ADVANCING ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH ENVIRONMENTAL DEMOCRACY IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Environmental justice entails ‘fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development imperatives, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. In other words, your health should not suffer because of the environment where you live, work, play or learn.’ Environmental justice also entails effective public engagement, involvement and, in fact, public sector integration in environmental policy initiation, implementations and decision making. The pertinent question therefore is: why should the public participate in environmental decision-making? Doctrinal research methodology was utilised to explore legal and interdisciplinary literature such that primary sources like statutes, case law and secondary sources like books and journals, etc, were explored to yield black letter data analysed in this paper. In the end, we found out that environmental democracy is new to Nigeria, that government rarely involves the masses in taking decisions in environmental issues, that the Nigerian public hardly utilises the created space opportunity to crave government indulgence to public feelings on certain policies affecting the environment, that the public utilise their created space rights, government will either stifle them or pay deaf ears to the public clarion call for a policy review or change and that the public awareness in this regard is still in its lowest ebb. We recommended, inter alia, inculcation of the principles of environmental democracy in national laws, increasing the frontiers of public participation by encouraging and inviting public participation, featuring expert in policy initiatives and implementation, and increasing public awareness in environmental issues.