Towards a Political Education Through Environmental Issues - Melki Slimani

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based on the experience of Athenian democracy, which crossed Christian theological thought with Thomas in the 13th century and Calvin in the 16th century, as well as philosophical thought of the 17th century with Locke.

      A third hybrid trend, exhausting its references from the experience of the Republic of Rome, manifested itself in the philosophical thought of Machiavelli (15th century) and Rousseau (18th century). It constituted a reference for the French Revolution and for the American Revolution. The latter invented the political form of a republican democracy, showing its resistance to the anti-political forms that quickly attenuated the French Democratic Republic by the institution of an anti-political project. The latter reigned during the 19th century until the outbreak of the war in 1914.

      The 20th century was one of a new vitality of political thought through the installation of a conflict of interpretation of the democratic paradigm of political legitimacy. The debate was between new forms and orientations of totalitarian, liberal or social democracy.

      In the remainder of this chapter, the political/anti-political trend in EDIs is explored through the following:

       – a discussion of the conceptualization of the political field with its symbolic dimension (the political) and its formal dimension (politics) of Lefort by Gachkov and Blokker. This discussion makes it possible to specify a set of expressions covering the political field: “power”, “depoliticization”, “democracy”, “participation”, “citizenship”, “domination”, “justice” and “liberalism”;

       – the classification2 of EDIs into six metathemes: “environmental politics and environmental change”, “environmental ethics”, “agrifood”, “sustainable development”, “environmental technologies and management” and “transitions”, to explore their political content via the Internet;

       – the association of EDI metathemes with expressions from political/anti-political or politicized/depoliticized discussions in French and English in order to collect a relevant corpus on the Internet;

       – a thorough reading of the collected corpus.

      This chapter will help us to identify and characterize the political/anti-political trend of EDIs.

      1.3.1. Issues of environmental politics and environmental change

      1.3.1.1. Environmental justice: a category which cuts across environmental politics

      Climate change is a contributor to environmental injustice. Indeed, the issue of climate change provides an opportunity to broaden the scope of environmental justice. The latter is not reduced to the issue of access to environmental resources nor to the problem of the unequal distribution of environmental costs. It involves a recognition of “plural modes of being in the environment” (Centemeri et al. 2016).

      In the field of international environmental politics, several environmental issues seem to have become urgent, such as:

       – the question of the degree of shared responsibility for climate change between rich and poor countries (Roberts and Parks 2007a, 2007b);

       – the issue of ecological debt and the injustice of climate change combined with the effects of poverty and environmental degradation (Magrath 2010);

       – the issue of intergenerational domination, which can stem from a violation of the freedom of future generations through climate change (Beckman 2016).

      Environmental justice is also considered both as a category of collective action social movements (political action) and of action in public environmental policies as well as a political-legal category. The history of the idea of environmental justice is influenced by two contexts: the context of social mobilizations and the academic context (Fol and Pflieger 2010).

      In the context of social mobilizations, the notion of environmental justice, which is derived from the concept of environmental racism, has given rise to a social movement that has adapted the frameworks of action of other social movements such as academics and political actors. The term “justice” has been preferable to “equity” by the social movements of environmentalists, which refers to broadly militant usage (Fol and Pflieger 2010). Related to this trend are:

       – local and global environmental politics initiatives (Blanchon et al. 2009) in response to local social movements denouncing situations of environmental injustice, such as exposure to an environmental impact, as well as situations of unequal access to environmental resources and the marginalization of inhabitants around protected areas (Blowers and Leroy 1994; Dozzi 2008; Faburel 2008; Gobert 2008; Gardin 2012);

       – other social movements of environmental politics are responses to global initiatives that introduce social equity into environmental protection. These movements use political ecology as a theoretical tool (Robbins 2012). Political ecology also provides a theoretical basis for discussing issues of “democratization of environmental explanation” in scientific practice between scientific expertise and public participation as a factor of environmental governance (Forsyth 2003).

      Epistemologically, these two types of environmental politics initiatives demonstrate two conceptions of justice: justice as an essentially local struggle and fight characterized by the bottom-up approach deriving from the North American current; and justice as the governmental top-down approach illustrated mainly by increasingly less sectoral environmental public policies (Gardin 2012).

      According to Fol and Pflieger (2010), in the academic context, debates on environmental justice have diverged into two main areas:

       – distributive justice dealing with the identification of team beneficiaries and services with high environmental efficiency, such as public transport, sewage treatment plants and other infrastructure. It seeks to distribute justice in the light of environmental harm and effects according to social categories;

       – corrective justice dealing with the correction of the effects of actions and policies causing harm.

      These two dimensions appear complementary because this academic debate on distributive justice is geared towards the implementation of corrective environmental policies. According to the authors (Fol and Pflieger 2010), several criticisms are made on the uses of the notion of environmental justice. These criticisms reflect the debate between the political and anti-political realm within environmental politics.

      1.3.1.2. A risk of depoliticization

      Environmental governance has not escaped the risk of “depoliticization” through the claim that this type of social interaction on environmental issues is apolitical (McCarthy 2013).

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