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BOOK REVIEW 
  

Building Inclusive Frameworks 
 

Lavanya Suresh  
 
Sharachchandra Lele, Eduardo S. Brondizio, John Byrne, Georgina M. 
Mace, and Joan Martinez-Alier, eds. 2018. Rethinking Environmentalism: 
Linking Justice, Sustainability, and Diversity. Cambridge and London: MIT 
Press. ISBN: 978-0-262-03896-6, pp. 302, USD 45.00 (PB). 
 

This book is an outcome of the 
discussions held at the Ernst 

Strüngmann Forum on ―Rethinking 
Environmentalism: Justice, 
Sustainability, and Diversity‖ on June 
19–24, 2016, in Frankfurt am Main, 
Germany. The participants of the 
forum, who are stalwarts in their 
respective fields, authored the chapters 
in this book. It provides a 
comprehensive review of the justice, 
sustainability, and diversity frameworks 
used to study environmental problems, 
and I am tempted to call it a reader. 

In The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel 
Kant suggested that our ideas do not 
conform to the objects of the world 

                                                        
 Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of 
Technology & Science, Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, Jawahar Nagar, Kapra Mandal, Medchal 
District - 500078, Telangana; lavanya.suresh.la@gmail.com. 
Copyright © Suresh 2020. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 
4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author. 

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007. 

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v3i2.215 

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v3i2.215


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [192] 

around us; instead, objects are defined by the world of our ideas (Kant 
1882). The constructivist approach builds on this idea and claims that 
processes, concepts, analytical frameworks, and definitions are normative 
and should be understood based on their socio-political context. 

This book falls squarely within this field of thought and seeks to provide a 
self-reflective understanding of environmentalism by considering ―how 
differences in framing environmental problems are driven by differences in 
normative and theoretical positions, as well as ways in which more inclusive 
framings might enable more societally relevant and impactful research and 
more concerted action/practice‖ (p. 154). However, the book goes beyond 
just reviewing these frameworks by calling into question the value-neutral 
claims of different theoretical and analytical frameworks applied in the 
study of environmental phenomena. Thereby, it brings the politics of 
environmentalism to the fore. The book addresses a significant gap in the 
literature on environmentalism by demonstrating how conceptual and 
analytical framings are socially constructed and are products of socio-
political power structures (p. 103). 

The central theme of the book is its enquiry into ―frameworks‖. 
Frameworks trigger a set of emotions and ideas—including stereotypes (p. 
5)—and articulate the relationship between power and knowledge that 
pervades the production of discourse and practice that, in turn, shapes 
definitions (p. 58). A footnote in Chapter 4 states, 

We understand framings as a set of concepts and perspectives based on how 
individuals, groups, and societies organise, perceive, and communicate about 
reality. It involves a social construction of phenomena. Framing selects certain 
aspects of an issue and makes them more prominent so as to elicit certain 
interpretations and evaluations of an issue. 

Therefore, frameworks are understood as epistemic developments that are 
constructed and used to understand the world (p. 75). In evaluating these 
frameworks, the authors also suggest ways to make them more inclusive. At 
the normative level, they consider a frame to be more inclusive when it 
addresses more than one of the three broad values of environmentalism: 
sustainability, justice, and diversity. At the theoretical level, the inclusivity of 
a frame is determined by its ability to incorporate or reconcile different 
representations of social and natural reality (p. 252). 

The chapters are organized into four themes: forests and other high 
biodiversity ecosystems, urban environments, energy and climate change, 
and water. Under each theme, there are descriptive chapters and one 
synthesis chapter that ties the whole theme together. Often, books that are 
a product of conferences have different papers that are put together as 



[193] Lavanya Suresh 

chapters, and there is no connection or coherence between them. This is 
not the case here. In each of the descriptive chapters, the authors remain 
faithful to the overall aim of the book, which is to evaluate how inclusive 
frameworks are in socio-environmental research. The synthesis chapter that 
summarizes the theme reflects on not only the broader literature but also 
draws upon the content in the other chapters in that section. Some chapters 
address more normative questions whereas others focus on descriptive 
aspects. The strength of this book lies in the ability of its authors to provide 
a cohesive narrative throughout the book. 

