Network analysis of keywords
The network analysis of keywords of 755 articles (S1) that explicitly used a justice-oriented term in their keywords, title, or abstract allowed us to visualize the professional conversation on justice in the field. Greater size and darkness of keyword nodes reflect the greater influence of the keyword (its centrality to other keywords). This does not necessarily mean they are mentioned more, though this is often the case, but that they appear together with other terms the most often. This is a measure for how
influential they are in terms of cohering and organizing other terms. The distance of nodes from one another indicates how often they appear together in the same text: the closer they are, the more often they appear together. For the unfiltered version, see
Appendix B.
The most central keyword in the S1 corpus is a distributive justice-oriented term: occupational health, a term used to describe how and whether certain types of workers are more likely to be exposed to harm due to their job, and (or) how often they suffer the consequences of that exposure. In traditional EJ literature in the social sciences, distributive justice refers to the uneven distribution of burden and benefit, including the need to recognize key differences that lead to inequitable distribution (
Schlosberg 2007). It is a core model of justice within published scientific studies of plastic pollution.
After occupational health, justice-oriented keywords have very little betweenness centrality in the corpus, and instead descriptive keywords related to plastics such as phthalates, microplastics, plastics, marine litter, recycling, and bisphenol A link the professional conversation together. We interpret this to mean that even when articles that feature justice terms in their keywords, title, and abstract, the professional conversation is not cohering around such terms so much as around types of plastic pollution.
Finally, the network analysis allows us to look at the distance between clusters to see which conversations are occurring together, and which are occurring independently. Studies in plastic additives are more represented in the corpus, as they are more likely to use justice-oriented terms in their writing. Distributive justice terms such as socio-economic class, children, adolescents, and pregnancy organize this nexus.
Justice terms such as ethics and EJ are closer to conversations about chemical additives and farther from the conversations about marine plastics, marine litter, and plastic pollution as a term itself. One way to interpret this split is that the plastic chemical conversation and the aquatic plastics conversation have different dominant models of justice: distributive (about uneven harms) and developmental (about industry solutions), respectively.
When we turn to the bare frequency of keywords, we see that the number of times a keyword is used is not the same as its influence (betweenness centrality). While “occupational health” and “occupational exposure” are the most central keywords, they are mentioned in only 9 and 11 papers, respectively (total: 20). More common keywords are phthalates (37 papers), which also has the second highest centrality, and BPA (31). This aligns with the keyword network analysis in that types of plastic pollution organize the corpus more than models of justice. However, “children” (16 papers) and “pregnancy” (13 paper), while not central terms, are the fourth and seventh most common keywords, respectively and, like occupational health, are ways to talk about distributive justice and the uneven impact of plastic additives on different groups. Likewise, “recycling” and “circular economy” appearing in 15 and 12 papers, respectively, are linked to developmental justice. Even with these clusters, however, there is little cohesion in the corpus as a whole, since these figures are based on 755 articles, so even the highest count at 37 papers accounts for only 5% of the corpus.
Distributive justices
Distributive models of justice are well-defined in traditional EJ literature. They might be considered a suite of approaches that focus on the systematic, inequitable distribution of harms, burdens, benefits, and liabilities across populations differentiated by race, indigeneity, geography, occupation, socio-economic class, gender, age, and other social stratifications (
Whyte 2017, p. 116;
Pulido 2017, p. 2;
UNEP 2021, p. 13). In the plastic pollution literature, we identified several reoccurring ways that these
differences or
social locations were understood and used.
Upstream and downstream approaches
There are different approaches to understanding where the differential distribution of plastic pollution harms comes from and thus where interventions might best occur. We frame these approaches as “upstream” or “downstream” because they locate responsibilities for harm variably along the value chain, from oil and gas extraction (upstream) to consumer choice (downstream), and variably between systems that produce unevenness such as racism (upstream) to symptoms of those systems such as racialization (downstream). Upstream approaches are closer to how distributive justice is understood in the EJ literature outside of the sciences, where harm is a result of complex and interlocking systematic oppressions and their material effects. Alternatively, downstream articulations of distributive justice locate the problem in waste disposal practices and consumer behaviour, often naturalizing both the production of plastics (pro-developmental justice) and the unevenness of its effects (distributive justice).
