Cultivating Justice beyond Law

Thinking about justice beyond law involves understanding justice as a process that campesinos (peasants) in Colombia link to aspirations for a good life. I argue that environmental justice draws on distinctive temporalities and spatial scales. By temporality, I refer to how campesinos think about justice as a process to overcome their long history of community injustice, not as a reversal of a single event or action. I also refer to campesinos’ everyday life, through which they define the territorial management underlying their enduring social inequality. Justice does not entail fixed spatial scales but rather the interplay between forms of state and local spatial orderings that may clash or coexist. These spatial-temporal dimensions have crucial consequences for addressing environmental justice, such as redress beyond individual compensation; thinking about scale beyond legal frameworks of jurisdiction; reflecting on the unequal distribution of responsibilities for environmental changes; and addressing notions of response-ability—that is, the capacity of campesinos to respond, not only to react, with both patience and urgency to socio-environmental harms.