’s not just looking at countries as a whole, but you can also go sub nationally and look at which areas are being set aside for nature conservation within countries. Then we also see the same effect at the subnational level. So we started by looking at this rather simplistic sort of cross national international analysis.

0:29:49.3 Prakash Kashwan: But this analysis tells us that these outcomes actually percolate down all the way to the subnational level and they are applicable throughout the global landscape within these new programs of climate restoration and climate justice and so forth. Now I won’t. We don’t have. I haven’t seen analysis that test some of the same arguments within the US But I’m sure you’re familiar with the debates on public land in the US west and in different parts, and of course the debates around the histories of protected areas within us, the dispossession and displacement of indigenous people and the whole settler colonial project and how directly implicated protected areas were in that project of settler colonialism. So there’s a research agenda here that could be picked up if there are some interested graduate students listening to this talk right now. I have a framework to try and put together all of this, but I won’t talk about that for now. But the argument is to bring the literature from the policy and political economy with the literature on just sustainability to provide an integrated framework to look at these social ecological outcomes and thinking of environment, which is denoted in green here, both as a context to political policy, social outcomes as well as an outcome, right. So environment…

0:31:16.5 Prakash Kashwan: And this comes from the just sustainability idea. With that, let me move to the concluding part of this talk. I want to come back to this notion of staying within the limits of supporting ecosystems. This would have implications for the renewable energy agenda that is important and on the top of the political and policy debates and also debates within EJ movements and to some extent. Green New Deal, Inflation Reduction Act has this kind of electrify everything wipe to it, which is that with a maximalist argument about building so much renewable energy everywhere that we will have tons of jobs and prosperity and we’ll have money for care economy, supporting the care economy and all of that, remember that bipolar pooling of bad environmental, bad social outcomes, good environmental, good social outcomes, that pooling continues into the Green New Deal and IRA kind of policies and programs. And to the extent that just sustainability relies on this argument about good quality jobs that will contribute to social and economic justice, but will also contribute to a better environment. There’s a problem here in the sense that this idea of electrifying everything, maximizing everything, does not speak so well to this notion of staying within supporting ecosystems.

0:33:05.0 Prakash Kashwan: For those of you who are studying renewable energy transition here in the US the arguments that some of the indigenous nations and indigenous leaders are making, as well as some of the fishing communities and other communities who are dependent on the landscapes that are being reshaped by renewable energy projects, they are asking questions about how much renewable energy we need. And if there’s some debate on trying to minimize the need for renewable energy by reducing consumption, and if we do that, that then has implication for how we negotiate this tension between a speedy transition to renewable energy, while also thinking about social justice and environmental justice within this process. My argument is not that we should forego one or the other. We should continue to talk about limiting consumption. We should continue to talk about synergies between renewable energy transition and environmental justice. But this will become a contested process. And so I think there’s a need to muddy those two pools that we talked about. Good and bad environmental outcomes and social outcomes will not always go together. And that will then help us pierce through this almost omnipresent rhetoric that we see about community participation in scripts, stakeholderism within the federal policies and federal agencies.

0:34:40.7 Prakash Kashwan: If you look at offshore wind development or other kinds of renewable energy policies, it’s overflowing with this rhetoric of community participation. But those in practice, the community participation is not happening. And it is not happening with seriousness. And I argue that lack of seriousness is a symptom of avoiding the contestation that cannot be avoided and that should not be avoided. The other important part now I want to come back to, in the last couple of points, I want to come back to this kind of entanglement between the economic paradigms and this sort of renewable energy climate mitigation transition paradigm of maximalist outcomes. That the maximalist outcome has allowed a the corporate industry around renewable energy to take hold of the ongoing transition process. It has overpowered. And this is particularly evident in the offshore wind program that I’ve been studying for past few years. In a nutshell, the corporations are riding on this maximalist green energy transition program to maximize their profits. And as many of these corporations are the fossil fuel companies not just here in the US but also some of the largest European offshore wind companies are also the largest fossil fuel corporations of the yesterday, both the state owned corporations in Europe as well as the private corporations based here in the US.