Within EJ literature, there are two main types of distributive justice: one that focuses on distributing benefits and burdens more equally so certain groups are not consistently overburdened with harms while others consistently gain the benefits, and another that seeks to guarantee protection from environmental degradation of any kind for all people (
Clayton 2000;
Blue et al. 2021). EJ professional Mike Ewall states that the two strains “represent the fundamental difference between the concepts of ‘poison people equally’ and ’stop poisoning people, period’” (
Ewall 2012, p. 4). We find these two strains in our corpus. Upstream distributive justice mainly aims to decrease overall plastic or chemical production and even occasionally challenges the structural oppression that leads to social stratification to begin with. Downstream distributive justice focuses on evening out or mitigating the harm experienced by certain populations, such as through appeals to public education.
Global and fence-line geographies of injustice (upstream)
For decades, fence-line distributive justice has been the classic framing used to address the inequitable distribution of harms associated with chemical production and pollution (
Bullard 2018). It emerged as a way to show how industrial production facilities, mines, pipelines, and landfills – and the pollution they produced – tend to be sited near low income, racialized, and Indigenous communities. A classic example is the 1987 report,
Toxic wastes and race in the United States: A national report on the racial and socio-economic characteristics of communities with hazard waste sites, which found that three of every five (60%) Black and Hispanic Americans and approximately half (50%) of all Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native Americans lived in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites (
Chavis and Lee 1987). The report showed that race was the most significant variable – greater than socio-economic status – in the siting of hazardous waste facilities in the United States (see also
Tishman Environment and Design Center 2019;
UNEP 2021). Because of this focus on production, fence-line distributive justice is often aligned with critiques of developmental justice.
A key characteristic of fence-line distributive justice is its use of a structural analysis that attributes harm to discriminatory
systems rather than irresponsible
individuals or events (
Bullard 2018). In other words, fence-line distributive justice distinguishes between race and racism, class and capitalism, and gender and patriarchy in its diagnoses of the problem. Instead of framing the condition of
being Black or poor as risk factors for certain exposures or forms of harm – which essentializes difference and locates responsibility in the individual – traditional fence-line distributive justice emphasizes the systems of exploitation (e.g., racism and capitalism) that create and distribute risks in inequitable and predictable ways (
Pulido 2017). For instance, the report
U.S. Municipal Solid Waste Incinerators discusses how the siting of plastic incinerators in poor and racialized communities “is not a coincidence but rather it is a product of historic residential, racial segregation and expulsive zoning laws that allowed whiter, wealthier communities to exclude industrial uses and people of colour from their boundaries” (2019, p. 13).
Table 4 outlines examples of this type of harm in the corpus.
Related to fence-line distributive justice, we identified a specific upstream articulation of global geographies of injustice in articles that discussed relationships between the Global North to the Global South (a useful but imperfect categorization for looking at distribution [
Dirlik 2007, 15]). According to a UNEP plastics report, “the increasing disconnection of economic benefits and ecological costs of the global economy has created opportunities for exploitation by more powerful actors from the Global North, while also complicating the attribution of liability” (2021, 14). GAIA’s report
Discarded: Communities on the Frontlines of the Global Plastic Crisis (2019) emphasizes how waste exports from wealthy countries overwhelm the infrastructures of, and offload an array of environmental and health problems to, lower-income countries in Southeast Asia. In their article on global plastic and climate governance, Stoett and Vince underscore that it would be constructive to consider the historic plastic footprints of European and North American countries where industrial processes and large-scale plastics production were first innovated, rather than just contemporary snapshots (2019, 350). This framing of distributive justice illuminates the globalization of the fence-line by highlighting not only the concentration of global plastic disposal in the communities of developing, coastal, and island nations but also the upstream culpabilities of overdeveloped Global North governments and industries. Although there are many articles in our corpus that investigated global distributions and sources of plastic pollution and might have aligned with this model of justice, we found arguments of global fence-line distributive justice mainly in grey literature, social science, and journalistic sources (
GAIA 2019;
Petrlik et al. 2021), despite many articles that investigated global distributions and sources of plastic pollutions that had findings that would have aligned with this model.
