Broadening democracy against environmental justice: The example of Montreal borough councils

Abstract

In this reflection, through observation of citizen participation in several local Montreal municipal councils, I examine whether and how people discuss environmental issues. More specifically, I seek to determine whether the politicization of environmental issues favours the expression of environmental justice. I use this term to refer to the social dimension of environmental questions, given that people of different social classes or identities are not affected by environmental issues in the same way. Does the politicization of environmental issues reproduce an unjust social order or does it encourage the struggle against inequalities? The answer reached here underlines the predominance of politicization through the challenging of democratic processes rather than a substantive politicization (where citizens debate the content of issues and discuss values or identities), which hinders the emergence of environmental justice. This study makes two contributions. First, it points out that, beyond conflict, addressing the avenues that conflict takes is vital. Second, while most analyses consider environmental justice within civil society organizations and on the “margins”, this reflection tackles environmental justice within institutions themselves, namely the favoured places of production of social norms. Apprehending the role of institutions in the politicization of environmental issues is, thus, crucial to highlighting some aspects of social framing and the place of environmental issues in society.

Keywords

Environmental justice politicisation local democracy conflict Montreal

In a context of growing inequalities, examining how they are publicly discussed is all the more important; it is arduous to struggle against the unnamed. In this regard, the politicisation of environmental inequalities is crucial. Processes of politicisation determine whether a social issue exists in the public sphere, how it is framed and, thus, discussed. Politicisation of environmental topics directly impacts public awareness of environmental inequalities and citizens’ ability to make connections between their daily life and environmental issues. Highlighting the politicisation of environmental topics is thus essential for understanding the difficulty of discussing environmental justice in the public sphere. I address this question by examining several Montreal borough councils. My aim is to illustrate how the politicisation of environmental issues in these local political bodies can favor or hamper the expression of environmental justice—defined as the disclosure of the unequal consequences of environmental issues and policies on citizens (Larrère, 2017). This line of inquiry shifts away from traditional ways of thinking about environmental inequalities by investigating neither the margins of society nor the “new participatory bodies” (Agyeman et al., 2009), but rather the conventional paths of representative institutions and the everyday dimension of inequality-making. Since institutions remain powerful agents for transforming society or reproducing the established order, and margins exist only in relation to norms—in a dialectic with a centre—it is vital to grasp how some issues are brushed aside within this institutional framework.

The cases studied here offer an interesting puzzle. While the literature has underlined the necessity of conflict in both spurring politicisation and raising advocacy (e.g. Martinez-Alier, 2002), I found that although conflict was present—people objected to the decisions made by their elected officials or challenged their positions—environmental social justice topics were absent in the case of environmental controversies. Solving this paradox involves thinking about the link between the politicisation of environmental issues and the voice of environmental inequalities not only by addressing conflict but also people’s ways of engaging in such disputes. More precisely, I argue that, in the cases observed, the evaporation of the environmental justice dimension is due to politicisation processes built around a procedural conflict rather than a conflict in substance. The question of social inequality in environmental topics refers to a form of social justice that tackles the issue of resource sharing and takes the unequal impacts and costs of environmental concerns into account (Larrère, 2017; Renouard, 2015). When citizens only address only the formal quality of the democratic process, they make the values, identities and interests at the heart of environmental issues invisible. This focus on respect of the rules erases the social categories relevant to airing environmental inequalities.

I will present my case in four parts. After presenting my conception of politicisation and environmental justice (next section), I expose my methodological framework (Method section). In the empirical section (Results – The politicisation of environmental concerns: A hurdle in the face of discussions about justice section), I show two distinct ways of politicising environmental concerns: that is, either by using a substantive argument (when citizens express general grievances), or an argument about democratic processes (when citizens talk about an environmental controversy). In the discussion (Discussion and conclusion: Ambiguities and the meaning of politicisation of environmental issues section), I highlight how debating democratic processes through a procedural argument prevents the emergence of environmental justice. Finally, I propose some explanations for the predominance of this type of argument.

Politicisation and environmental justice

Politicisation refers to the processes that make an object political. Defining the processes of politicisation therefore implies defining politics. One definition of the term associates politics with the political system: issues become political when they are discussed in a political space or addressed by an element of the political system (political parties, pressure groups). However, such a perspective does not allow us to consider the avoidance of politics within institutions (Eliasoph, 1998). It also overlooks the fact that almost any object can potentially become a political issue (Fraser, 1997; Young, 1983). My analysis therefore requires a definition of the processes of politicisation that does not limit the definition of politics to particular places or objects. Therefore, politicisation must be thought of as the process of giving voice to a wide circle of concerns and a transition of the discussion from the private to the public sphere. According to some theorists of democracy, the public sphere is the place for public-spirited debates (Eagleton, 1985; Calhoun, 1993). In such debates, citizens are able to draw the public consequences of their personal demands and to assume that what they say or want matters to someone other than themselves (Eliasoph, 1998: 15). In other words, politicisation is associated with “a rise in the level of generality,” echoing the speaker’s will to build a bridge between self-interest and the common (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991; Hamidi, 2006; Eliasoph, 1998).

