Violència(s) i resistència social en un món tòxicuna anàlisi multiescala de les lluites per la justícia de la salut ambiental

Resumo

The aim of this dissertation is to expand knowledge regarding environmental conflicts in the context of toxic pollution—a form of environmental pollution causing health harm to human and non-human beings, which is everywhere but often invisible. Organized into a compendium of three articles, each article presents a research question and a specific contribution. First, Chapter II expands what we understand as violence in environmental conflicts and proposes a multidimensional approach to bring to the debate and to make visible forms of violence as processes (rather than actions in time and space) that, as well as toxic contamination, exceed temporal, geographical and intergenerational scales. Second, Chapter III tackles the dimension of gender to reveal that the origin of—and methods used to gather—scientific evidence mediate the demographics recognized as victims of toxic pollution. Recognition of victimhood is also mediated by the ingrained gendered power relations within the environmental justice organizations. Third, Chapter IV leaps to a global analysis and identifies global trends in conflicts where effects to human health have been reported as a result of exposure to toxic pollution. We see different and clear trends; therefore, I argue that these conflicts, what I call ‘environmental health conflicts’, require a more nuanced framework to tackle their complexity and differences. One of these trends, for instance, is the key role of working-class communities as mobilizing groups; they are actors, however, who are almost forgotten by scholars in environmental conflicts. Whereas Chapter III delves into ethnographic methods grounded in the case of banana farmworkers claiming reparations for health damages caused by the pesticide Dibromocloropropane (DBCP) in Nicaragua, Chapter II builds on 95 environmental conflicts in Central America, and Chapter IV uses a total of 3033 cases worldwide for analysis. For the last two chapters, I draw on data from the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), the largest global sample available on environmental conflicts today. In summary, this thesis offers theoretical contributions and highlights methodological implications to the study of environmental conflicts, environmental justice and political ecology. It advances what we understand as violence. It provides critical lenses to address de-gendered power relations within environmental justice organisations and aims at building knowledge on a major and global issue that, although urgent, receives less attention in the global environmental agenda: the issue of an increasingly chemical-intensive agrarian and industrial world.