The global or fence-line distributive models of justice become complicit in mis-attributing disproportionate responsibility to more disempowered Global South agencies. An example of this misattribution can be found in
Jambeck et al. (2015) article, which argues that 83% of marine plastic debris is generated by 20 countries, most of which are developing countries. Jambeck et al. go on to frame the global plastic pollution problem as an issue of developing countries’ waste “mismanagement” (2015, 770).
GAIA (2015) and
Liboiron (2021) specifically critique this article’s misdiagnosis of injustice for overlooking the ways in which historical and contemporary processes of colonialism and imperialism craft such data, narratives, and waste flows to begin with. Thus, global economies of both plastic production and waste export complicate where upstream and downstream occur, as well as provide challenges for the use of global data.
Occupational health (mixture of upstream and downstream)
Occupational health is the most central keyword in our corpus (
Fig. 2). This field has an implicit framing of distributive justice in that it focuses on exposure to harm for mainly blue-collar workers and looks upstream in terms of investigating whether/when industry is the source. These studies emphasize the disproportionate disease burdens borne by workers through exposure to polymer-associated chemicals and particulates in specific industries and informal sectors, including synthetic textile manufacturing, plastics manufacturing, construction, waste picking, and beauty care work (
Huang et al. 2011;
Wright and Kelly 2017;
Fucic et al. 2018;
UNEP 2021;
Varshavsky et al. 2020).
In its most upstream articulation, occupational distributive justice in the literature considered inequitable occupational distributions of harm in the workplace in relation to the racialized, gendered, and classed nature of labour divisions, particularly in the production of plastics and plastic additives (e.g.,
DeMatteo et al. 2012). These studies often found that women, Indigenous peoples, racialized, and working-class people tend to face higher occupational exposures due to the kinds of jobs available or assigned to them not only in production and manufacturing but also in blue collar service and waste disposable industries (
N’dri et al 2015, p. 16;
Varshavsky et al. 2020;
UNEP 2021). In their pilot study on Vietnamese American nail salon workers, for example, Varshavsky et al. found that Vietnamese nail salon workers in California – most of whom are low-income women – are disproportionately exposed to phthalates in comparison to the general population (2020, p. 10).
However, some studies straddle upstream and downstream approaches. Although these studies concede that exposure is linked to occupation, they forward a developmental model of justice by advocating for downstream solutions: more rigorous occupational health surveillance via personal biomonitoring tracking systems, educating workers and doctors, conducting more research, providing better protective gear to workers, and improving workplace safety practices (
Fucic et al. 2018, p. 5;
Varshavsky et al. 2020, p. 12). That is, these studies do not align the problem (distributive) with the solution (developmental), which allows distributive injustice to continue, even if mitigate).
Naturalizing difference (downstream)
There is high agreement in the literature that there are strong race, class, sex, gender, and age disparities in terms of which populations carry the highest risks and burdens of plastic pollution (for a summary, see
Bergman et al. 2013, as well as
Adeyi and Babalola 2019;
Belova et al. 2013;
Nelson et al. 2012). In all cases, these studies use cultural categories of difference to identify uneven harms. At the same time, rather than pointing upstream to issues of racism, classism, sexism, ageism, colonialism, capitalism, and other systems that organize populations through differential privilege and oppression, they almost always direct their attention downstream, either to consumption behaviour and choices or innate biology. For example, in nearly all cases, the analysis of racialized disparities stops at ethnic differences and expresses uncertainty as to why such differences occur in product consumption and thus chemical exposure (e.g.,
Kobrosly et al. 2012, 15). This lack of explanation and conflation of race and racism leaves room for potential blame of exposure on racialized individuals for using certain consumer products. When researchers use racialized categories for comparison but do not take into account that plastic packaging is often related to affordability, cultural practices, and the types of stores that surround communities of colour, they collapse racism into race or ethnicity. By decontextualizing distributive injustice into categories of difference rather than systems of differentiation, studies can mis-align a distributive model of justice with developmental justice.
