







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 2 (1): 27–30, January 2019 

 
SPECIAL SECTION: Ecological Distribution Conflicts in India  
 

Editorial: Some Insights on the Role of Violence 
 

Joan Martinez-Alier  and Brototi Roy  
 
The term Ecological Distribution Conflicts (EDCs) was coined about 20 
years ago by ecological economists (Martinez-Alier and O’Connor 1996) to 
describe social conflicts born from the unfair access to natural resources 
and the unjust burdens of pollution. The ultimate cause of such conflicts is 
the growth and changes in the social metabolism (the flows of energy and 
materials) concomitant with economic growth. In political ecology, the 
terms socio-environmental conflict, environmental conflict or EDC are 
interchangeable. Despite the processes of technological change and 
‘ecological modernization’, unfair ecological distribution appears to be 
inherent at different scales to world capitalism, defined by K. W. Kapp 
(1950) as a system of cost-shifting. In environmental neoclassical 
economics, the preferred terms are ‘market failure’ and ‘externalities’, a 
terminology that implies that such externalities could be valued in monetary 
terms and internalized into the price system. If we accept commensurability 
of values, then ‘equivalent’ eco-compensation mechanisms could be 
introduced. Instead, the environmental social sciences such as ecological 
economics and political ecology advocate the acceptance of different 
valuation languages to understand such conflicts and the need to take them 
into account.  

While ‘economic distribution conflicts’ in political economy describes 
conflicts between capital and labour (profits vs. salaries), or conflicts on 

 
 Guest Editor and Coordinator for this special section. Institute of Environmental Science 
and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain; 

joanmartinezalier@gmail.com.  

 Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of 
Barcelona, Spain; brototi.econ@gmail.com.   

Copyright © Martinez-Alier and Roy 2019. 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.v2i1.53  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i1.53


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [28] 

prices between sellers and buyers of commodities, or conflicts on the 
interest rate to be paid by debtors to creditors, the term EDC in ecological 
economics and political ecology stresses the idea that unequal or unfair 
distribution of environmental goods is not always coterminous with 
‘economic distribution’ as, for instance, rents paid for by the tenant farmers 
to landlords, or the international terms of trade of the South American 
economy, or claims for higher wages from mining unions opposing 
company owners.  

‘Ecological distribution conflicts’ is then a term for collective claims against 
environmental injustices. There are different valuation languages deployed 
in such conflicts, and economic compensation is only one of them. In such 
conflicts, incommensurable values come into play (Conde and Martinez-
Alier 2016). 

The three articles in this special section have some aspects in common. All 
three deal with EDCs in India and accept incommensurability of values. 
The methodology used in the articles is a mix of fieldwork and secondary 
literature review, along with insights from the EJAtlas (Temper et al 2015; 
Temper et al 2018). All three articles also attempt to look at the means, 
methods and manifestations of violence in EDCs in India.  

The article by Arpita Bisht draws on her doctoral thesis and her previously 
published overview article on “ecological distribution conflicts over mineral 
extraction in India” (Bisht and Gerber 2017). In this previous work, she had 
focused mainly on metal mining. Here she focuses on another important 
element of the social metabolism of Indian economy- sand and gravel 
extraction for the construction industry and for other industries. 

 India has given some terms to the global vocabulary of environmental 
justice (Martinez-Alier et al 2016), and one of them is, in English, the term 
“sand mafia”, used by activists and journalist. Apart from the ecological 
harm, as it endangers several species of flora and fauna and alters the 
patterns of access to river beds and beaches by local people, the striking 
facet of sand ‘extractivism’ in India is the violence associated with the 
activity. 

Through comparative analysis of different instances of violence that arise, 
Bisht concludes that the sand mafia was born from the nexus between local 
politicians and extractive agents, as well as from the high profits which 
miners make from illegal activities which create unequal power dynamics. 
This economic activity leads to violence against a broad range of social 
actors from activists to police officers to peasant leaders, and involves 
verbal and physical harassment and several cases of murder of people trying 
to stop the activity. Power determines which valuation languages 



[29] Joan Martinez-Alier and Brototi Roy  

predominate – money triumphs in this case (illegally gotten money) over 
environmental and livelihood values.  