0:36:20.0 Prakash Kashwan: This corporate agenda is the tension between EJ groups and labor unions. Labor unions do well under that paradigm of maximalist electrify everything paradigm because the more we build, the more jobs there are for unionized workers. And unions want that. And that should also happen. Of course unionization should expand. But still we cannot brush aside the tension that is showing up in New York and California. In many other states where EJ groups are strong, labor unions are struggling to deal with this idea of environmental justice and climate mitigation. The intersection of these two agendas is quite a bit. There has been an exception in Maine where labor unions have succeeded in building a broader coalition. And I’ve written about this, but that is Maine, right? So Maine does not have an EJ movement. And so that’s an exceptionalism. My concluding thought is this idea of the entanglement of the maximalist environmental agenda and the dominant economic paradigm, which is capitalism writ large. How do we rethink the environmental paradigm in a way so that it is effectively able to confront the economic paradigm as the Just Sustainability Program directs us to do, to makes us think to do broad based coalitions.

0:37:48.0 Prakash Kashwan: And obviously this audience again doesn’t need this reiteration that we need broad based coalitions struggling and shaping and negotiating and bargaining policies, laws, institutions that we need. And going back to that debate within the EJ movement, we cannot avoid engaging with this state. There’s no way, because anything at scale has to be done at speed, will require us to use the power of the state one way or another. Right now the corporations have been effectively able to use that power to that advantage. EJ movements have also succeeded, particularly in California and New York. But the larger story, that paradigm shift that Just Sustainability Program asks us to do that is still a long way off. And my hope is that in this current moment we can debate about and come out with some nuggets of wisdom collectively to think about both our scholarship as well as the social and environmental justice agenda that is even more important in the current context. So I’ll stop here.

0:38:56.9 Julian Agyeman: Thank you, Prakash. So last semester I taught my food justice class and I always use the quote that from Sen. That famine doesn’t happen because of an absence of food, it happens because of an absence of democracy. And I kept thinking of that as you were going through and challenging us to rethink our ideas about democracy. And my obvious thought here is we are, as you’ve intimated, we’re going to go through some very great challenges to democracy, not just here, but around the world. We are going to go through a period where states and regulation are changing greatly. What’s the agenda? Yes, we have to get back and look at these broad based coalitions, Prakash. But what is your prescription, Dr. Kashwan? 

0:39:51.8 Prakash Kashwan: As I said, I think this is an audience, especially in your presence, and I don’t know who else is around, but I wasn’t really. I was trying to avoid, to be prescriptive, but I’ll take the bait. Those of us who dabble a little bit in the positivist social science, sometimes you remove certain variables to get a clear picture on one of the many variables. And I think for me, and I haven’t because I Want to be very disciplined. In my 40 minutes that you gave me, I didn’t mention that I’ve been actually researching a comparative research on Maine, New York and California looking at how these three states are dealing with this agenda of renewable energy transition. So what we have seen in Maine, and remember it’s a state where we don’t have EJ. So we are taking out one of the variables. But what the labor unions have done in Maine is to engage with the environmental groups, the climate activist groups, as well as some of the indigenous nations and leaders to create a broad based coalition. And not just as a paper coalition. Right. This is a phrase that is often used that you sign on to some statements and make some paper coalitions.

0:41:05.8 Prakash Kashwan: But labor unions in Maine have actually taken that coalition building seriously and have put their own interest at stake, sometimes for the sake of advocating for indigenous people or advocating for the environmental protection agenda and so forth. And what we see in that particular case study, and I have a new paper in Environmental Energy and Social Science Journal which shows that the labor unions have confronted the corporate profit maximization tendency within the offshore wind industry in the Gulf of Maine. And that has not happened in many other places. And so that would be the first step, I would argue that labor unions, and this again, as many of you, there’s long standing debates about this wage bargaining model of labor union versus a larger societal political agenda that labor unions took on in Europe and sometimes also in the US in the New Deal era and so forth. And so the labor unions really have to think about working more closely with EJ groups in big states like California and New York. And similarly groups have to find ways of working more strongly with this politically powerful constituency of labor unions. And to me that, and again, I’m reducing it to a simplistic one sort of bullet point purposely to point out the ways in which we can connect the agenda of environmental and climate justice with the agenda of democracy, largely broadly speaking.

