Examples of the application of distributional justice in coastal flooding, instead, have focused on investigating the distribution of water-based amenities and the way they structure patterns of settlements adjacent to the coast (Collins, Grineski and Chakraborty, 2018), the spatial and social inequities between coastal and inland flooding (Montgomery and Chakraborty, 2015), as well as the differences in distribution of costs and benefits of FRM (Kaufmann, Priest and Leroy, 2018).

 

These studies begin to unravel a landscape of uneven risk between residents living on the waterfront of U.S. and E.U cities. This unevenness is brought about by a combination of factors such as: the historical patterns of coastal urbanization driving what is built on the coast; the institutional mediation of risks through a variety of structural (flood control structures) and non-structural (flood insurance) measures that privilege areas with higher amounts of water-based amenities and property values exposed; the social disparities and intra-ethnic diversity between people living inland and on the coast;  and different understandings of distributional equity in the distribution of pre-flood defense measures and post-flood recovery. This brief overview points to the important ways in which scholars of distributional justice of flood risk are starting to move passed understandings of spatial proximity to hazards, which was a key aspect of early EJ scholarly work. Flooding, Walker (2009a) claims, shares similar contextual complexity as green space and pollution. Green space is more than just an issue of ‘availability’: there can be important cultural, gender and other differences in how particular forms of green space are viewed and the functions and services that these perform (Walker, 2009b; Wolch, Byrne and Newell, 2014; Anguelovski et al., 2018). Pollution is also socially contextualized, intersecting with life courses, class and poverty so that impacts of “equal doses” are not equally experienced or coped with—an observation that extends to the unevenness of the psycho-social as well as the physiological impacts of living with sources of risk.

 

To this end, EJ theorists like Walker and Bullard, also advocated that meaningful stakeholder involvement in decision making, in the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies is key for realizing justice. Notions of society decides to regulate and governs spaces, resources, and processes of stakeholder involvement happen in the context of politics. Indeed, the way in which climate change responses are deployed, re-organizes materials and spaces in the pursuit of alternative urban futures (Castán Broto, 2017). The exposure to, prevention of and recovery from climate change impacts are defined and implemented in the context of politics, or what I refer to ‘resilience politics’.

 

Responses to climate change impacts, like flooding, are generally framed as wanting to achieve urban resilience – resilience as end goal – or more broadly take resilience as an ongoing process (Davoudi et al., 2012). Urban Resilience as an end goal is often associated with the ‘short term’ aim of (re) building a more robust, resistant city to increasing rates of climate change induced disasters. The broader perspective, transcends recovery by embracing change, self-organization, and eventually transformation of the possible configurations of its socio, political economic and ecological features (Chelleri, 2012). I define resilience politics by using the formulation by Holland (2017), as the relations and interactions shaping decisions about how particular communities will adapt to climate change, such as decisions to retreat because of climate change, to develop local adaptation plans, or to develop particular strategies and actions that implement those plans.

 

Like the arrival of unwanted land uses (Swyngedouw, Moulaert and Arantxa, 2002), climate resilience, requires that vulnerable communities respond to an imminent threat over which they have little or no control. Because climate resilience interventions will alter people’s relationships to the natural environment, scholars called for giving communities some control over their destinies, identities, and responses to real or imminent changes to the environments in which they live (Adger et al., 2011). It will not suffice for governments to do a better re-distribution of environmental bads, in the context of resilience politics, a procedural justice approach to flooding is required.