To illustrate this conception of politicisation in the context of this research, I refer more specifically to environmental issues and borough councils. In the city of Montreal, borough and municipal councils are responsible for green lanes, landfills, zoning, the use of automobiles, water quality, and public transportation. They deal with spaces shared by pedestrians, bicycles, and cars; pollution and cleanliness; access to environmental amenities¹ for very different kinds of individuals (in social, economic and ethnic terms); and the possibilities of reconciling development, urbanism, and an ecological vision. These elements can be approached as purely administrative issues from a personal point of view: my street is dirty and without shade, when are you going to clean it and plant trees? These words do not affirm a sense of connection to the wider world. In contrast, a political discussion can be opened if citizens of a disadvantaged area point out the lack of parks in their neighbourhood and the resulting heat islands by underlining the advantage of more affluent areas in this respect. However, the process of politicizing an environmental issue does not always lead to a discussion in terms of environmental justice, which must consider the environment-related social inequalities (Taylor, 2000).

The notion of environmental justice is complex: what constitutes the environment varies considerably, as does the meaning of justice (Haluza-Delay et al., 2009; Scholsberg, 2013). The environment pertains to nature, green spaces, the sustainability of natural resources, and climate change, but also to more immediate amenities, such as neighbourhood parks, the availability of safe water, and public transit options, in addition to connections and the status given to animals. The definition of the environment is thus rarely self-evident but depends on the particular political and cultural background. It assumes a conception of the links between humankind and nature, and the different ways of thinking about these links can alter perceptions of the boundaries of the environment and challenge the nature-society dualism (Descola, 2013; Norgaard, 2011).

The concept of justice, to which the literature attributes three dimensions, may also take on a diversity of meanings. Distributive justice concerns the unequal distribution of wealth, while procedural justice reveals that the design and procedures of the legal or institutional system involve unequally distributed resources and skills, thus creating inequalities of treatment and participation (Fraser, 1997; Young, 1983). The last dimension of justice, recognition, affirms all collective identities deserve the same respect and sheds light on the embedding of the justice system in a framework of power and values. The basis of injustice is thus not exploitation but cultural domination (Fraser, 1997).

Politicisation processes act as a filter; they define how environmental issues will be addressed, and which perspectives of the environment and justice flow from them. For example, the two environmental controversies examined here—transforming a street into a pedestrian zone, or clearing a woodlot to build social housing—can be seen only as an administrative problem: the length of the street, the numbers of trees and parking spaces allowed by municipal rules. In contrast, they can be politicised as either a social justice problem (the balance of social housing in the city and the contribution of wealthier neighbours in this regard, i.e. distributive justice). They can also be embedded in environmental justice, whereby citizens evoke both the social and environmental dimensions of the social housing project.

The operationalisation of the notion of politicisation should therefore capture not only the broadening of concerns previously mentioned but also the social categories mobilised through this process in order to gauge how politicisation has filtered the results. With this in mind, citizens’ broadening circle of concerns is linked to the two following elements (Hamidi, 2006). The first involves public-spirited conversation as defined in Pitkin (1981): when citizens speak in terms of justice. Such conversation includes a transition from “I want” to “I have the right,” a demand that becomes negotiable by referring to public norms. In this way, citizens learn to think about the norms themselves and about their interest in the norms’ existence. They question the foundations of their community and the arguments and interests of their “opponents and enemies in the community; so that afterwards [they] are changed” (Pitkin, 1981: 347). This last point introduces the second element of a “rise in the level of generality:” the possibility of turning issues into conflicts, or the creation or accentuation of divisions (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991; Duchesne and Haegel, 2007; Gamson, 1992). These divisions are related to the definition of oneself within a group opposed to other groups (“us” against “them”) and to the demand for resources—processes at the heart of political regulation in society (Gamson, 1992).

In order to reveal the social categories underlying these broadening concerns, I use notions of social and symbolic boundaries in my analysis. Symbolic boundaries point out “conceptual distinctions made by social actors … [that] separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and group membership.” In contrast, social boundaries are institutionalized (recognized officially or enshrined in law). They are, therefore, “objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to an unequal distribution of resources … and social opportunities” (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 168). These boundaries reflect struggles and (im)balances of power among the groups and are highly mutable (Bail, 2008). People compete to transform some symbolic boundaries into social ones, or, conversely, to blur social boundaries. The groups’ symbolic boundaries, or groupness, are the result of this competition, and they are negotiated through both self-identification and perceptions of out-groups, as well as conditioned by the context in which individuals and groups find themselves.

Unveiling the symbolic and social boundaries shaped by the politicisation of environmental issues sheds light on how they are framed by the councils observed. When politicisation is based on conflict, what are the foundations of this conflict and the social categories involved? In other words, how are “us” and “them” defined—according to class identity, ethnic identity, or any other boundary? What are the “objective” boundaries, such as those between rich and poor, urban and rural populations, that are symbolically obscured, and what are the boundaries that are highlighted? Notions of symbolic and social boundaries are also useful in exploring a conception of justice that does not preclude a division between “us” and “them” (Renouard, 2015). The definition of the boundaries underlying the demand for justice can be bifurcated, echoing the previous distinctions mentioned: procedural justice and/or substantive justice. In the case of procedural justice, the boundaries are traced according to respect for rules or rights, the idea being that all citizens should be able to participate and be treated equally. In the case of substantively defined justice, social and symbolic boundaries are based on concrete groups and issues, such as the enunciation of territorial injustices that cut across different social or ethnic categories.

