Abstract Where environmental procedures do not adequately include affected parties in decision-making, particularly those from vulnerable and marginalized sectors of society, environmental justice cannot be realized. Further, the practice of EIA will likely perpetuate the negative and disproportionate distribution of environmentally associated harms on vulnerable persons. Thus, this paper explores the potential merits of the capabilities approach for establishing sufficiency grounds for public participation in environmental impact assessment (EIA). The paper identifies shared principles of justice in decision-making between the practice of EIA and the capabilities approach by highlighting key ethical and theoretical concepts of the latter as a means to fortify this weakness in the participation practice of EIA. Capability probes explore individual stakeholder's opportunity, ability and constraints to participation. The findings of four South African (EIA) case studies are discussed, highlighting the instrumental relationship between participatory actions, potentials and entitlements as they are mediated by empowering or disempowering procedural mechanisms. Cases exhibiting convincing stakeholder empowerment demonstrate the value of sufficient support for participatory achievement. Instances of disempowerment in the cases underscore the dangers of insufficient and inequitable participation. Reflecting on the findings, the work applies the recent notions of capability ‘sufficiency’ ( Nielsen and Axelsen, 2016 ) to outline what can be delimited, and later contextually specified, for support provisions in EIA building towards more meaningful, and perhaps more just, public participation processes.

中文翻译：

---

是否有足够的能力有效参与环境影响评价？

摘要 如果环境程序没有将受影响的各方充分纳入决策，特别是来自社会弱势和边缘化部门的各方，环境正义就无法实现。此外，环境影响评估的做法可能会使环境相关危害对弱势群体的负面和不成比例的分布永久化。因此，本文探讨了为公众参与环境影响评估 (EIA) 建立充分理由的能力方法的潜在优点。本文通过强调后者的关键伦理和理论概念，作为强化 EIA 参与实践中这一弱点的手段，确定了 EIA 实践和能力方法之间在决策中的共同正义原则。能力调查探索个体利益相关者参与的机会、能力和限制。讨论了四个南非 (EIA) 案例研究的结果，强调了参与性行动、潜力和权利之间的工具关系，因为它们是通过授权或剥夺程序机制来调节的。展示令人信服的利益相关者赋权的案例展示了充分支持参与性成就的价值。这些案例中的剥夺权利的实例强调了参与不足和不公平的危险。反思调查结果，这项工作应用了最近的能力“充足性”概念（Nielsen 和 Axelsen，2016 年）来概述可以界定的内容，然后在上下文中指定，以便在 EIA 建设中支持条款更有意义，