Socio-environmental justice and its perspectives of materialization in history

a hermeneutic approach

Abstract

Introduction: the research addresses the need to analyze environmental justice from a perspective based on the concretizing hermeneutics as an instrument for the effectiveness of the normative postulates present in the legal system. As an intrinsic part of the very existence of premises that lead to a fragmented process of access to environmental justice, it is noted that hermeneutics, as a discipline and matrix of the foundations of normativity, should be considered as a channel for the institutionality and effectiveness of the rights in the environmental field. 

Objective: the work aims to establish to what extent the convergent premises of environmental justice and socioeconomic justice are interrelated so as to attribute a hermeneutic-concretive sense to socioenvironmental justice, from the examination of the ideological nature of the ecological movement, or ecologism, as well as the concretization of environmental justice in a strand of hermeneutics that concretizes such premises. 

Material and methods: the methodologies used in the research were philosophical-speculative, analytical-conceptual, philosophical-deductive and philosophical-normative, since the study has axiological-conceptual and procedural pretension. In its exclusively primary sources, the research was based on the consultation of doctrinal texts through access to bibliographic collections, such as books and articles available in scientific journals, including via the World Wide Web.

Results: three specific points can be mentioned as the main result: a) one can understand socio-environmental justice based on the investigation of the premises that are linked to holistic (environmental) justice whose convergence with the premises of socio-economic justice have been identified; b) the revisited and updated historicity concerning socio-environmental justice should imbricate a conception that effects access and its correlated rights and guarantees; c) the convergence between holistic and socio-environmental justice should be established from a perspective of resignification of sensibility and consciousness founded on an order one of high protection of human rights.

Conclusion: the theme of socio-environmental justice, besides being ethical-philosophical, is correlated to innumerable expressions of technical-scientific knowledge and social and institutional practices. Along this line of reasoning, socio-environmental justice is an unattainable goal in its ethical-philosophical fullness; however, it is achievable in its historicity. Its bases imply the possible realization, progressively and permanently revisited and updated, of socio-environmental equity and shared decision-making regarding the agenda of socio-economic and environmentally sustainable development of the various peoples and social groups. To this end, the formation and affirmation of new local, regional, national, and transnational political, economic, and legal instances is indispensable.