Questioning the politicisation of environmental issues bridges the gap between two fields of research, that of environmental studies and that of democratic transformations, which, particularly in Canada, have been the subject of separate developments. A first body of research deals directly with the notion of environmental justice by focusing especially on its intersectional dimension and impacts on traditionally disadvantaged and racialized people, mirroring the results of other international research (e.g. Bullard and Wright, 2009; Getches and Pellow, 2002; Haluza-Delay et al., 2009; Maclaren et al., 2006; McGurthy, 2007; Norgaard, 2011; Scholsberg, 2013). Much of Canadian research has exposed the colonial inheritance of the country and the different facets of systemic injustice that Indigenous people endure in terms of treaty and land claim processes, recognition of culture and rights, quality of life and safety (i.e. quality of air, water, and land), and sharing territories and resources (resource extraction by outsiders on unceded territories, for example) (e.g. Agyeman et al., 2009; Jafri and Okamoto, 2007). The impacts of racialization and poverty on the absence of environmental justice is not limited to Indigenous lands. The poorest immigrant neighbourhoods in Canada, home to the country’s industries and landfills, also suffer from the highest levels of pollution (e.g. Jerrett et al., 1997; Keil et al., 2009). The intersectional point of view, without explicitly using the language of environmental justice, has been instrumental in demonstrating that a number of political movements deal with similar problems, as environmental issues overlap with others, such as health, food security, neighbourhood equity, and human rights advocacy (e.g. Agyeman et al., 2009).

A second body of research, while not directly addressing the topic of environmental justice, has explored how environmental movements have transformed citizens’ relationships to politics and democratic practices. For example, Dufour et al. (2015) show how protests against shale gas development in Quebec demonstrate a recent transformation of activism and “do it yourself politics.” Faced with a lack of institutional possibilities, citizens try to resolve problems and initiate social change themselves. Other studies have discussed the political dimension of non-traditional political movements linked to environmental demands, i.e. green consumerism or the eco-food movement (Kennedy et al., 2018). Such practices, characterized by both the politicisation of daily life and a fear of contention, can be useful to organizations in overcoming periods of abeyance and encouraging an interest in politics (Yates, 2015). However, the impacts of these practices are unimpressive, even when the only aim is to introduce cultural change in society (Szasz, 2007). These findings are consistent with those of studies on transformations of democracy. The latter point out that the rejection of conflict and antagonism, associated with a political system deemed corrupt, would not be detrimental to citizen engagement. However, avoiding conflict would impede the struggle against inequalities as citizens favour a non-confrontational and local level of action and the “do-able” in the short-term, without challenging power (Bennett et al., 2013; Eliasoph, 1998).

Bringing these fields of study together makes it possible to highlight how the environment redraws the relationships between citizens and politics and, conversely, how political institutions of representation circumscribe the formulation of environmental issues in the public space.

Method

My argument is based on a qualitative multiple case study analysis in three borough councils, Outremont, Park Extension-Villeray-St. Michel, and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Côte-des-Neiges (NDG-CDN), in Montreal, Canada. The three above-mentioned councils illustrate a relatively representative spectrum of environmental situations and access to environmental amenities.² Outremont is a bourgeois neighbourhood, where ecological concerns are at the forefront of city planning, and the neighbourhood has one of Montreal’s most abundant green canopies. The district of Park Extension-Villeray-St. Michel is among the poorest and most multi-ethnic in Montreal, with a large immigrant population, and its citizens have the least access to green space among the three boroughs (Montreal, 2011). NDG-CDN presents an intermediary context, with people belonging to different social and ethnic groups whose access to environmental amenities varies. The demographic composition of the audience reflected that of the borough territory. As in other instances of representative democracy, participation of new arrivals is difficult. This is particularly true in Park-Extension, where the borough council meetings are held mainly in French, and which has seen a recent wave of allophone immigration. In Outremont, one of the elected representatives is part of the Hasidic minority in the neighbourhood, and members of the community participate in the council meetings. In addition to “ordinary citizens,” leaders of borough community groups attend meetings on behalf of their organizations, often to follow up on specific issues. They may also mobilize their members to take part in question periods. Two groups were particularly active in the cases analysed here: the housing co-operative in Outremont (whose members' economic status was below the borough average) and the community group La maison d'Haïti in Villeray-Park-Extension-Saint-Michel. There were about 50 people usually present at the monthly council meetings in the three boroughs, but more came when the topic of conversation was to be controversial or raised citizens’ concerns.

Through these examples, I was able to analyse cases that are not typically studied together and to ascertain how different individuals address the same questions of environmental justice. To gather data, I used a multisite collective ethnography approach (Bennett et al., 2013). I attended all the monthly borough council meetings, accompanied by a research assistant (who, when she could not attend, watched the session online) (see Appendix); together, we wrote the field notes and did the coding. Conducting research in this way allowed me to observe events through multiple lenses, increasing the reliability of data and analysis. My observation activities took place from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2017, except in the case of Park Extension-Villeray-St. Michel, where they began in 2014 as part of my preliminary investigation. During this period, my assistant and I did not witness any substantive politicisation of any environmental controversy in the three boroughs. Therefore, I decided to integrate into the analysis an observation made during another 2013 study (Patsias, 2016), which revealed environmental politicisation processes through a substantive conflictual approach. This addition does not invalidate my conclusion (the absence of substantial politicisation of environmental controversies and the disappearance of environmental justice), but it is helpful in examining the processes that make politicisation possible through substantive conflict.

