‘Equal Participation of All’: A study of environmental justice and vulnerability in the Resilient Melbourne and Resilient Sydney Strategies

Abstract

‘Resilient Melbourne’ (RM) and ‘Resilient Sydney’ (RS) are City Resilience Strategies (100RC, 2017) developed to prepare cities for climate change impacts and other ‘shocks’ and ‘stresses’. Through an environmental justice (EJ) lens, this research examines the 100RC’s City Resilience Framework (CRF) and the RM and RS strategy-development processes and resulting actions and priorities. A qualitative comparative methodology using document analysis and in-depth interviewing of 18 individuals found that limited consideration of embedded power structures in the CRF prevents underlying drivers of risk and vulnerability from being addressed; as such, the resulting actions of a procedurally-unjust strategy-development process will be distributively unjust. In one city, the need to gain legitimacy in a complex metropolitan governance system was a driver of the strategy-development process that was procedurally just. This research contributes the first EJ analysis of the CRF, the first comparative analysis of 100RC member cities, the first EJ analysis of a developed nation’s CRS and the first academic attention of any sort to RS.