This special issue relates the key analytical constructs of environmental justice scholarship – distributive justice, procedural justice and environmental racism – to a series of Third World case studies. It calls attention to the need to theorize both distributive burdens and benefits, treat the relative salience of race as a category of differentiation as an empirical question, and examine new avenues of procedural justice that have opened up to transnational environmental justice activists. The basic position advanced in the collection is that the core issues at the heart of environmental justice struggles are universal. In this sense, the case studies presented here should be read not as though they were part of exceptional Third World circumstances, but instead as part of broader patterns of distributive, procedural and racial injustice with global significance.