The study of the councils’ meeting minutes and local papers’ reports completed this observation. The latter were useful for gauging the potential gap between the environmental issues raised in the council meetings and those encountered by the city.

In Table 1, I have summarized the theoretical concepts at the core of my interpretation and the questions to which they refer during the observation.

Table 1.

Analytical grid.

Criteria of politicisation processes	Symbolic and social boundaries expressed through politicisation processes	Questions guiding the observation
References to rights and justiceFrom “I want” to “I have the right to”	Definition of types of rights pushed to the forefront: individual, collective? Procedural rights or substantive rights?	How do people within the council meetings observed discuss justice or injustice? Do they discuss rights and how?
Building of conflict “Us” versus “them” Expression of antagonistic interests and groups supporting these interests	Definition of groups and categories engaged by the construction of “us” versus “them”	Definition of stakes and interestsEvocation of conflicts behind the issues at stakeWhat are the elements of group identity: Social or economic class, ethnic identity, other?

Table 2.

Summary of observations: politicisation of environmental issues and expression of environmental justice.

	Expression of simple grievances in the municipal councils under examination	Environmental controversies
	Three borough councils	Outremont social housing and Park Extension pedestrian area controversies	St. Michel’s waste sorting controversy
Reference torights and justice	– Claiming of procedural rights:enlargement of representative democracy– Claiming of substantial rights: distributive justice and environment as a right for all citizens, including the poor and future generations	Procedural rights with respect to the exercise of democracy: failure of democratic processes. No or weak expression of substantial rights	Substantial justice: unfairness of the ecological burden
Building of conflict	Poor versus rich or poor neighbourhood versus rich neighbourhood. Citizens against power of “big” corporations or agencies	Citizens respectful of the law versus those who do not respect the law Citizens versus elected representativesNo expression of conflicting interests	St. Michel’s inhabitants versus those of other neighbourhoods. The poor versus the rich. Conflicting interests of those who pay the cost of environmental policies and those who take advantage of these policies
Expression of environmental justice	Environmental justice with a redistributive dimension– Defence of the children, future generations– Unequal access to green amenities and different environmental policy costs,– Challenging the capitalist lifestyle	Discussion about the quality of democratic processes obscured the discussion on environmental justice	Environmental justice with an accent on redistributive justice (social classes and the environment)

Results – The politicisation of environmental concerns: A hurdle in the face of discussions about justice

This analysis aims to investigate how the citizens observed discuss environmental issues in front of their elected representatives, and whether these discussions contribute to the emergence of environmental justice topics. While research has indicated the importance of conflict in the debate to express inequalities and environmental justice (Bennett et al., 2013; Larrère, 2017), the more the environmental stakes were embedded in a confrontational discussion or a controversy, the more the expression of inequalities and environmental justice were not aired by citizens. To highlight this point, my argument has distinguished between two instances: when environmental stakes are presented in the borough council meetings removed from any heated debate, such as a general grievance, and when they nourish conflict and controversy.

Environmental issues through general grievances: From the improvement of daily life to the emergence of a green living environment

At the municipal level, some studies have suggested that, during the question period, a focus on the individual and special dimension of a demand may favour political engagement, but in a way that is selfish, constricted, and confrontational, as the structural or collective roots of an issue have been obscured (Bellah et al., 1985; Putnam, 2000). My results contradict this point of view. The environmental stakes raised by citizens are certainly rooted in their daily lives, but the citizens observed were able to politicise them. For example, in Park Extension, citizens’ request for collective gardens was based on political arguments about the degrowth theory and resource sharing. In front of the elected representatives, they also stressed that collective gardens that are not divided into individual plots (unlike community ones) permit the sharing of crops and the interaction of different communities in the neighbourhood.

Even when citizens defended strictly individual interests (improving their lanes), they used broader arguments: the role of the back alley in greening the neighbourhood, in cutting off traffic. Not only were they aware of inequalities vis-à-vis the green living environment but they also expressed these politically and stood up for an improvement in their neighbourhood. In NDG-CDN, when a councillor answered a citizen’s appeal for a better bikeway by beginning with “your plea,” the citizen curtly replied: “It is not my plea, it is our collective concern; the place of cars in big cities is a crucial issue for future development, and we ask for a general plan and investment.” In the same borough, the representative immediately incorporated a citizen’s question about collective transportation into a reflection about social inequalities:

In NDG, we have different profiles of citizens. On the one hand, we have citizens who have their own cars and do not need the buses that much, and, on the other hand, we have citizens who are dependent on public transportation. Who is using the buses? Poor people who are less likely to be citizens, and politicians deny them, which is very different from what is going on in Westmount [a very wealthy city adjoining NDG-CDN].

The recurrent demands to protect parks also reaffirmed a concern regarding the common dimension of the environment and social justice. People focused on the need for such a public area in a neighbourhood “where trees and green space were rare and where few people could afford vacations” (quote from a member of a citizens’ committee in the Park Extension council).

In contrast to the citizens described in Eliasoph (1998), the NDG-CDN citizens’ demands for a comfortable, pleasant, and clean daily living environment did not induce them to omit crucial political questions, and the citizens observed did not focus solely on green lanes or avoid more difficult issues such as the road network or waste management (NDG-CDN council, October 2016). Supported by their representatives, people were also able to link a local problem to a national and democratic problem of governance. For example, discussions concerning a pedestrian access road crossing the railway lines emphasized that even though the railway's impacts were major on the neighbourhood's territory, local elected officials had no jurisdiction in this matter. The decision was the prerogative of Canadian Pacific. The railway company was not accountable to the citizens and even the local elected officials had difficulty in reaching its representatives (Park Extension council).

