Colin Crawford

A Survey of Federal Agency Response to President Clinton's Executive Order No. 12898 on Environmental Justice

We are attempting to assess the progress the federal government has made toward integrating environmental justice into its policies, programs, and activities, as well as whether federal agencies have made a substantial effort to direct and deliver environmental services to environmental justice communities. We are also interested in seeing if an agencys goals are matched by reality. This independent report will also allow federal agencies to compare their efforts with those of other agencies. One of our goals is that this survey will be the first in a periodic series to assess the ongoing efforts of federal agencies to advance environmental justice.

Our Bandit Future? Cities, Shantytowns and Climate Change Governance

The effects of climate change on the worlds cities and the people who live in them is not a matter that has received a great deal of attention. The effects of climate change tend to get considered in continental or regional terms – melting ice caps, agricultural crop losses across vast swaths of land, shoreline loss that will inundate sub-continents. Alternately, the discussion tends to focus on behavioral change, again at the level of entire national populations. Crudely put, the analysis posits that poorer nations, especially those in Asia and Africa, will become poorer, while the richer nations will, if not become richer, at the least suffer fewer negative consequences of climate change. What this debate strikingly neglects is arguably the dominant demographic shift of our era, namely the global trend towards urbanization. In historical terms, it is impossible to understate the significance of this phenomenon, especially in as much as the vast majority of these in-urban migrants will arrive in the worlds cities without resources and live in slum conditions. As the world gets hotter, this seems likely to create a – perhaps literally – combustible situation. The paper therefore seeks to identify the striking inattention of the climate change literature, and especially the mainstream, U.S.-based legal scholarship on climate change, to address the effect of this environmental phenomenon on the world’s mega-cities and their extensive mega-slums. The paper further suggests that most analysts and scholars have failed adequately to address the phenomenon of global urbanization, failing to appreciate the ways in which, for example, people (and especially elites) in developed and developing countries benefit from urbanization in less-developed countries. The paper then traces a connection between these two phenomena, arguing that the climate change debate and the search for legal solutions to help combat climate change need take more careful account of global urbanization. The paper concludes by offering possible models for greater participation of the urban poor in the search for solutions, specifically endorsing the possible application of participatory budgeting experiments used across the world.

Uproar at Dancing Rabbit Creek : battling over race, class, and the environment

Noxubee County, Mississippi was selected as the site for a toxic-waste disposal facility because its people are poor, undereducated, predominantly black and politically powerless. Crawfords vividly written narrative gives a full account of this instance of environmental racism, and the efforts, so far successful, to end it. Photos.

The Political Economy of Legal Knowledge in Action: Collaborative Projects in the Americas

Legal knowledge is a commodity directed by a political economy constituted by precise rules and principles. Examining the political economy of legal knowledge contributes to understanding routine practices that determine ways we create, exchange, and use legal knowledge. This chapter describes a decade’s worth of dynamic programming led by two law schools—Tulane University (New Orleans, USA) and the Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, Colombia)—to promote joint academic research among scholars across the Americas. It applies conceptual tools to understand practices in legal thought creation and describes how they are typically characterized by a dominant global North partner and a subordinate global South partner. It concludes by offering normative criteria for collaborative processes for legal knowledge construction.

ACADEMIC COLLABORATIONS IN THE AMERICAS: SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LEGAL KNOWLEDGE

The article proceeds in three parts. The first, the articles’ analytical heart, considers the political economy of legal knowledge. It describes briefly the free market of legal ideas and the colonial model for the production of legal knowledge. It illustrates how these two models work using examples from our “South-North Partnerships” (SNP), that is, our collaborative practices in the creation of legal thought as they play out in the legal academies of the global North and South. The second part is both descriptive and reflective, focusing on four different SNP examples that illustrate challenges in the creation of truly collaborative legal knowledge production processes. It identifies common challenges in these endeavors, from surmounting basic organizational issues such as language barriers to jostling with fundamentals like conflicting academic calendars. Most importantly, the second part indicates how the dynamics of the political economy of legal knowledge played out in the SNPs described. It also highlights possible ways to equalize these relationships and activities, with an end to creating SNPs focused on truly collaborative legal knowledge production. The third part offers conclusions and recommendations.