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40 years after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (1972), the environmental question remains unanswered even if the impacts become more and more pressing. The book gives evidence that different perceptions of the concepts of sustainable development and environmental justice between institutions and civil society are responsible for the failure of environmental legislature. The work entails three parts: Theory debate, definition/institutionalization of the two concepts through history, and applied field study in Brazil´s Amazon. The theory examination demonstrates the debate´s insufficiency on the nature-society relationship in sociology and gives hints to a way-out by a dialectic approach. In the second part shows the necessity that the global environmental regime, that bases on sustainable development, must be opposed by the environmental justice concept in order to prevail. The last one characterizes the environmental regime in Legal Amazon. In the case study on the APA Algodoal-Maiandeua showed that 20 years of environmental law-making failed confirming the above assumption also on the local level. Here, the 2nd edition responds to public academic critiques.

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The author graduated in political science (2003). His focus shifted to the environmental question and sociology by research visits at Federal University of Pará/Brazil (2005;2010/11) and University of Melbourne/Australia (2006/07). He defended his doctoral thesis in 2012. His postdoc project is now on climate justice in Europe and the Americas.

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