The environmental justice scholarship and its focus on environmental justice conflicts, movements and communities have set the path for a promising research strand within the commons scholarship. A number of empirical environmental justice studies have shed new light on the positive relationship between environmental justice mobilizations and community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) organizations. Well known examples include the rubber tappers’ movement in Brazil against logging and large-scale cattle ranching, which eventually led to the creation of collectively-owned “Extractive Reserves”; and the social movements of the Mau Mau tribes in Kenya and Nigeria, which used land occupations and built on customary land use institutions to reclaim historically common lands from agri-business and oil companies. Beyond empirical analyses, new concepts like Martinez-Alier and other’s “environmentalism of the poor” and “liberation ecologies” have put forth an inherent relationship between environmental injustice situations, community mobilization, poverty alleviation and resource conservation. Despite the growing literature, no systematic review has been carried so far. The proposed meta-analysis builds on Elinor Ostrom’s CBNRM design principles and tests the extent to which their implementation shall be facilitated by environmental justice movements. Results highlight the differential effect and mechanisms through which social mobilization can influence CBNRM institutions and inspire propositions integrating CBNRM and social movement theory.