This trend is compounded when disproportionate burdens of plastic pollution along lines of race, sex, gender, and age are attributed to biology. For instance, multiple sources attributed the larger plastic toxicity burdens borne by women to “particular biological vulnerabilities” (
DeMatteo et al. 2012, p. 428), “women’s specific biology” (
UNEP 2021, p. 19), or to their use of certain consumer products (
Arbuckle et al. 2015, 283), rather than to patriarchal social arrangements that constrict women to occupations of increased exposure like the household labour or informal waste picking (
Lynn et al. 2017). That is, the problem is located in women rather than sexism, which risks legitimizing uneven harms (
Moore et al. 2003). Like the trend in occupational health, many of these studies turn to the scientific development model and call for more research or enhanced biomonitoring of “vulnerable” populations (
Arbuckle et al. 2015, p. 281;
Kobrosly et al. 2012, p. 16), accruing resources to those least impacted (white collar researchers). This is another example of misalignment of models of justice within a single text (see
Table 5).
Research bias and distribution of harms (upstream)
The final type of distributive justice turns its attention (as we did above) to uneven power relations in scientific research, joining a wider multidisciplinary trend (e.g.,
Carter et al. 2021;
Liboiron 2021;
Mervins 2022;
Robertson and Hairston 2022). A number of articles tacitly pointed upstream towards university institutions, funding agencies, and dominant research cultures as the sources of inequitable distributions of scientific attention, studies, personnel, and resources, and the negative impacts of this maldistribution. In their review paper on women workers’ chemical exposures in the plastics industry for example, DeMatteo et al. assert gendered biases in occupational health research. They argue that when occupation is considered without also considering gender, they find that the most impacted workers – women – are missed (2012, p. 440). In our literature review, there were only a few studies,
DeMatteo et al (2012) among them, that considered the unique
intersection of two or more markers of difference (
Crenshaw 2017). While many studies considered multiple markers, they used a one-at-a-time approach.
Because this finding has direct ramifications for research design and methodology, we highlight two articles that take an intersectional approach using geography and either socio-economic status or indigeneity to analyse research biases and gaps.
Blettler et al. (2018) argue that not only are freshwater environments massively understudied in plastic pollution research compared to marine environments, but that existing research on freshwater pollution does not even address the most polluted rivers. They argue that these research biases are produced through socio-economic differences between developing and developed countries (2018, 422. Also see
Melvin et al. 2021 for a similar argument around plastics research in icy regions). Likewise,
Liboiron et al. (2021) found that 100% of research leads who studied surface water plastics in Inuit homelands were not Inuit and were not from Inuit homelands “despite the existence and excellence of Inuit researchers” (2021: 21–22). Liboiron et al. posit that this results “in an overall regional skew of knowledge” (2021: 23) divergent from local research needs (also see
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami 2018).
Procedural justices
Procedural justice focuses on equitable access to decision-making processes, political representation, and bargaining powers in the development and enforcement of laws, regulations, policies, and other legally binding instruments (
US EPA 2015;
UNEP 2021, p. 13;
Whyte 2017, p. 117;
Clayton 2000, p. 461). It typically recommends increasing the consultation and participation of marginalized communities in polity decision making as the solution to environmental inequities. We found that this traditional definition of procedural justice is rarely articulated in scientific plastic pollution literature. Even in the considerable literature on occupational health, rarely do recommendations focus on worker participation in the development of health and safety policies or measures. Even when articles call for broadening participation, they argue for inclusion of “researchers, citizens, industry representatives, and commercial monitoring laboratories” (
Coffin et al. 2021, p. e3000932) rather than those most impacted by exposure or harm.
However, we identified two interrelated examples of procedural justice that do appear regularly in the literature: expert appeals to policy in general and critiques of weak governance structures in particular. Both are usually aligned with distributive and anti-developmental justices.
