Geoforum 37 (2006) 725–738 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum 0016-7185/$ - see front matter  2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.10.005 Global environmental sustainability: Intragenerational equity and conceptions of justice in multilateral environmental regimes Chukwumerije Okereke School of Politics, International Relations and the Environment, Chancellors Building, Keele University, StaVordshire ST5 5BG, UK Received 9 February 2005; received in revised form 11 October 2005 Abstract With speciWc focus on two environmental regimes (the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and the Climate Change Convention), this paper seeks to indicate the prospects and limitations of the aspirations for distributive justice by the political South within the context of sustainability in general, and the institutions for global environmental governance in particu- lar. It is argued that while these aspirations have produced important normative shifts in the rule-structure of global environmental man- agement, they have not proved momentous enough to generate policies outside of what the prevailing neoliberal socio-economic regime might permit. Hence, although the texts of global environmental agreements accommodate concepts that express egalitarian notions of justice, core policies remain Wrmly rooted in market-based neoliberal interpretations of justice, which mainly serve to sustain the status quo.  2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Environmental justice; Intragenerational equity; Conceptions of justice; Neoliberalism; Global environmental governance; Neoliberal justice; Regimes 1. Global sustainability and social justice Ideas of justice are now a very prominent feature of discussions on environmental sustainability. Contrary to traditional approaches in which the notion of environmen- talism was Wrmly linked with the preservation of endan- gered (non-human) species (cf. Pinchot, 1910; Leoplod, 1968; Naess, 1973; Lee, 2000, pp. 31–48), it is now the case that ‘some of the main controversies surrounding the paradigm of sustainable development and ecological secu- rity involve questions of justice’ (Conca et al., 1995, p. 279). Although there remain some variations in the way respec- tive authors and policy designers seek to operationalize the concept of sustainability, ‘considerations of social justice, especially, are integral to almost all inXuential deWnitions’ (Benton, 1997, p. 23). The anatomy of environmental injustices within some speciWc countries has been extensively reviewed, following especially the “Anti-toxic campaigns” in the United States (Bullard, 1994; Szasz, 1994; Pullido, 1996; Camacho, 1998; Turner and Pei Wu, 2002). These reviews commonly indi- cate that the “unavoidability of justice” (Shue, 1992, p. 373) in the pursuit of sustainability resides in the fact that envi- ronmental issues are not distinguishable but rather inter- woven into the fabric of racial, social and economic justice (Szasz, 1994, p. 82). One of the clear ways in which this man- ifests, according to Hayward (1997, p. 1), is ‘that the eVects of environmental degradation are not necessarily experi- enced as costs by the people who cause – and most beneWt – from them.’ In other words, that environmental costs and beneWts are so distributed such that those who already suVer other socio-economic disadvantages tend to bear the great- est burden. Thus understood, environmental degradation and ecological crisis for a wide majority of people becomes, as Lorraine Elliot puts it, ‘symptomatic of a broader struc- tural oppression and silencing’ (Elliott, 1997, p. 147). E-mail address: c.okereke@envss.keele.ac.uk