0:42:41.8 Julian Agyeman: We’ve got a question from Alejandro Manga, WPI. Alejandro, it’s an amazingly long one. Can you, are you on the line at the moment? Can you give it to Prakash in a couple of sentences? 

0:43:01.0 Prakash Kashwan: Oh, there’s. I’m scrolling. Okay.

0:43:03.3 Alejandro Manga: Allright. Yeah, now I can ask the question. Yes.

0:43:06.0 Prakash Kashwan: Well, please do. Please do.

0:43:10.1 Alejandro Manga: So this question is basically like you’re using, you’re doing regressions and you have a top down approach and a large approach of what is happening globally with this issue. And my question is framed from a perspective. I teach at WPI and I had this project where my students had this. They had to go and work on education, on community based natural resource management awareness. And so they had to go to communities that live in contact with the wildlife of Africa, say lions and elephants. And there were a couple of issues that they found. First, the communities care about this only insofar it does not. If it doesn’t impinge on the livelihoods, it works. So if the lion kills livestock and they get it back, it works. If the elephant tramples their cultures and they get it back, it works. But usually these programs to find out these kinds of research, they’re done with Western money and they’re framed by educated, mostly black people in Windhoek who are upper middle class people that have no experience and are trying to break away from their, like this whole thing, we are modern, we’re not peasants kind of framework. And I was looking at this and I was thinking this is the kind of stuff that irked the communities that we were working with. And yeah, so that’s. And it’s something that you cannot do if you stick to the methodologies that we’re using. And so I wanted to know whether you have something to say about that.

0:44:27.5 Prakash Kashwan: Right, absolutely. And along with this, I’ll also respond to the other comment that I saw about the confusion around the relationship between protected areas and democracy. The argument there is that it is contingent. So it’s the relationship between inequality and democracy. And protected areas is dependent on the level of inequalities, which means that in countries with lack of democracy and high level of inequality, more protected areas, because these elites and Alejandro talks about this, there are these people who are explicitly trying to sort of portray themselves as modern, as not peasants, as not being. And if I read the subtext, not being ignorant, but enlightened about the need for global conservation and so forth. And remember, these need not be the actual citrus. This might just be discourses. Right. So we think a lot about the power of the narrative to shape leaders and their actions. But yes, absolutely. And again, to think about this, it’s helpful to do a little bit of comparison between Latin America and, say, Africa. Protected areas in Latin America have benefited local surrounding communities more than they have benefited the communities in Africa. And that’s because the communities in peasants in Latin America have been very well organized and have been connected to national political parties and regional political parties.

0:46:00.2 Prakash Kashwan: And they are able to pull the strings so that whatever income the agencies earn from protected areas, that income is channeled back, effectively, relatively speaking, into local communities while in Africa, because the leaders are not accountable to local communities in the same way there Is this feudalism? Cheat tenancy hierarchies? And this also holds true for South Africa and large parts of Southeast Asia in those contexts, because there’s no accountability. These modern enlightened leaders impose protected areas on local communities. There’s another article that I would like to draw your attention which came out in the journal Environment, the Environment magazine. It’s called From Racist Conservation to Environmentalism, something like that, where we take you through the whole history of protected areas and bring you up to the speed on community based conservation and regional differences and infiltration of markets and financialism, financialization of conservation and all of that. So all of these forces are entangled and depending on what methodological tools you’re using, you look at different parts of it, Right? So you’re very right that it, it cannot show up in all of the empirical analysis. But one needs to do like qualitative case studies to show some of these effects.

0:47:24.3 Julian Agyeman: We’ve got a question from Barth wants to know. You talk about it, but you don’t mention degrowth. He wants to know, have you incorporated degrowth into your thinking? 