Scientific appeals to policy
Rather than advocating for better decision-making representation of marginalized or often-harmed groups, it was exceedingly common for researchers to make recommendations on behalf of these groups. Many advocated for scientists to be better represented in plastics governance so they could better represent harmed groups. Yet grey literature originating in social movements critiqued this model, arguing that scientists often speak over and obfuscate marginalized populations’ own priorities and knowledge in direct contravention of traditional ideas of procedural justice (
GAIA 2015).
Critiques of weak governance systems
Another model of procedural justice in the corpus makes more explicit critiques of governance structures, infrastructure, and power. Direct criticism of weak governance systems, such as how insufficient regulations and enforcements create asymmetrical risks and harms, appeared in several articles (e.g.,
Njeru 2006). For instance,
Korfali et al.’s (2013) study on phthalates in children’s toys on the Lebanese market criticizes the Lebanese Standards Institution for failing to set appropriate national criteria for levels of toxic chemicals (2013, p. 380). In the North American context, scientists have critiqued current dose-based regulatory conventions for failing to capture the low dose toxicities of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) (
Charboneau and Koger 2008;
DeMatteo et al. 2012). For example, Charboneau and Koger’s paper on the connection between EDCs and developmental disabilities condemns the affinity between government and industry, and the US EPA’s reliance on chemical manufacturers’ data (2007, p. 125). Social science research such as Njeru’s critiques of how economic instruments and anti-littering campaigns in Nairobi, Kenya individualize systemic issues of colonialism and capitalism is also part of this model of procedural (2006, p.1047). While critiques such as these do not always posit methods for achieving procedural justice, they do articulate areas of procedural injustice to be addressed.
Environment-first justices
Although “EJ” appears as a keyword in 1.5% of articles, the fifth most common occurrence in our heterogenous corpus, in most cases, these articles articulated an
anthropocentric model of justice, meaning they focus on humans and even used developmental justice models. To deal with the conflation of terms, we use the phrase “environment-first justice” to refer to a suite of justices that centre nature, animals, land, ecosystems, or other non-humans over humans as primary rightsholders or stakeholders deserving justice (e.g.,
Healey and Pepper 2021;
Sunstein and Nussbaum 2004;
Nash 1989).
In the reviewed published scientific literature on plastic pollution, we find no
explicit references to this model of justice, but many
implicit statements and study designs that posit the inherent goodness or importance of nature, animals, and (or) ecosystems and frame harm to them or interruption of their habitats or bodies is wrong or unjust. This most often manifests as a passing introductory statement that plastics cause harm to animals and (or) ecosystems, even when the study is not about animals or ecosystems. For example,
Mofijur et al. (2021, p. 2) provide a paragraph on “the death and injury of aquatic birds, fish, mammals, and reptiles”, and the “suffocation of the ocean floor” in a paper that is primarily about the sources and socio-economic impacts of marine microplastics. Others refer to plastics as “intrusions on natural ecosystems” (
Stoett and Vince 2019, p. 345) or provide other statements that centre the environment.
A subtle but pervasive evocation of environment-first models of justice is the way studies are designed. Thousands of studies focus on the impacts of plastics on animals even when that animal is not directly relevant to humans as a biological model, health indicator, or as part of the human food web (e.g.,
Lin et al. 2020).
Bläsing and Amelung’s (2018) summary of how microplastics negatively impact the reproduction, growth, and mortality of earthworms has been used by the United Nations Environmental Programme to argue that microplastics in soil are in contravention of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDGS) #15: life on land (
UNEP 2021, p. 20).
For environment-first justice, we include only studies that do not foreground humans. This means that assessments of risks to ecosystems services or harm to animals that are understood as harm to human well-being, etc. are excluded because they remain anthropocentric (e.g.,
Beaumont et al. 2019;
Silva et al. 2018, p. 153;
Khan et al. 2019, p. 33054).
Environment-first models of justice and tensions in science
Due to the frequency of environment-first statements in science, researchers have investigated the pervasiveness of implicit critiques of animal or ecosystem harm in studies that do not investigate such harms.
