Chapter Twelve: Mirjana Drenovak-Ivanovic, Environmental Justice in a Comparative Context
Environmental justice underscores a broad idealised understanding of justice. It embraces both procedural and substantive elements, although the term “environmental justice” is no less elusive than justice itself.
Like the preceding chapter, albeit expressly rather than impliedly, this chapter recognises the importance of members of the public being included as legal actors in the pursuit of justice.Ivanovic infers that environmental justice based on theories of both distributive justice and social recognition can be achieved through a process of public participation in decision-making — but only if the public is adequately informed. Adequate public participation includes the familiar rituals of procedural fairness, including timely notice and reasonableness in the allocated time for public participation and a right of review. Ivanovic equates environmental justice with environmental democracy in the right to participate in decision-making, but that right is subject to the principles associated with procedural fairness, including a right of access to information.
Conclusion
These three chapters with their discrete scenarios illustrate well the impossibility of a universal definition of justice and the aptness of the idea of justice as performance. The chapters also underscore the variety of legal actors who have an interest in justice other than the paradigmatic aggrieved person or individual judge, for the relevant constituency may include a range of actors extending to the community as a whole.