Transformative Environmental Justice

A legitimate and just decision-making process for the green transition anticipates a representative system centering public engagement with all stakeholders, regionally, and across borders.

Transformative Environmental Justice (EnJUSTICE) investigates forms of democratic engagement with the explicit aim of balancing the unequal distribution of power between Indigenous and grassroots communities and powerful stakeholders in formulating key policies toward fossil-free energy production in the Nordic-Baltic region.

We foreground traditional community justice practices to facilitate knowledge exchange and build an evidence base of a transformative environmental justice ethos that can reorient the Nordic green transition toward local communities.

EnJUSTICE aspires to bring the voices of excluded communities in Greenland, Lithuania, and Sápmi into the Nordic-Baltic green transition strategy debate.

The main research question that EnJUSTICE aims to answer is how comparing and learning from Indigenous community-based and community-driven efforts striving toward transformative environmental justice may in turn help the Nordic drive toward a green transition.

The Swedish part of the project will explore grassroots community mobilization and justice making practices in the Swedish part of Sápmi in the concrete case of rare earth metal extraction, while relating it to justice struggles, histories of colonialization, resistance, and local knowledge across Sápmi.