Rochman et al. (2016) found that 27% of claims of harm in scientific articles are what they call “perceived” (stated without scientific evidence) rather than “demonstrated” (through the findings of the paper) and that many perceived impacts are articulated at the ecological level (rather than organelle, individual, or species levels). That is, scientists are making claims that plastics have negative impacts on ecosystems when those claims are not scientifically proven within the study. Our interpretation of Rochman et al.’s findings is that nearly a third of scientists in the study (n = 366) are expressing an environment-first orientation regardless of their research questions or methods (2016, p. 306).
In an interview, conservation scientist and plastic pollution researcher Alex Bond has said that, “As a scientist, you have to take a step back and almost detach yourself from the situation. But as a human being, when I cut open a dead bird and see bottle caps, tetra-pack lids and balloon clips gushing out of the stomach, it just breaks my heart. You think, ‘God, there’s no way that this has not severely affected this bird.’ But that’s a different thing than the scientific weight of evidence” (
Bond and Liboiron 2018). Rochman et al. and Bond illuminate the same tension, that scientists who forward an environment-first model of justice often do so without toxicological or other scientific measures of harm in contradiction to scientific models of evidence that do require such measures.
There is a small but overt conversation in the scientific literature on plastic pollution that
science is a potential cause of harm to animals, nature, and (or) ecosystems. Some scientists actively develop non-invasive methods to research plastic ingestion without the need to kill or even disturb animals, such as using ematics (pharmaceutical agents that induce regurgitation) and lavage (pumping the stomach with water) (
Bond and Lavers 2013), visual identification of plastics in bird’s nests (
Grant et al. 2021), boluses (
Bond et al. 2021), and scat (
Donohue et al. 2019). Some, though not all, of the articles cite animal welfare as the reason behind researcher’s choice to develop or use non-lethal methods.
Indigenous sovereignty
Indigenous models of justice are based on responsibilities to land, broadly defined, and “the worldviews, philosophies, and knowledges of Indigenous peoples [are] central tenets in defining Indigenous environmental justice concepts” (
McGregor 2018: 10). Kyle Whyte writes that for Indigenous peoples, “Environmental injustice can be seen as occurring when these systems of responsibilities are interfered with or erased by another society in ways that are too rapid for Indigenous peoples to adapt to without facing significant harms that they would not ordinarily have faced” (
Whyte 2016). These models of justice are different than including Indigenous peoples in distributive justice models, which is based on an ethic of inclusion into the settler state (
Gilo-Whitaker 2019;
Coulthard 2014;
McGregor 2014). They also differ from environment-first justice, where considerations of animals and ecosystems are not based in responsibility to them as articulated through Indigenous nations, law, cosmologies, and governance. As such, these models of justice cannot be led by non-Indigenous peoples, though it can certainly be respected and followed by all scientists regardless of their origins.
Though versions of these models of justice have existed since time immemorial (
Borrows 2010), only one peer-reviewed
scientific article in the corpus truly used this model, which had an Indigenous lead author (
Liboiron et al. 2021). Other sources outside the scientific corpus include those in the social sciences and humanities (
Njeru 2006;
Altman 2021;
Shadaan and Murphy 2020;
Liboiron 2021), magazine articles and blog posts written by two Indigenous scientists (
Ngata 2018;
Liboiron 2018;
Ngata and Liboiron 2020), and an NGO campaign (
GAIA 2021). While other scientific publications do address connections between Indigenous peoples and plastic pollution, they consistently forwarded non-Indigenous models of justice (e.g.,
UNEP 2021;
Perovich et al. 2018, p. 8). We will cover two core topics in these articles: plastics as a colonial injustice and the role of colonialism in plastic pollution research. We describe Indigenous models of justice with detail despite their rarity because non-Indigenous readers may not be familiar with them.
