on the research and development agenda

Rising inequalities and accelerating environmental changes are two of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century. But how do they relate to one another? Do they have common dynamic factors? We will try to address this question at the regional scale of the Mekong countries, which benefit from both an ecological and socioeconomic coherence. COVID-19 has tested and, in one way or another, revealed embedded societal inequalities. The virus does not confine itself to zones that are known for their difficult conditions; rather, vulnerable families present in all settings can be affected, from rural to urban areas, from Lao PDR and Cambodia to Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam, and from poor to non-poor households. Such unprecedented crises, similar to natural disasters, challenge response mechanisms at all levels: individuals, households, countries, and regions.

1.1. Equality and its current position on the research and development agenda

Equality is currently at the center of the development agenda, both for for its relevance to and interdependence with growth dynamics and poverty alleviation. In the Mekong region, extensive interventions on land, water, and other resources in the last decades have fueled economic gains, while leaving significant negative impacts on the environment and communities, especially the most vulnerable, which includes minority ethnic groups, the poor, fishers, women, children, migrants, and smallholders. These social groups are likely to become even more vulnerable soon. Adding to the problem, vulnerability to climate change is also socially differentiated and those consistently identified as the most vulnerable to climate risk are those who are already socially vulnerable. The reverse is also true. Indeed, inequalities often lead to an overuse of natural resources through different channels. Different human activities and behaviors may also hinder attempts toward environmental protection. As noted by various authors (Cushing et al., 2015; Boyce, 2007), inequality has often been discussed in its economic (income-related) dimension (Piketty, 2014) without focusing on the diverse and holistic dimensions of inequalities in relation to different environmental dynamics.

In a global-scale review, Hamann et al. (2018) show that, far from being independent from each other, inequality and the biosphere interact in many different ways — or “pathways” — including through the presence of unequal societies, which leads to increased environmental degradation (emphasized in

Cushing et al. 2015). The economic and social studies around the global increase in inequalities (Piketty, 2014) would then expand to become ecological, too. More often than not, the impacts of environmental changes vary between groups of people and are strongly informed by existing social inequalities. Environmental changes put disadvantaged population groups at significantly higher risks, as confirmed by Chancel and Piketty (2015) in the case of climate change. Further, Mohai et al. (2009) conclude that exposure to pollution and other environmental risks is unequally distributed by race and class. There have been reviews on the relationship between inequalities and the biosphere (Hamann et al., 2018), and environment quality and health (Cushing et al., 2015). Putting an emphasis on the nexus between inequality and the environment helps identify the people at risk and/or the disadvantaged group(s), which is a step toward understanding the winners and losers of environmental policies supporting sustainable development (Boyce, 2007).

Different typologies of inequalities have been investigated by a range of academic and political institutions. This includes the economic, political, environmental, social, cultural, spatial, and knowledge-based inequalities defined by the 2016 World Social Science Report (ISSC, 2016), and the tripartite typology of equity (distributional, recognitional, and procedural equity) used by Schreckenberg et al. (2016) and Leach et al. (2018) developed from Fraser (1996). There are also the distributional, recognitional, and contextual equities used by McDermott et al. (2013). The notion of “environmental justice” first emerged as early as the 1820s, but was only mentioned in the United States in the mid-1980s (Mohai et al., 2009), before reaching Europe in the 1990s. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines four different types of inequalities: exposure and access inequalities, policy effect inequalities, impact inequalities, and policy making inequalities (Laurent, 2011). Inequalities are increasingly becoming a critical factor affecting “a fair and equitable process of moving towards a post-carbon society” (McCauley and Heffron, 2018). In that discussion, the notion of just transition is also embedded within a political trade-off. Any ecological pathway must be made compatible with the pursuit of “climate justice” for current and future generations exposed to social and ecological disruptions (Newell and Mulvaney, 2013).