Revisiting Missed Opportunities: A Self-Reflection on (Not Always) Writing Meaningfully

This year’s Journal of Environmental Law annual workshop on ‘Different Voices, Different Knowledges’ raises important questions about identities, perspectives, privilege and marginalisation within the academy in relation to environmental law and related scholarship. Here I want to ask a singular question; how can I write meaningfully about international environmental law and the Global South when I am a middle-class, white, male from the northern hemisphere? I want to try to answer this question in as honest and self-reflective a way as I can. I do not want to be defensive or limited by a particular theoretical lens. I want to interrogate my own thinking as it has evolved over the years, including the missed opportunities to deepen my own approach and methodology. In questioning myself this way, I need to consider why I have never asked myself this question before. I also need to confront the fact that penning a self-reflective piece on my own privilege in writing about international environmental law and the Global South is an example of that same privilege.