In the introductory chapter, the book’s editors set the stage by explaining 
that the book seeks to answer the question of who gains and who loses 
when different theoretical, epistemological, and socio-political perspectives 
are used to address socio-environmental problems. Chapters 2–4 address 
the theme of forests and other high biodiversity areas. In Chapter 2, Kent 
Redford and Georgina Mace focus on traditional biodiversity conservation 
and point to the malleable aspects in the definition of biodiversity. They 
argue that although biodiversity is thought of as a unitary concept, it has 
multiple meanings that differ in technical and value-based ways (p. 23). To 
understand conservation, they outline four conservation frameworks that 
have evolved since the 1960s (p. 30). This helps to shed light on a set of 
tensions underlying the way biodiversity conservation is defined (p. 34) and 
enables them to conclude that biodiversity conservation is not a term with a 
universally agreed-upon definition, but rather, it is a value proposition. 

Ecosystem services that humans derive from nature are an important 
concept in sustainability and conservation. In Chapter 3, Peter Minang 
explores the connections between values and incentives in the context of 
ecosystem services in high-diversity tropical forest systems. He highlights 
the potential linkages between held, assigned, and relational values and 
multiple incentive typologies through two main decision-making framings: 
rational choice and bounded rationality (p. 41). The chapter explores the 
implicit theory of change present in every frame that is based on an 
incentive structure. This aspect of frameworks based on incentives is rarely 
articulated in terms of the context within which the incentive will take place 
and how it will operate differently in a different setting, which is referred to 
as a theory of place (p. 51). 

The synthesis chapter for this theme, written by Leticia Merino-Pérez et al., 
presents a detailed review of how varied framings of biodiversity and 
forests approach issues of justice and governance, which, in turn, influence 
conservation and sustainable management programmes (p. 59). The chapter 
reflects on thematic and conceptual focal points: causes and drivers of 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [194] 

forest and biodiversity losses and the proposed prescriptions in different 
framings. In doing so, it evaluates the values explicitly or implicitly held by 
these frames (p. 62) in the fields of conservation biology, ecological 
economics, political ecology and collective action, and institutional analysis 
theory. Further, the chapter analyses eight initiatives from these fields that 
represent different approaches to biodiversity conservation. It addresses the 
normative concerns that drive these diverse initiatives, the interaction of 
frameworks and values, and conceptual and ethical framings about the main 
challenges faced by these conservation approaches (p. 75). 

The second theme of urban environments is covered in Chapters 5–7. The 
two background chapters in this section demonstrate how broad the theme 
of environmental framings can be. In Chapter 5, Amita Baviskar presents 
an eloquent account of how social position and political-economic power 
influence the framing of urban environmental problems. She demonstrates 
how unequal urban spaces in India operate by comparing two neighbours: 
an upper-middle-class family living in a comfortable high-rise apartment 
and their housemaid, whose family occupies a shack next door. This 
chapter argues that the power to define and address an issue as an 
environmental problem is unequally distributed and that social location and 
cultural capital shape interpretive frameworks and capacities to act (p. 85). 
This chapter stands out for its distinctive narrative style and the two 
environmentalisms it depicts (p. 139). 

In Chapter 6, Nancy Grimm and Seth Schindler use a social-ecological-
technological system framing (SETS) to discuss the nature of cities as well as 
nature in cities, which encompasses issues relevant to both the Global 
North and South (p. 99). This chapter addresses the issue that ecology is 
often hard to see in the city (p. 90), which is why the urban poor have not 
been able to wield environmentalism as a discursive resource to secure their 
interests (p. 91). The authors argue that bourgeois concerns drive 
environmentalism in cities where concerns over air and water quality are 
articulated in ways that penalize the poor while ignoring the culpability of 
other classes (p. 95). Cities continue to be ecosystems (p. 107) and the 
contrasting challenges associated with cities of the Global South compared 
with those of the North need to be seen as being interwoven into the 
design of various dimensions of cities, their infrastructure, and inhabitants 
(p. 120). 

In Chapter 7, Xuemei Bai et al. provide a comprehensive review of five 
framings of urban environmentalism—SETS, urban metabolism, complex 
urban environments, environmental justice, and cities as solutions from 
different normative and theoretical positions (p. 127). The chapter also 
addresses four conventional dichotomies that influence conceptual and 



[195] Lavanya Suresh 

analytical framings—the urban–rural framing, Global North versus Global 
South, the brown versus green agenda in cities, and private rights versus 
environmental commons. The authors then propose that a more inclusive 
definition of the urban environment will enable frameworks that take into 
consideration issues of justice and bring recognition to the fact that cities 
are complex, dynamic, and evolving systems with non-linear trajectories, 
influenced by a variety of urban constituencies (p. 128). 