Through their environmental concerns, the citizens challenged the question period’s rules or their councillors. In all the council meetings examined, “This is not a debate” was a constant refrain used to call to order people who were too vocal. However, some “delinquent”³ citizens resisted. When the mayor, upset by the repetitive dimension of a citizen’s question about the preservation of a park, suggested he stop talking, the latter replied, in an angry tone:

“It is professionalism!” and he continued to add some other points to his question, but the mayor interrupted him.

The citizen got angry and said, “I am not finished yet.”

The mayor replied, “Go ahead! Ask your 17 questions.”

The citizen then shot back, “I paid 45 to 50 dollars to come here! So here is the question: What have you done for the preservation and redesign of NDG Park as Memorial Park?”

In all three boroughs, citizens participated in ways that opened a path to politicisation. They were community-minded and showed a kind of sociological imagination, which encouraged the expression of different dimensions of environmental justice.

Environmental controversies: The predominance of politicisation in challenging democratic processes

In this section, I focus on three projects, all with a potential environmental justice dimension, which were very controversial, exacerbating divisions and conflicts in their respective communities.

The construction of cooperative social housing units in Outremont: Regarding Norway maples, Paul Eluard, and (subdued) class struggles

In Outremont, in 2016, a controversy concerning the construction of cooperative social housing units in a park divided the citizens. From the outset, the project—which was developed by civil servants of the Montreal housing office without any consultation with the borough’s elected representatives and officers—raised opposition among citizens who reproached the cooperative’s defenders, both for eliminating a wooded area (specifically, eight Norway maples) and for obstructing the view onto a nearby building. However, the defence of the wooded area by those who opposed the cooperative was based mainly on a technical discussion of the project with the elected representatives.

The ecological dimension of the speeches was reduced to a presentation about the Norway maples. A green activist gave an expert report (which resembled a natural sciences class) about the health of the trees, but never tried to justify the impacts or the necessity of a wooded area for a community. He in no way established a link with the citizens’ quality of life or with any right to green amenities. In contrast, he focused on the report’s content, and reproached the mayor for breaking her promise to preserve the wooded area. The discussion was devoid of any political dimension. It was the mayor’s answer that, by using the words “social housing” for the first time, shifted the debate away from its purely technical and apolitical focus:

Our team is very proud of the work achieved over eight years. We asked that a hundred trees be planted per year. Eight hundred new trees over eight years: we have respected our commitment. I feel strongly about accomplishing this; we must respect the agreement about the construction of the University of Montreal campus, which requires 30% social housing. It is a municipal piece of land that is sold or donated to build social housing, coops, educational residences, or possibly sponsored social housing. So I want this project to happen: I’m determined. There were a lot of pitfalls. I believe you when you say that I had promised to respect the trees; if you say so, I believe you … I do not want to rain on anyone’s parade, but I want the project to be completed.

She concluded by recalling the low numbers of social housing and cooperative units in the district. The mayor’s argument was pursued neither by the cooperative’s opponents nor, paradoxically, by its defenders. The latter never did mention inequalities faced by lower-income people. An argument about the legitimacy of the social mix was not advanced. Instead, defenders of the coop responded to the opponents’ technical argument with equally technical points to justify their delay.

A member of the cooperative: “We work very closely with our group of technical resources⁴ but the rules are not established by us. They need the elected representatives’ approval. As for us, the processes were respected.

During all my years of observation, I never witnessed any cooperative member evoking the social status of the cooperative’s future inhabitants. People seemed to have endorsed the idea that the legitimacy of discourse in the public sphere was rooted in expertise instead of unfairness. The cooperative’s opponents no longer discussed the issue of inequalities raised by the mayor. Instead, they resumed the green activist’s argument about not respecting a democratic promise.

A citizen: “Mr. Girard [the official’s surname], you mentioned that you were simply at the administrative level … but this resolution is not merely a matter of administrative details. If you and the other councillors pass it tonight, it is a blank check, which will invalidate the vote of June 2015! You shoot yourself in the foot, in the heart and in the head, Ms. Mayor, since you are going back on a democratic resolution.”

The mayor: “You’re laying it on pretty thick.”

“These are images, as Eluard said: words do not lie. In July, the official told me that any proposal concerning the plan for a subdivision should respect council’s previous resolutions. How is it that Proposal 47, which plans to eliminate 80% of the wooded area … How is it that such a proposal, that does not respect that of June 2015, is even presented to the borough council?”

“There have been talks between the city centre, the project’s proponents and the borough from the beginning, and as I explained to Mr J., I wanted to be sure that the resolutions do not postpone this project indefinitely … We must decide because, without a shadow of a doubt, the elected officials want this project to progress.”

Citizens opposed to the project were however able to raise the level of generality by addressing the quality of the democratic process. They felt that it was unfair because the mayor did not respect her previous electoral commitment. Citizens defended a conception of democracy built on representatives’ strong accountability and citizens’ trust in the system.