0:47:38.5 Prakash Kashwan: Degrowth, Absolutely. To the extent that it reminds us of the limits part. There are some naughty questions around the type of growth and degrowth. Scholars have been remarkably nuanced about what they mean by degrowth in terms of. It’s not a crass sort of argument about stopping all kinds of economic development, but de developing the global north, especially the extractive economies and all of that. But I would argue that de growth has been framed by and has been developed within the Western liberal framework. And so it has to deal with many kinds of issues that are quite complicated, but in a broader spirit of reducing consumption. I think that goes very well with the just sustainability idea of living within the surrounding ecosystems and the limits to that.

0:48:33.5 Julian Agyeman: Lorenzo asks, how do you define democracy? This sounds like a whole nother cities of Tufts. But how do you define democracy as a variable in your research? Is it just holding elections? Is it just a binary variable or are there degrees of democracy? 

0:48:50.6 Prakash Kashwan: So the Freedom House index that I used in that 2017 Ecological Economics article has a, has a scale with a variety of different indicators. And then in some of the subsequent projects we have also used Polity Score, which is a more. It’s a more politicized but a somewhat simpler measure. Remarkably, these two main indicators of democracy have a very high correlation of about 85, 90%. So even though they measure democracy very differently, they come to the same sort of conclusions about which countries are strong democracies. And which are weaker. In my qualitative work, of which I’ve done a lot actually I take a more nuanced approach of democracy with a smaller D where it is about grappling with the ongoing political and policy processes and holding leaders accountable and making them do the things that they wouldn’t normally do under corporate oligarchy, kind of democratic setup that have become very common in many countries. There I actually look at the actual struggle for democracy and how they develop. My argument is that we have already actually seen quite a bit of that. I don’t want to preview another argument here, but I think there’s quite a bit of that benefit gains to be had by looking at the small D democracy at the state level, energy transition processes.

0:50:19.8 Julian Agyeman: Great, thanks Prakash. Lucia, do you want to talk about your question? It looks like a good one, but it’s again very long.

0:50:32.4 Lucia Cristea: Hi, yes, I’m Lucia. I’m from Italy at this moment and thank you very much for this. Yeah. In Europe we haven’t probably, you know very well we have an imposed process or imposed stage of co creation or involvement on the stakeholders in the process of implementing anything, anything, any project that we are doing we have to or strategy or even policy we have to discuss with stakeholders and end users and unfortunately how nice democratic this process is. It’s so long and sometimes over seen by the politicians or by the decision makers. And my major concern is to what extent all these nice stages in the process of implementing a project or a strategy or a policy allows us to reach quickly the targets that are imposed by different policies such as Green Dealer or I don’t know, achieving fit for 55 in in 2013 in Europe or something like this. So it is a gap in my opinion between how we engage or how we discuss with everybody and even how we can create or address the conflict resolutions between different, like you correctly said, between different stakeholders. So I’m interesting if you have some insights on this or mechanism I will be very grateful if you can have your insights. Thank you very much and very nice talk.

0:52:03.6 Prakash Kashwan: Thank you, thank you. I really appreciate that question. It’s a big one. So I’ll say briefly that the state of affairs that we have now, they are a product of at least a century long, if not more of extractive development and then rigging of the policies, institutions, democracies by the extractives, the industries and actors who are benefiting. This includes both market actors as well as political actors who have benefited from that extractivist project. I think in all fairness, I think it’s a bit too much to ask the environmentalist to grapple with all of that in brief period of time. I think the dilemma that you point out is very real, but we have to live with dilemma and we have to tackle these questions in ways that justice to both the environmental agenda as well as the ecological and social justice and environmental justice agenda. I will say this, that this respecting the social justice and environmental protection agenda has been very difficult because we haven’t been able to tackle the original extractivist project. We are patching on these all of the other processes that you’re talking about on the top of an ongoing extractivist project, and this is why that’s so hard. So if we attack that more strongly, I think we’ll have a much better handle around these kinds of challenges.

0:53:33.5 Julian Agyeman: Prakash, thank you so much for getting us off to a fantastic Cities@Tufts colloquium start for spring 2025. Can we give a warm round of applause to Prakash Kashwan of Brandeis University? 

0:53:46.6 Prakash Kashwan: Thank you everyone. Please email me if we would like to continue some of these discussions.

0:53:52.5 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable, with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Jess Milner. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and Communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candice Spivey, and the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.