From Conflicts Over Seabed Governance to Wildlife Conservation: Developing a Theory of Global Ecological Justice

Debates on ecological justice are often conducted at a high level of moral abstraction, framing justice as a set of universal principles to be applied to environmental problems. This paper challenges that approach. Drawing on critical theory and critical social analysis, it argues that ecological justice cannot be specified independently of the social conflicts, power relations, and situated demands through which environmental harms are experienced and contested. Ecological justice, on this view, is not a purely normative ideal imposed from above, but a concept that must be reconstructed from the claims, practices, and normative innovations of affected actors in concrete contexts. The paper develops this argument through two sites of contemporary ecological conflict: international deep seabed governance and local commons of wildlife conservation in Africa. In the case of the seabed, disputes over deep-sea mining have generated context-specific principles concerning common heritage, intergenerational justice and responsibility, precaution, and epistemic humility in the face of irreversible harm. In the domain of wildlife conservation, conflicts surrounding protected areas, species protection, human–wildlife conflict, and coexistence of environmental stewardship and economic development, have given rise to competing justice claims relating to property rights, commons governance, livelihood security, Indigenous rights, and multispecies coexistence. Rather than treating these claims as empirical noise to be filtered through pre-given moral frameworks, the paper treats them as normatively productive. By reconstructing ecological justice from these conflicts, the paper advances a contextual and conflict-sensitive theory of ecological justice that is attentive to asymmetries of power, histories of domination, and the plurality of human and non-human interests at stake. It contributes to debates in global justice by showing how ecological justice must be grounded in practice without collapsing into relativism, and how critical theory can bridge moral normativity and situated struggles in the Anthropocene.