Participation and procedure are also seen as integral components of how injustice is produced, they are the tools for addressing injustices because they relate to how people are allowed to take part in processes of decision making. Schlosberg, quoting Gould, says that taking differences in public life seriously means a radical increase in opportunity for participation, for individuals to have an equal right in determining their own actions. This is a central demand in EJ movements, but it is also very much linked with both recognition and distribution, for as Schlosberg says “one must have recognition in order to have real participation; one must have participation in order to have real equity; further equity would make more participation possible, which would bring more recognition, and so on” (96).
Justice as procedure is about enabling access to spaces, and flows between spaces, that have previously been restricted (Barnett and Low, 2004 in Walker, 2009). This means for communities to have access to accurate information and unbiased hearing of claims in material terms, where time and space constraints of everyday life limit abilities to be present in participatory spaces, from local meetings at community boards and EJ groups led public deliberations. I refer to public deliberation as “meetings where citizens collectively discuss local problems and possible solutions” (Fagotto and Archon, 2014:7) about coastal flooding exposure and resilience and connected concerns around housing, health and planning more broadly. Again, we see the circularity of the relationship between participation and recognition. Access to spaces where the claims of groups affected by environmental decisions can be voiced, requires bringing people who are mis-recognized into a political process with people that treat them as full partners in social life – as worthy of equal respect and esteem in decision processes and procedures. Recognizing the experience of lay-people as valid as those of experts who are informed by science is a contentious point that unites both EJ and Society Technology Studies (STS).
Just like the politics of EJ is fraught with expert lay-people conflicts that often pit communities exposed to environmental harms against well-funded government or industry experts, so are the politics of resilience, where there is often a notable lack of consensus about the meaning and priority of competing claims over what climate resilience plans should look like at the local level (Allen, 2007; Bulkeley, Edwards and Fuller, 2014; Eriksen, Nightingale and Eakin, 2015). This can be compounded by the use of standard comparison techniques or techniques to determine loss and damage, that miss out on important differences between black and white populations, or low-income residents. In the EJ literature, Checker (2007) studied the biases that shaped an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) risk assessment report on the level of contamination of air, soil and groundwater contamination around a declining urban area in Augusta (Georgia), showing that the way in which risks are problematized serve science but not environmental justice necessarily. Bryant (1995) posited, that issues of certainty and causality, or lack thereof, can be used to justify inaction or misrepresent the complexity of the communities that agencies like EPA, are supposed to help.
Issues of uncertainty in exposure to environmental harm can, quite literarily, split communities in two, between those who believe in the accuracy of the scientific establishment and those who don’t. In line with this, Ottinger, Barandiarán and Kimura (2017) recently argued for epistemic justice as a separate category of justice, along with distributional and procedural. With this term the authors identify “people’s right to be respected in their capacities as knowers” (2017:1032) which means that, in demanding for their experience to be weighted as much as that of vetted experts, EJ activists are also demanding recognition for their cultural identities as well as their identity as knowers. One of the ways in which different knowledge claims find their expression is through community-based environmental justice research and planning to help remediate particular environmental and pollution threats in communities of color and generate new knowledge about the relationship of race, poverty, health, and the urban environment (Sze, 2007) and, more recently, climate change induced flooding and energy poverty (see section 1.1).
In the pursuit of alternative forms of community research and planning, EJ groups ask different questions, looking for ways to represent ongoing systematic hazards rather than assessing regulatory compliance. For instance, Sze (2007) documented how since the mid-nineties, WeAct and other environmental justice groups active in Brooklyn and Manhattan (NYC) have transformed their activism around environmental justice and clean air issues into research programs that emphasize community empowerment in study design and data collection. Using the principle of “speaking for ourselves”, WeAct developed the position that communities of color “are not objects of study but rather must be active collaborators with researchers and institutions to assess and eliminate the causes of poor health” (157). Community-based planning often allows the expression of alternative ideas to mainstream planning for the use of open spaces, especially along politicized spaces such as NYC’s waterfronts.