Lessons on socioenvironmental justice from Guåhan and Puerto Rico (and what “non-sovereignty” leaves out)
This article is based on the research “Conceptualising Self-Determination and Socioenvironmental Justice on the Fringes of the American Empire – A Study of Guåhan and Puerto Rico” by Léa Rival published on the UNPO Academy. Click the link below to read the research.
Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization
In Puerto Rico, a chant has echoed across coastlines where fences, luxury projects, and “private” security attempt to redraw the public map: Las playas son del pueblo, the beaches belong to the people. On Guåhan, community voices have used another kind of clarity: this island is not a just piece of strategically located land. It is an ancestral homeland, with a rich cultural history and biodiverse natural environment.
At first glance, these struggles can look like local disputes: a development project here, a contaminated site there, and a controversial expansion elsewhere. But the deeper pattern is structural. In both territories, environmental harm is tightly bound to political status: to who holds power, who sets priorities, who bears the brunt of environmental degradation or security risks, and who is allowed to decide what “development” should mean.
The legal status that shapes everyday life in both places is often described in neutral language: “unincorporated territory,” “overseas territory,” “commonwealth,” “non-sovereign jurisdiction.” Yet the democratic deficit is inescapable. Residents do not have the same voting rights as citizens living in United States (U.S.) and their representation in federal decision-making remains limited. This gap matters because it shapes what can be resisted, negotiated, and imposed.
This piece draws on research done by Léa Rival, based on interviews with environmental and community advocates involved in organising, researching, litigating, documenting, and resisting. What they describe in the interviews, is not simply pollution or poor environmental planning. It is about a chain of decisions that begins elsewhere, delivered through laws and budgets; and military priorities, and lands (and literally) on coastlines, aquifers, wetlands, forests, and neighborhoods.
Puerto Rico: “Aquí vive gente”: Development that displaces
In Puerto Rico, environmental struggles are deeply tied to economic governance: austerity, privatisation, and investment frameworks that can reward extraction while pushing communities out.
After the territory’s debt crisis deepened, federal oversight introduced a new layer of control over public finances and policy choices, often linked to austerity measures. The effect wasn’t only economic. Interviewees describe how this kind of macro governance doesn’t stay abstract: it shapes which projects get approved, how environmental assessments are handled, and whose expertise is treated as optional.
Then, in 2017, Hurricanes Irma and María became a breaking point. The destruction exposed fragile infrastructure and deep inequalities, and, for many, sharpened the question of what it means to be governed without full representation.
In the years that followed, displacement and gentrification became central concerns, especially along coastal zones. Community organisations and environmental advocates have challenged high-profile real estate and tourism projects, warning of damage to wetlands and fragile ecosystems, while also naming a social cost: the slow transformation of public land into private privilege.
Resistance here isn’t only about nature; it’s about belonging. One slogan captures it with blunt simplicity: Aquí vive gente, people live here. It is a direct refusal of narratives that treat land as empty, idle, or waiting to be “activated.” The same goes for Las playas son del pueblo: a reminder that public space is not something to be purchased, fenced off, or gradually eroded.
These struggle tap into fundamental questions. Activists and community leaders repeatedly return to the energy system: its vulnerability, its cost, and the way in which crisis narratives can be used to accelerate privatisation while sidelining community-led alternatives. In response, grassroots initiatives have pushed locally rooted models: community energy, solar solutions, and micro-grids – framed not as charity, but as energy sovereignty in practice.
Across these issues, a key frustration is reiterated time and time again: even when communities mobilise evidence, expertise, and public support, decision-making power often remains tilted toward those with capital and political access.
Guåhan: an outpost …. or a homeland?
If Puerto Rico is shaped by fiscal oversight and privatised development, Guåhan is shaped by ongoing militarisation: openly, physically, and over generations.
Here, environmental harms are layered: wartime bombing legacies, toxic substances used across decades, and contamination that affects water and ecosystems. Community advocates point to the impacts of military expansion and pollution, arguing that the island’s limited political leverage makes it harder to refuse harmful decisions or enforce accountability when damage is done.
A key reality appears again in activist framing: a significant portion of the island’s land is controlled by the U.S. military. For many CHamoru advocates, this is not only a question of acreage. It is about access to ancestral sites, conservation areas, and cultural continuity. It is about the political reality where the island’s “strategic value” often outweigh the community’s right to shape its own future and the safety of its inhabitants, who face threats from the U.S.’s political rivals such as China and North Korea.
Public participation has also been narrowed. Environmental review processes may accept public comments yet confine them to technical parameters excluding broader questions of demilitarisation, decolonisation, or land rights. The message many advocates take from this is not “you are invited to collaborate or influence,” but “you are allowed to speak …as long as you do not challenge the premise.”
That premise, for many, is that Guåhan is treated as a military asset first and a homeland second. What gets called “security” at the metropolitan level can feel like dispossession at the local one: restrictions on land access, exposure to contamination, and development decisions shaped by priorities set elsewhere.
The myth of “better off,” and what communities actually argue
A thread that runs through both cases is the critique of a familiar external narrative: the idea that non-sovereign territories are “better off” because certain economic indicators look comparatively strong: GDP, welfare access, citizenship and metropolitan transfers.
The problem is what those indicators can leave out: who pays the environmental price, who benefits from development, and who decides. In both contexts, advocates challenge cost-benefit framing that treats rights, land, and culture as secondary, or worse, as negotiable.
Importantly, this is not an argument that sovereignty automatically solves everything. The point is more demanding: self-determination is not a promise of perfection or a panacea. It is the right to pursue locally defined priorities and to hold real authority over land, resources, and the terms of political and economic partnership. This is why the “better off” narrative can be misleading and overly simplistic. It can flatten the story into statistics and ignore the everyday governance of harm: pollution that lingers, housing markets that push communities out, “consultations” that are procedural rather than meaningful, and policy swings driven by metropolitan politics that territorial populations often cannot vote on.
Why this matters today
Guåhan and Puerto Rico are not stories on the periphery. They sit at the centre of some of the defining questions of our time: climate resilience, resource pressure, military expansion, and an economic model that often turns land into an asset before it recognises it as people’s home. In that context, their experiences are a warning sign of what happens when environmental decisions are made without the full political voice of the people.
The core lesson is not only ecological. It is democratic. Socioenvironmental justice is about who gets to decide what “protection” means, what risks are acceptable, and who bears the cost when development is framed as inevitable. When legal and political arrangements limit representation, the result is often the same: consultation without real power, and accountability that arrives late, if at all.
That is why these struggles resonate far beyond these islands. They speak to a wider reality facing many unrepresented and excluded peoples: land, identity, and sustainability cannot be separated, and neither can environmental justice and self-determination. What communities are asking for is not simply better policy management. It is agency: defined as the ability to shape their own future, on their own land, with their own definition of dignity, security, and sustainability.
