Environmental Justice - Social Distribution, Justice Evaluations and Acceptance Levels of Unfavorable Local Environmental Conditions

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Karin Kurz; Professor Dr. Peter Preisendörfer
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 257644768

The proposed study, which includes four sub-projects and pertains to Germany and Switzerland, aims at a broader establishment of environmental justice research in the German-speaking countries. Research on environmental justice, which began in the US in the 1980s, mainly deals with patterns of unequal social distribution of local environmental threats among different population groups. Our study will focus on four research questions: First, do urban citizens see local environmental conditions as an important aspect of their quality of life, and are there significant differences of these priorities according to social strata? Second, what is the social gradient, i.e., differences according to social strata, of unfavorable local environmental conditions in German-speaking cities? Third, to what extent does the urban population judge the distribution of local environmental threats as unfair, and which individual and situational factors affect these justice evaluations? Fourth, under what conditions can one expect urban citizens to accept or, conversely, protest against unfavorable environmental conditions in the neighborhood, and what is the role of justice considerations and justice evaluations in this process of the formation of political protest? The main data of the study will be mail surveys, with about n=1,000 citizens in each case, based on official population registers of the four metropolitan areas Rhine/Main (Frankfurt, Mainz, and Wiesbaden), Hannover, Zurich, and Berne. These data will be supplemented by a follow-up online survey of those who participated in the mail survey and by qualitative interviews with experts in the start-up period of the project. The measurement of subjectively perceived local environmental threats (traffic noise, air pollution, etc.) is the central task of the mail survey. An innovation and challenge will be the approach to capture also the objective local environmental threats. This will be managed by geo-tagging the home addresses of the respondents of the mail survey and merging additional geographical environmental data with the addresses. Also innovative is the use of a choice experiment and a factorial survey in the follow-up online survey to gather information about personal priorities of local environmental conditions, subjective justice evaluations and individual acceptance/protest levels when faced with environmental risks in the neighborhood.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Partner Organisation: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF)
• Participating Persons: Professor Dr. Andreas Diekmann; Professor Dr. Ulf Liebe