Environmental justice: constitutionalism, equity, development and environmental governance in Uganda

Abstract

Justice, it has been said, is the first virtue of social institutions. Yet for much of the history of law, the natural environment remained conspicuously absent from the vocabulary of justice. Rivers were resources. Forests were timber. Wetlands were wastelands awaiting development. The earth itself was object, not subject — available for exploitation by whoever held the legal title to exploit it. It was only in the latter half of the twentieth century, as the costs of industrialisation and extractive capitalism began to fall most heavily on those least able to resist them, that environmental justice emerged as a coherent legal, political, and philosophical response to this dispossession.1 In Uganda, the environmental justice problem is not an abstraction. It is the Nakivubo Channel flooding a slum community because drainage was sold to developers. It is the oil drilling on Lake Albert proceeding without meaningful consultation with fishing communities whose livelihoods it will permanently transform. It is the wetland restoration order demolishing the home of a poor family while the large-scale developer who cleared ten times as much wetland faces no sanction. It is the Karamoja miner who leaves behind a landscape of craters and acid tailings without ever having paid a meaningful restoration bond.