The second article in this section is by Eleonora Fanari. An Italian by birth, 
she  had spent more than five years in India, during which time she was also 
learning and working with the environmental organization Kalpavriksh in 
Pune. She has travelled in pursuit of her research interest in what we call in 
the EJAtlas “biodiversity conservation conflicts”. By this we mean conflicts 
arising between conservationist organizations and the local people, of which 
sadly there are many examples in India (as also in Africa and other world 
regions). In her article, Fanari notices how conflicts due to biodiversity 
conservation projects have been growing elsewhere in the world as well as 
in India. There can be a confluence of conservation and local interests and 
values (as in the case of the conflict on Silent Valley in Kerala some decades 
ago) but often environmental protection is implemented at the expense of 
indigenous communities living within and around such biodiversity spots, 
which in India are sometimes Tiger Reserves. The study analyses the violent 
process of relocation and displacement from some of the best-known 
protected areas of India, and examines the laws and regulations that legalize 
the relocation of communities from their ancestral land, in contrast with the 
legal recognition of community’s forest rights under the Forest Rights Act 
(FRA).  

The third article, by Brototi Roy and Joan Martinez-Alier, also deals with 
violence in some EDC s in India. The subject is enormous. Their source is 
mainly the EJAtlas (which held nearly 300 cases from India in December 
2018 in a total of 2660 cases worldwide). From the many cases of 
environmental conflict included in this and other inventories (Roy, 2018), 
they select only a few in Odisha and Tamil Nadu for examining “extreme 
violence against environmental defenders” (a variable for which India 
appears to score at the world average) to other forms of violence: structural, 
cultural and ecological. The authors draw on work by Grettel Navas et al. 
(2018) on violence in environmental conflicts in Central America, and use 
the notion of slow or silent violence in protracted conflicts that have to do 
with deteriorating human health because of pollution (as from use of 
Endosulfan in Kerala, or sulphur dioxide from copper smelting in 
Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu, or in Patancheru near Hyderabad – all of 
them are present in the EJAtlas), comparing it with cultural and structural 
violence in cases of dispossession of Adivasi population.  The article 
concludes by asking for increased south-south collaboration in academic-
activist co-produced research on environmental justice movements, 
research that would throw light on the realities of violence, which 
sometimes escape the lens of ecological economics and political ecology.  



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [30] 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

This special section is a contribution from the ENVJUSTICE project, 
funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (No. 
695446). 

 

REFERENCES 

Bisht, A. and J.F. Gerber. 2017. “Ecological Distribution Conflicts (EDCs) over 
Mineral Extraction in India: An Overview.” The Extractive Industries and Society 4 (3): 
548–563. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.03.008 

Conde, M and J. Martinez-Alier. 2016. “Ecological Distribution Conflicts.” EJOLT 
Glossary. http://www.ejolt.org/2016/04/ecological-distribution-conflicts/ 

Kapp, K.W. 1950. The Social Costs of Business Enterprise. Cambridge: Harvard 
University Press.  

Martinez-Alier J. and M. O’Connor. 1996. “Ecological and economic distribution 
conflicts.” In Getting down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics edited 
by R. Costanza, J. Martinez-Alier, and O. Segura. Washington, DC: Island 
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Martinez-Alier, J., L. Temper, D. Del Bene, and A. Scheidel. 2016. “Is There a 
Global Environmental Justice Movement?” Journal of Peasant Studies 43 (3): 731-755. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1141198 

Navas, G., S. Mingorria, and B. Aguilar-Gonzalez. 2018. “Violence in 
Environmental Conflicts: The Need for a Multidimensional Approach.” 
Sustainability Science 13 (3): 649–660. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0551-8 

Roy, B. 2018. “Ecological Distribution Conflicts in India: A Bird’s Eye view.” 
Ecologia Política 55: 24-31. 

Temper, L., D. Del Bene, and J. Martinez-Alier. 2015. “Mapping the Frontiers and 
Front Lines of Global Environmental Justice: The EJAtlas.” Journal of Political 
Ecology 22 (1): 255-278. https://doi.org/10.2458/v22i1.21108 

Temper, L., F. Demaria, A. Scheidel, D. Del Bene, and J. Martinez-Alier. 2018. 
“The Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas): Ecological Distribution 
Conflicts as Forces for Sustainability.” Sustainability Science 13 (3): 573-584. 
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0563-4 

 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.03.008
http://www.ejolt.org/2016/04/ecological-distribution-conflicts/
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1141198
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0551-8
https://doi.org/10.2458/v22i1.21108
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0563-4

