Whose nature, whose city? : environmental justice and the governance of urban biodiversity in cities around the world

Urban biodiversity planning is increasingly positioned as a vehicle for both ecological conservation and social equity, yet whether it delivers on either commitment remains poorly understood. This dissertation evaluates whether and how 98 Local Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (LBSAPs) from 26 countries engage with environmental justice, asking how plans frame values, who is included in decision-making, how disparities in benefits and burdens are addressed, and whether the three dimensions operate interdependently in practice. Drawing on Schlosberg's tripartite framework, it employs mixed methods combining AI-enabled data extraction, manual coding, and qualitative discourse analysis. Across all three dimensions, urban biodiversity planning more often reproduces than challenges existing inequalities. Instrumental and regulatory values dominate recognition, while justice- oriented relational values appear in fewer than one in five plans, and the dissertation introduces false recognition to explain how symbolic inclusion of alternative worldviews neutralises their transformative potential. Procedurally, 72% of plans employ participatory mechanisms but only 18% redistribute decision-making authority; marginalised groups record the lowest inclusion scores of any actor type and zero authorship credit across the corpus. Distributively, half are silent on how benefits and burdens are shared, and marginalised communities, when recognised as harmed, rarely receive comparable programmatic response. Across the corpus, justice engagement on any dimension occurs only under three conditions: integration of non-hegemonic discourses such as relational values, social equity, and Indigenous knowledge; targeted inclusion of marginalised populations; and presence of justice-mandating legal frameworks. The actor-specificity thesis further establishes that it is not participation in general but the inclusion of particular actors that predicts just outcomes. These findings produce the structural Catch-22 of marginalised group inclusion: the actors whose inclusion most powerfully transforms distributive and cross-dimensional planning outcomes are those most systematically excluded from governance. Together, the results yield a fragmented justice thesis that empirically qualifies Schlosberg's mutual constitution hypothesis. Plans from Mexico City, Medellín, Fort Collins, Melbourne, and three South African cities show transformation is achievable through structural commitment: legal mandates binding distributional analysis, institutional designs placing affected populations in governance authority, and frameworks treating inequality as a produced condition requiring remedy.