Legal Invisibility of Mobile Communities under Environmental Justice Frameworks: A Transnational Legal Analysis Centered on Sea Nomadic Peoples

Environmental justice (EJ) frameworks increasingly shape environmental governance through principles of equitable protection, meaningful participation, and recognition of marginalized groups. Yet many EJ instruments and implementation routines implicitly assume a territorially settled community that can be easily located, enumerated, and represented. This article develops the concept of "legal invisibility" to describe how mobile communities are structurally excluded from the categories and procedures that trigger environmental rights, consultation, and remedies. Centering sea nomadic peoples, the study conducts a transnational legal analysis that synthesizes EJ theory with governance subjecthood and examines how international and transnational regimes—particularly Indigenous rights norms, the law of the sea, and development-oriented legal identity commitments—interact with domestic administrative systems. The analysis finds that legal invisibility is produced through administrative illegibility, jurisdictional fragmentation in maritime space, and misrecognition in environmental decision-making. It argues that mobility-sensitive EJ requires recognition of maritime relationality, procedural standards for stakeholder identification based on ecological dependence rather than residence, and safeguards that couple legal identity reforms with cultural autonomy to avoid assimilationist outcomes.