Opponents’ arguments helped to circumvent NIMBY syndrome, and I wondered whether the use of procedural or ecological arguments could, perhaps, be a front to conceal NIMBY attitudes: citizens wishing to thwart the arrival of poor people in the district. Although this is unclear, people did seem very outraged and sincere in their commitment. Also, the green activist belonged to a well-known and very active environmental group that was considered to be progressive. However, as was the case for the procedural argument, not only did the environmental argument, enshrined in an expert and technical dimension, eclipse the question of inequalities, the environmental defence also worked against the idea of tackling social inequalities.

The layout of the new urban Place Castelnau in the Villeray neighbourhood: Arguing about different interests without expressing them and dividing the community

The project to pedestrianise and green Castelnau street in order to create a new public square in the Villeray neighbourhood gave rise to the same phenomenon as in Outremont, with a more pronounced erasure of environmental issues. A pilot project was launched in the summer of 2015, and the experiment was renewed in the summers of 2016 and 2017. The idea of a car-free section and the removal of parking areas triggered debate among citizens, as well as shopkeepers. Opponents primarily feared that the lack of parking areas would harm local business. However, this argument was not the first one raised in the council meeting. Instead, during the May 2015 session, the representative of the opposing shopkeepers pointed out that the borough failed to consult citizens on the issue.

Ms. Lefebvre [the elected representative] knows why we are here tonight. We are here about the Castelnau project. In a democratic society, we have to accept a decision with which we disagree if we are satisfied with the transparency of the process, but here the process was very opaque. We legitimately expected to be consulted; they told us that we would be consulted at some point, and it did not happen. We are extremely disappointed by the process behind the final decision.

The elected representative shared the concern for transparency and added that this project had been publicized for a long time as well as that it was her second electoral commitment. The question about the quality of the consultation was repeated every time the project’s opponents came to council.

Although opponents mainly chose to contest the project by challenging the quality of democratic processes, the expression of conflict between different interests sometimes emerged. In reply to opposition from one group of shopkeepers, the representative pointed out that other shopkeepers were very satisfied with the new Place Castelnau. She focused on new urban development trends, which confirmed the role of pedestrian areas in keeping families in central districts. She concluded by citing the need for tactical urban planning and used the example of Times Square in New York. On another occasion, the shopkeepers’ representative said that they did not all share the same interests, and that “it was more difficult for some people than for others.” However, in each case, people quickly returned to the procedural argument, and the emergence of an argument about interests was not enough to allow for the expression of the environmental issues connected to pedestrian areas: the decrease in the numbers of cars in cities, and revitalization through a green approach in some neighbourhoods.

Whereas this debate was subsumed during the municipal sessions, it was very present on the elected representative’s Facebook page. On this page, there were two strongly opposed perspectives on development; some citizens even went public with a petition in favour of Place Castelnau. A citizen complained to the council that this page nourished conflict and divisions within the community:

You have triggered a war among the citizens by pointing out on Facebook things for and against business; you denounced us publicly. This is shameful. You have divided the community to win. I demand your resignation.

If the debate between the citizens and the representative was intense, it was just as heated among the representatives. When the mayor claimed that trade was decreasing this year, another representative (a proponent of the project) commented scathingly:

“ … I would like to know where you got your data.”

The mayor replied, “I have got no data; I take the street in front of Place Castelnau four times a day, and I have got eyes to see and I did not see people.”

“But you represent the authorities here, and you said that you based your analysis on data, and it is wrong.”

“Ms. Lefebvre, we are not going to debate here.”

“…Would it be right to draw conclusions from what is only your own feeling … ?”

In this controversy, conflict was strongly voiced but was limited to challenging the democratic processes. Paradoxically, whereas citizens accepted fervent debates about the processes, the expression and explanation of divisions in substance, as on the representative’s Facebook page, seemed intolerable to those who feared divisions and conflict within the community. Not only was there no politicisation of environmental issues, but these issues were also ignored by the municipal council.

The implementation of a waste-sorting centre in the St. Michel neighbourhood: Concerning backyards, and full backyards

In 2013, the inhabitants of St. Michel spoke out against the implementation of a waste-sorting centre in their neighbourhood. The opposition to the project, supported by community groups well established in the neighbourhood, particularly by La maison d’Haïti, was strong, both within and outside the borough council. In contrast to the previous examples, this case illustrates substantive politicisation and led to people advocating for environmental equity. This affair peaked at the February 2013 council meeting: opponents did not bother with a technical argument, instead immediately focussing on social injustice. After having emphasized that the St. Michel neighbourhood already hosted “everything that the other districts of the city” rejected, such as the municipal dump, a citizen at the microphone declared:

It is not because we are a poor neighbourhood that we must accept everything.

In addition, when the mayor invoked the need to await the results of studies commissioned by the public consultation office, the representative of the coalition replied:

You have to put yourself in our position: “Yes, yes, we will wait for the studies.” For us, this is not the case. We do not need the studies. What are you going to do to support us in this process?

She continued:

We are for the treatment of organic matter, but not regardless of our health and safety … Go look elsewhere, Mr. Tremblay [the mayor of Montreal in 2013], because our backyard is already full.

Another citizen added:

To prove that there is no bad odour, do it in the city centre.

In these dialogues, the group refuted the technical and scientific dimension of the problem. It was not a question of the quality of the composting, but rather one of an unfair choice, which made the poor bear the burden of sustainable development. Not all citizens were shouldering the environmental cost equally. The expression “our backyard is full” explicitly referred to NIMBY syndrome, and reflected it back to the administration by highlighting the project’s environmental unfairness. The elected representatives’ arguments echoed citizens’ complaints at the city council meeting and before the press.