The third theme of energy and climate change has two background chapters 
by Patrick Bond (Chapter 8) and Manfred Fischedick et al. (Chapter 9), who 
take the Paris 2015 Climate Agreement as a starting point. Bond traces the 
positions taken by four individual South African environmentalists and a set 
of environmental organizations that have all been highly critical of the 
inadequate progress in international climate negotiations. Chapter 8 
explores the dichotomy that is often drawn between two major civil society 
forces within climate activism: international nongovernmental organizations 
(INGOs) and grassroots climate justice activists (p. 156–159). He 
recommends that climate justice movement organizations should attempt to 
link up more decisively with each other, as it will enable them to confront 
neoliberal discourses (p. 178) directly. 

On the other hand, Fischedick et al. in Chapter 9 recognize the top-down 
character of most international climate change discourses and posit that the 
Paris Agreement allows for more decentralized, polycentric decision-making 
and design in climate change policy. They point out that local and regional 
planning and campaigns are adopted more quickly than national and 
international efforts. Decentralized efforts also put a greater emphasis on 
inclusiveness and transparency, which allows for explicit climate justice 
commitments (p. 183). Through a set of three hypotheses, the authors 
demonstrate that climate justice—with its emphasis on unequal distribution 
across local communities—has an inherent bottom-up feature and provides 
an opportunity for a polycentric paradigm that distinguishes itself from the 
mainstream techno-centric strategy of control. This will instead allow for 
creativity, experimentation, and innovation (p. 198). 

In the synthesis chapter by Sun-Jin Yun et al. (Chapter 10), there is a 
detailed typology of framing of the energy and climate debate. The authors 
draw specific attention to the increasingly problematic status of market-
based arguments and policies. They focus on discourses of climate justice, 
energy sovereignty, and green economy (p. 207). In their extensive review 
of 12 framings on energy and climate, four frames focus on the market, 
three on analytical frameworks, and five on post-market aspects of the 
economy. The chapter captures the key ideas, values, and concerns that 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [196] 

emerged from framings of the energy–climate debate and speaks of ways to 
promote dialogue among them (p. 210). 

The last theme, water, has only two chapters. Chapter 11 by Margreet 
Zwarteveen et al. addresses the issue of water accounting and how it is 
employed to solve water problems. The authors take on a social 
constructivist position and critique new science policy initiatives that 
involve water (p. 227) by addressing the performative aspects of knowledge 
(p. 231). The chapter establishes how water accounting claims objectivity by 
being characterized as modern, which, in turn, leads to its legitimization and 
all-pervasiveness. The chapter focuses on whether water accounting meets 
its own modernist claims and ends with a discussion on how water 
accounting tools can be used in less modernist ways to meet goals of equity 
and diversity, rather than just efficiency (p. 232). 

The synthesis chapter (Chapter 12) by Amber Wutich et al. examines seven 
frames in water research and analyses them based on their normative and 
theoretical positions, different views on progress (p. 252), and definitions 
and perspectives (p. 252). The chapter demonstrates how the frames vary 
widely in terms of inclusiveness and justice (p. 255). For each of the frames, 
the chapter assesses six aspects that range from their intellectual history to 
their political effectiveness. These aspects are illustrated under each frame 
through case studies. The chapter also demonstrates how inclusive 
frameworks can work in practice (p. 279). By assessing the frames on water 
through a standard set of criteria, the authors have demonstrated points of 
tension, overlap, and disconnect between them (p. 283). 

Overall, this book is an intense and lucid compilation of various dimensions 
of environmental frameworks analysed through the lens of sustainability, 
justice, and diversity. The authors convincingly argue that frameworks 
should be more inclusive. However, one drawback is the lack of a 
conclusion chapter. The focus of this book is so broad that there is a need 
to consolidate the arguments made under each of the themes. I was hoping 
that given the calibre of the authors involved in this project, they would 
have concluded the book by theorizing on the concept of ―frames,‖ which 
would have been a great addition to the existing literature on the 
constructivist approach. Nevertheless, this book is a must-read for 
academicians, students, practitioners, and activists who work on 
environmental issues. 

 

REFERENCES 

Kant, I. 1882. Critique of Pure Reason. London: George Bell and Sons. 


