Power, politics and environmental inequality: A theoretical and empirical analysis of the process of ‘peripheralisation’

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Abstract
Environmental inequality is an outcome of social inequality. This article deals with the processes of location of environmentally hazardous activities. These processes illustrate the ‘peripheralisation’ of certain, already backward, regions. The political, economic and social characteristics of these peripheries and their relation to the core areas of the state seem to reproduce the pattern of social, spatial and environmental inequality. Evidence from case studies of the location of brickmaking and nuclear waste in the UK and of the location of hazardous industry in Belgium can be used to identify the process of peripheralisation and its consequences. Some political issues, including mechanisms of centralisation and measures of compensation that emerge from these findings are of considerable analytical importance.

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