Session organisers:

• Valeria Costantini (UniRoma 3, Italy)
• Davide Consoli (INGENIO, Spain)

Description:

Most environmental challenges have a global nature, but their impact has a local character. As a consequence, territories (and populations within them) exhibit significant heterogeneity in both the degree of vulnerability and of resilience-building capacity. Unless this unevenness is explicitly accounted for in the design of national and international policies, the distribution of benefits and costs of the environmental transition is likely to replicate, if not exacerbate, existing disparities. The proposed special session aims at spurring a debate on environmental justice at the intersection of economic geography, environmental economics and innovation studies. The focus will be on both distributive justice (i.e., the distribution of environmental burdens) and procedural justice (i.e., the decision-making processes that lead to those distributions). Although recent literature has broadened the remit of places, forms and processes of disparities of interest, significant criticalities remain unaddressed or underdeveloped. Accordingly, we invite empirical contributions, both quantitative analysis and qualitative case studies, on the following themes:

• Green transition, innovation and inequality
• Changing understanding of (in)equality and neglected (in)justice concerns
• Trade-offs between economic development and environmental sustainability
• Just transition and mitigation actions
• Uneven distribution of the climate burden over space
• Access to resilience strategies and capabilities
• Instances of inclusive policymaking that support just and effective sustainability