Environmental Restorative Justice in the Philippines: The Innovations and Unfinished Business in Waterways Rehabilitation

Almost 30 years ago in 2003, Filipino lawyer Antonio Oposa and colleagues successfully took the country’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to court on behalf of future generations, symbolised through their children. Since then, calls for environmental justice—both for those not yet born and the elements of our natural world that cannot speak for themselves—have grown globally. Judicial innovators in the Philippines have more recently also made ground-breaking orders for entire catchments to be restored under the constitutional right to ‘a healthful and balanced ecology’. In this chapter, the authors explore the possibility for bringing these ideas together in a uniquely Filipino form of environmental restorative justice (ERJ). They investigate the possibilities and the barriers for healing environmental harm in the Philippines through three applied case studies of highly polluted waterways.