Plastic pollution as colonial injustice
Most sources articulated plastic pollution as a colonial
injustice, arguing that plastic and “EDCs are materially a form of colonial environmental violence” (
Shadaan and Murphy 2020, p 1) and that plastic waste management is part of an ongoing “struggle to overcome the inequalities of colonialism” (
Njeru 2006, p. 1056). In a special issue on plastic pollution in
Science, historian Rebecca Altman makes the case that bio-based plastics were not only “extracted under colonial regimes” but also were core drivers of Indigenous dispossession and sites of resistance (2021, p. 48). GAIA’s #StopWasteColonialism Campaign is based on “the effects of waste colonialism in the African continent. … Where our resources are returned to us, in the form of waste and cheap products made from toxic recycled materials. Where plastic waste has infiltrated its way into our land, oceans and physical bodies, severing our cultural connections with the earth and violating our rights to a clean and healthy environment” (
GAIA 2021). Other sources argued that plastic pollution is a form of colonial injustice because it interrupts Indigenous food sovereignty and Indigenous relationships to fish and other aquatic life (
Ngata 2018;
Ngata and Liboiron 2020).
Colonialism in plastic pollution research
One scientific study on marine plastics called for “reconciliation science”, where “existing and ongoing Indigenous research relations should never be divided from scientific study and reporting” and should be characterized by “respecting Indigenous sovereignty” (
Liboiron et al. 2021: pp. 2, 11). This text outlines how access to Indigenous land by non-Indigenous scientists, even when that access is for benevolent or well-intentioned environmental science, perpetuates non-Indigenous entitled access to Indigenous land (
Liboiron 2021). The authors provide examples from existing plastic pollution research where researchers do not or may not seek consent, permissions, or permits for conducting plastic pollution research on Indigenous lands. They note that “of the 18 peer reviewed articles collected in our systematic literature review where Indigenous permits were required… five (28%) mentioned whether a permit from an Inuit Nunangat [Inuit homelands] research center was obtained” while more mentioned permits from settler Canadian government agencies even though both are required (2021, p. 8).
The same study found that all research on plastic pollution on surface water and in ice in Inuit Nunangat was led by non-Inuit researchers, resulting in all research on plastics stemming from the research interests and skills of white, settler, Western-trained scientists (
Liboiron et al. 2021, pp. 8-9). These trends are in direct contravention of both the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) that outlines Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination in any aspect of knowledge or policy concerning their lands (
United Nations 2008) and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami’s (ITK’s) National Inuit Strategy on Research (NISR), which seeks to change the norm wherein “the primary beneficiaries of Inuit Nunangat research continue to be [non-Inuit] researchers themselves, in the form of access to funding, data and information, research outcomes, and career advancement” and seeks to change this norm (
ITK 2018, p. 5). Outside of Indigenous lands, the same finding is reflected between freshwater plastic pollution research conducted in the global north versus global south with the majority of research “performed in Europe and North America (67%)” and 69% in developed countries compared to developing ones (
Blettler et al. 2018, pp. 418, 420). While this paper critiques power relations of dominant science institutions and colonial geographies, it did not examine whether the few studies in developing nations were conducted by “parachute” researchers from developed nations or by local researchers.
Models against Indigenous Sovereignty
We also saw a consistent trend in published literature that implicitly worked
against the Indigenous Sovereignty models of justice: many peer-reviewed articles claimed to be the first to know about plastic pollution in Indigenous lands, even when they also acknowledged Indigenous people were part of the research who lived in the area and thus knew about plastics (e.g.,
Laglbauer et al. 2014;
Lusher et al. 2015;
Mallory et al. 2021;
Huntington et al. 2020;
Pinzone et al. 2021). In almost all cases, these Indigenous co-researchers were not named or listed as authors. Attribution experts Anderson and Christen write that, “Firsting [stating that a researcher is the first to do or know something] is a linguistic act that supports and makes possible the physical act of taking: it is, fundamentally, an act of settler-colonial attribution. Firsting names something in order to erase what was before it—eliding both a previous existence and continued presence. Firsting, then, is a mechanism that supports a colonial property paradigm of possession through taking, naming, and attributing” (
Anderson and Christen 2019, p. 121; see also
O’Brien 2010). As such, taking up Indigenous Sovereignty models of justice in science would require changing cultural norms in the field, including but not limited to claims of novel knowledge in Indigenous homelands and attributing Indigenous knowledge from hunters, fishers, guides, and associations to non-Indigenous authors (see
ITK 2018 for more).