Environmental Justice and Collaborative Governance: Building a Socio-Spatial Perspective for Facility Siting

Abstract

Environmental justice concerns, in part, the maldistribution of both environmental hazards and nuisances such that impoverished communities, particularly impoverished communities of color, contend with the effects of industry more so than those who are affluent. As communities of color have organized to confront this problem, their claims of injustice have revealed significant issues across all sectors of environmental governance, both in the U.S. and internationally, and reflect failures of representative institutions in urban land management. In this manuscript, we derive a socio-spatial approach to management of facility siting decisions based on the research in environmental justice. Then we discuss some reforms to facility siting that have been proposed and implemented in the US, Canada, and western Europe over the course of three decades and how these reforms can improve the legitimacy of facility siting decisions.