Sustainable Rural Community Development and Environmental Justice

Dear colleague,

Rural communities in the Global North and Global South face a wide range of challenges in the context of sustainable development. They often occupy marginalized positions relative to urban centers, serving as sites of natural resource extraction and waste disposal. Rural communities are also driven by internal conflicts associated with dynamics of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other factors. Such structures and processes of inequality present significant challenges to any prospect for sustainable rural community development.

Environmental justice, which is a vital field of scholarship, policy, and advocacy, addresses the intersections of systems of inequality and the distribution of environmental hazards and opportunities for disadvantaged populations. Many of the formative struggles of the environmental justice movement have occurred in rural communities around the world, as residents and organizations have confronted the forces and legacies of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and systemic racism. The profound inequities caused by these historic and contemporary phenomena weaken rural communities’ capacities for building sustainable economic, environmental, and social systems. Environmental justice can therefore be a valuable lens to understand and inform interventions in protecting and promoting sustainable rural community development.

Recent scholarship has chronicled key rural environmental justice struggles around the world and has raised a number of pressing questions for those committed to sustainable rural community development. Such questions as: How are efforts to promote environmentally-just rural communities intertwined with broader processes organized at regional, national and/or global scales? How do these efforts occur at the intersections of social inequalities related to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation? And finally, how are social movements using environmental justice as a framework to mobilize collective action to address problems of unsustainable and inequitable development in rural communities?

This Special Issue invites papers that address these and related questions using multiple methods including but not limited to case studies, quantitative approaches, qualitative methods, and  theoretical frameworks. Given the global focus of this journal to global concerns, we invite contributions from a range of scales including local, regional, and global. Relevant topics could include:

• Rural economic restructuring and sustainable livelihoods
• Indigenous struggles for natural resource sovereignty
• Climate justice in rural communities
• Political ecology approaches to rural communities
• Environmental contamination in rural communities
• Innovations in rural environmental governance
• The role of youth as rural community advocates
• Urban-rural divisions and their ramifications for environmental justice
• Rural communities’ place in the UN Sustainable Development Goals

This special edition seeks papers with an explicit environmental justice focus, including those that address issues of disparities in distribution of environmental hazards, amenities and/or representation. Potential authors should include a cover letter that describes how their article aligns with this focus and addresses these issues.

Dr. Jonathan London
Dr. Clare Cannon
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Rural communities
• Sustainability
• Climate justice
• Environmental justice
• Intersectionality
• Community development
• Social justice
• Rural geography
• Environmental governance
• Political Ecology
• Urban-rural interface