Justice in Soil Governance: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Stakeholders' Justice Perspectives Regarding the Proposed EU Soil Health Law

Abstract

Soils are of critical importance to human societies, as they provide a host of ecosystem services and harbor roughly a quarter to a third of all living things on Earth; soil degradation and biodiversity loss are pressing sustainability issues at both the global and the EU level. While soil degradation has a number of justice dimensions, there is relatively little academic work that explicitly makes the link between justice and soil governance. This thesis aims to provide a better understanding of stakeholders’ justice perspectives regarding EU soil health policy and how these perspectives may relate to stakeholder coalitions and policy proposals for the EU Soil Health Law proposed in 2022. To this end, the thesis augments the pluralistic justice framework developed by Biermann and Kalfagianni (2020) to include multispecies justice perspectives alongside liberal-egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, the capabilities approach, libertarianism, and critical perspectives. The research follows principles of critical discourse analysis to analyze statements made by 31 stakeholders regarding EU soil policy in the context of past developments in EU soil initiatives and identify stakeholders’ perspectives and policy proposals. The dimensions of justice that are considered in this analysis are subjects, spatial scales, temporal scales, causes of injustice, and justice mechanisms. Insights from the Advocacy Coalition Framework are used to supplement the analysis and gain a better understanding of coalition dynamics and their potential implications for the development of EU soil policy. The analysis was conducted on a sample of statements made by 31 out of a total of 189 stakeholders that gave feedback to the European Commission’s 2022 Call for Evidence for the proposed EU Soil Health Law. The results of this research indicate that all justice perspectives included in the analysis can be identified in statements made by the 31 stakeholders. The most common justice perspectives identified in the statements are libertarianism and liberal egalitarianism. These findings align with past developments in EU soil policy, as libertarian perspectives appear to have played a crucial role in past opposition to EU soil legislation. The analysis of stakeholder statements also identifies two main existing coalitions, one around a libertarian justice perspective and another coalition comprised mainly of civil society actors around a mixture of justice perspectives. While there are a number of policy proposals shared primarily by stakeholders within each of these two coalitions, the analysis also found policy proposals shared by stakeholders across and beyond these coalitions. The findings illustrate the potential of an analysis of justice perspectives to identify and understand stakeholder coalitions and policy proposals. They also imply that EU policymakers should consider the dominant justice perspectives and coalitions among stakeholders when trying to develop effective soil policies, as these appear to have an influence on the positions of decisionmakers from EU Member States.