It should be remembered that St. Michel is home to the largest recycling centre in the city and the biggest snow disposal site and is the regional centre for the towing and storage of automobiles. In addition, the neighbourhood has been the city’s old garbage dump for many years. St. Michel’s citizens are fighting for social equity.⁵

Environmental discourse is not inherently progressive: it can establish conservative policies or reinforce inequalities (McGurthy, 2007). The cost of remediation, which benefits everyone, can be imposed on poor neighbourhoods, whose opposition is depicted as selfish (Hermansson, 2007; McGurthy, 2007). Unlike the examples in Outremont and Park Extension, the arguments raised by the project’s opponents in St. Michel allowed them to grasp and denounce this dimension publicly. The neighbourhood advocacy groups, with a clear repertoire of contention, bolstered citizens’ opposition. The injustice did not lie in the failure of democratic processes but in the idea of two categories of people: haves and have-nots, privileged and oppressed. And people were not reluctant to claim that they belonged to this latter group. Table 2 summarizes the results of our case studies:

Discussion and conclusion: Ambiguities and the meaning of politicisation of environmental issues

Environmental concerns present in local councils are being expressed in creative ways, which illustrates a rise in the level of generality. However, curiously, politicisation remains difficult when environmental issues are part of a controversy limited to a conflict concerning democratic processes, which circumvents any substantive debate.

The ambiguities of politicising environmental issues by challenging democratic processes

This study has shown that people do not fear procedural conflict. In fact, they could be very antagonistic towards their elected representatives when this was the case. By addressing representative processes and the power of elected members, the citizens in this study helped to extend the limits of representative democracy. In the council meetings observed, citizens contested the length of time allotted for questions and their limited ability to reply to the representatives. They no longer conceived of question periods as being a simple exercise in accountability but wished to initiate debates on some topics. When they spoke, they defended the idea of improved participatory democracy and demanded an increase in transparency and consultations, in addition to traditional municipal council meetings. This type of argumentation allows citizens to raise environmental issues with municipal councils and to propose a broad definition of them.

From this point of view, citizens became empowered with regards to both environmental questions and municipal citizenship. However, the conflict about procedures and political innovation that stems from these issues makes the emergence of explicit discourse on environmental inequalities difficult.

Insisting on procedural boundaries prevents any substantive discussion that could engage the social categories necessary for the articulation of environmental inequalities. Taking these categories into account implies considering justice that goes beyond the procedural dimension, namely, questions of fairness in access to participation mechanisms and in the rules of said participation.

Tackling environmental inequalities requires confronting problems of (re)distribution of power and access to territories and resources according to social and racial affiliations. “Challenging inequality is further bound up in the conflict of identifying groups as haves and have nots, privileged or not privileged, to show some belonging” (Bennett et al., 2013: 541). These categories are necessary for the defence of marginalized or low-income groups (Rancière, 1995). As Zizek (1999) has argued, political conflict is the domain in which disadvantaged populations can make demands for increased recognition. By pitting “those who respect the rule” against “those who do not,” the conflict over procedures erases previous categorizations.

For example, in the discussion about the pedestrian dimension of Place Castelnau, emphasizing the legitimacy of participatory processes is detrimental to the confrontation of two different visions of urban spaces. The question of reconciling a green approach and business development remains implicit, as is that of the place of families in the neighbourhood. In the case of Outremont, environmental groups argued that the mayor had reneged upon her electoral promise to protect the neighbourhood’s trees. This reproach was anchored in a technical vision of ecology in which injustice was not to be found in citizens’ unequal access to the environment but rather in not respecting the proper rules required by this type of project. Procedures and science were used to avoid any substantive discussion on social justice and thereby reduced ecology to mere scientific knowledge, erasing its social dimension.

The predominance of procedural conflict in the politicisation of environmental issues

This research contributes to the discussion about environmental controversy in borough council meetings, showing that the predominance of procedural conflict prevents any substantive conversation. In this section, I will discuss four possible explanations for this phenomenon.

A first potential cause of the predominance of a procedural dimension could be people’s ignorance regarding environmental issues or their incapacity to politicize these topics. However, Place Castelnau was an element in the municipal campaign of the representative supporting the project, part of a larger discussion about the place of family in the neighbourhood and the importance of a new green urban vision for the next generations. Moreover, in Outremont, as in Park Extension, everyone was aware of the substantive topic at stake. The debates about democratic processes could be considered a ploy used by certain actors to advance their cause, which, however, remained an important one. None of those for or against the project were unaware of this point—the debates on Facebook were unequivocal in this regard. Each time the underlying, tangible social conflict was named, it was promptly buried once more, as in the dialogue between the elected representative and the citizen about Place Castelnau. The citizen had stressed that he represented shopkeepers unhappy about the impacts of Place Castelnau, the councillor replied that others were satisfied, after which both promptly returned to a discussion about the processes, not the diverging visions and modalities of development in the neighbourhood. In the case of Outremont, the mayor offered citizens an opportunity to stand up for social housing and to redefine the debate about social inequalities, but none seized it, even among representatives of the housing cooperatives project. Each time, the substantive topic was “the elephant in the room,” and people tried hard not to see or speak about it (Zerubavel, 2006).

