Identifying pathways towards equitable access and allocation: distribution, recognition and participation

Benefits and burdens of global environmental change are not equally allocated throughout the world. Decision-making processes addressing this unequal allocation suffer the same ills: people asserting justice claims rarely function on a level playing field. This duality has traditionally been analyzed by environmental justice scholars through a distinction between distributive and procedural aspects of environmental justice. Recent developments attempting to outline a more empirical and pluralistic account of environmental justice have blurred this distinction. Authors such as David Schlosberg and Gordon Walker now analyze environmental justice using a tridimensional framework encompassing notions of distribution, recognition and participation. This new framework can serve to analyze both the aspects of ex-post allocation of benefits and burdens, and of ex-ante access to resources shaping the context of decision-making. While providing a useful lens for the analysis of interpersonal and intergroup approaches of environmental and social justice, this empirical approach has received little attention in the context of interstate conflicts about natural resources. This paper attends to this gap by assessing if and how the framework could serve to analyze resource allocation procedures between states. In particular, the paper applies the three dimensions of justice to the participation of states in environmental negotiations. Building on the numerous literature on allocation decisions in international environmental politics, a set of criteria is identified through which decision-making in this context can be considered equitable. Results stress the importance of global political economy for the ability of states to participate in environmental negotiations. Human and economic resources, the composition and preparation of delegations, the characteristics of the domestic political systems, voting rules, consensus-based decision-making, deliberative capacities, boundary politics, the homogenization and hierarchization of knowledge, cognitive differences and geopolitical status all interact in shaping the context in which some actors are economically, politically and culturally (dis)advantaged