Critical environmental justice and the state: a critique of Pellow

Abstract

ABSTRACT How should movements for environmental justice orient themselves towards the state? Recent work in the environmental justice field critiques the legalistic basis of both environmental justice research and movement strategy based in juridical action, regulation, and advocacy within state institutions. Meanwhile, rightward-moving politics in the United States threatens to choke off even this limited strategy. Scholars have responded by urging movements to adopt a more skeptical strategic posture towards the state, one informed by an anarchist conception of states as uniformly repressive structures. This essay addresses the most systematic attempt at re-theorizing the state for these movements, David Pellow’s What is Critical Environmental Justice? While Pellow’s work to integrate intersectionality theory into environmental sociology has been recognized, less attention has been paid to his anarchist state theory, which implies an untenable strategy of movement withdrawal from politics. Environmental justice movements and scholarship need a state theory that allows for the possibility of action both against and within states. I introduce an alternative, ‘strategic-relational’ view of states, and suggest that changing structural patterns of environmental injustice will require re-thinking both the state and the ‘movement’ of environmental justice, as they are conventionally imagined.