How Recognitional Justice (Re)Shapes Access and Participation in Urban Green Space Governance

Urban Green Space (UGS) policy has mostly focused either on addressing the distributional inequities and subsequent levels of access, or procedural inequities to widen public participation in their governance. In this paper, we build on work focussing on recognitional equity – a dimension of equity which calls for the acknowledgement and respect of diverse identities, values, and experiences – to deepen understandings of existing UGS inequalities. We develop an analytical framework that highlights how recognitional justice relates to both access and governance of UGS to explore UGS equity in Oxford, one of the most unequal cities in the UK. Using a mixed-method approach, we provide a spatial analysis of the available green space and relative influencing factors for three neighbourhoods with differing socio-economic deprivation levels and local planning provisions. Qualitatively, we consider with community members their values underpinning access to UGS, and their ability and willingness to participate in local governance. Overall, we show how recognitional injustices impact different socio-economic groups based on existing procedural and distributional inequities, making local UGS more vulnerable to loss in neighbourhoods that are relatively bioculturally diverse and socio-economically deprived. Ongoing institutional failures to account for principles of recognitional justice and embed strategies to mitigate the uneven impacts of system-embedded inequities risk continued erosion, rather than improvement, of UGS justice for the most deprived.