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Environmental Justice: Comparative Experiences in Legal Empowerment

This report produced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) examines worldwide environmental justice trends from the perspective of legal empowerment of the poor. The report contains regional profiles for the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arab region as well as several country-specific profiles within each region. Each analysis is holistic, evaluating relevant legislation, judicial cases, government policies, actual conditions on the ground, and civil society and community initiatives that positively or negatively affect the environmental rights of poor and vulnerable peoples. The report highlights how poor, marginalized and indigenous communities are almost entirely dependent upon certain key natural resources yet are also the people most likely to be dispossessed of these resources or disproportionately impacted by pollution, climate change, and ecological degradation resulting from unsustainable development practices. The report’s “Conclusions and the Way Forward” section provides recommendations for further integrating legal empowerment of the poor into environmental justice and sustainable development efforts while stressing that effective change must be context-based.

Keywords: environmental rights, legal empowerment of the poor, sustainable development, land and natural resource governance.

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Uploaded on: Aug 14, 2015
Last Updated: Dec 04, 2015
Year Published: 2014


Resource Tags

Resource Type: Practitioner Resources Issues: Community / Customary Land Rights, Environmental Justice, Governance, Accountability & Transparency Tool Type: Reports / Research Method: Research Languages: English Regions: > Global