Bennett et al. (2013) have emphasized that in a democratic culture characterized by the “disavowal of politics,” people dread appearing confrontational or antagonistic, as conflict is associated with negative feelings and attitudes, politicking and the defence of vested interest. This is exemplified by the words of one member of the Park Extension citizens’ committee in a preparatory session for the council meeting: “Could we find a positive way to speak about and defend a positive cause in order to avoid being seen once again as against people?” This culture of political disavowal takes on particular forms in municipal councils. On the one hand, the rise of political parties and the structure of the question period (face-to-face between elected officials and citizens) encourage the expression of conflict. On the other, municipal politics in North America is marked by a tradition of apoliticism and consensus-building (Patsias and Patsias, 2014; Tindal et al., 2016).

The construction of conflict through procedure is thus a response to the injunctions of the culture of political disavowal. Of course, the conflict is present, the citizens contest their representatives, but the confrontation with “the other” is less direct. The “us” and the “them” drawn through the procedure are less intense than the social and symbolic categories involved in the conflict in substance. The division between those “who follow the rule” and those “who do not,” does not refer to boundaries based on ethnic, social, economic, or symbolic identities. Boundaries built from rules are flexible and abstract. Abstraction can be a form of violence unto the individual, smoothing out their specificities (Terestchenko, 1992). However, it can also provide some protection, because it neither directly attacks the individual nor explicitly names the groups in conflict. Procedures are the least engaging in terms of self-definition, followed by social class and identity. Social class also offers some movement and abstraction, while the identity categories have a strong objective dimension, particularly with respect to race or disability. From this point of view, conflict over procedures can violently express disagreement, while pacifying face-to-face confrontation by blurring the boundaries between opposing groups.

This may explain why the conflict in substance is more hazardous, especially when it is based on ethnic identity boundaries, which carry the risk of stigmatization. This stigmatization can lead to rejection of “the other” and racism (Lamont et al., 2016), although all conflict at some point involves a kind of prejudice against others’ arguments and values. In this respect, the rise of identity in political discourse is a challenge to the construction of meaningful conflict in political spaces. Moreover, not only is it difficult to be associated with the stigmatizing element, it is also problematic to acknowledge that one belongs to such a group (Bennett et al., 2013). Finally, as Rancière notes (1995: 29–30), in contexts of entrenched inequality, to speak of equality is a “deviation from the normal order of things,” thus arguing for its increase inevitably interrupts and unsettles accepted assumptions that facilitated existing privilege.

As a result of this often-assumed inequality, citizens’ social class or race could be evoked to explain the rejection of the conflict in substance and the dissolution of environmental justice. However, even without a quantitative study of this dimension, this study has shown that avoidance of conflict in substance in favour of procedural conflict is characteristic of all the boroughs studied, regardless of the composition of their population. In fact, as illustrated by the final case study, the type of conflict chosen owes more to the presence of community groups well-versed in collective action and undeterred by opposition than to the presence in the audience of any group of citizens linked by ethnic or social identity.

This reflection reveals processes of politicisation, which facilitate avoidance of substantive conflict and instead encourage conflict about procedures, hindering discussion of environmental justice concerns. It therefore stresses the relevance of considering not only the presence of conflict in the politicisation processes but also content of this conflict, namely the ways of defining the boundaries at stake. Citizens’ determination to stifle a debate on the crucial matters at hand is due to a fear of direct confrontation with “the other.” This point reflects a dilemma in contemporary democracies, testifying to the complex interconnection of stigmatization, conflict, and advocacy. Finally, this analysis reinforces that environmental topics and discourse are not necessarily progressive. Even when discussed in the public sphere, face to face with institutional power, environmental questions can oppose social change and environmental justice may not be addressed. The broadening of democracy and voicing of environmental justice do not always go hand in hand. Participatory democracy can increase, and yet environmental inequalities may remain unchallenged. These challenges take the study of the environmental question beyond a crucial issue for the future, underlining the implications for social and political transformations in contemporary societies.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my two research assistants, Merve Erdilmen (McGill University) and Catherine Viens (UQAM), and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Centre de recherche sur les médiations for the International Conference : « Les paroles militantes dans les controverses environnementales », in Metz, 2017. I would also like to thank all the participants in the conference and more particularly Marieke Stein Muller and Jacques Walter for their advice on the previous drafts and their warm welcome in the center. Finally this research would not have been possible without the support of the SSHR. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (371 196).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Caroline Patsias is a full professor in the Department of Political Science at UQAM. Her most recent research deals with the politicisation of citizens within municipal political councils and the emergence of new instances of “participative democracy”. Through these topics, she analyses the relationships between citizens and politics and the transformations of democratic practices. In particular, her reflections focus on how certain social and symbolic boundaries are being redrawn in the 21st century (e.g. environment and culture, private and public). She has recently published: Patsias C, Durazo-Hermann J and Patsias S (2019) The Steep and Slippery Slope of Politics: Civic Spirit, Empowerment and Politicisation in Citizen Committees. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 6(1): 95–123 and Patsias C (2016) Une Chronique de la démocratie ordinaire: les comités de citoyens au Québec et en France. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal.

Appendix

Reports of each borough council meeting can be found online:

Outremont

http://webtv.coop/search?module=search&action=index&title=Outremont&description=Outremont&tags=Outremont&type=all&categoriesopt=0&groupsopt=0&channelsopt=0&page=3

NDG-CDN

Park Extension-Villeray-St. Michel

http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=8638,121817652&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

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