Neoliberalism and environmental justice in the United States environmental protection agency: Translating policy into managerial practice in hazardous waste remediation

Abstract

In response to the failings of the aggressive neoliberalism of the Reagan era, the Clinton administration sought new ways to promote and deepen the neoliberal project. One of its strategies was to develop “neocommunitarian” programs to support political empowerment and economic self-sufficiency in marginalized communities. Its environmental justice policy became an important vehicle for delivering these programs. This paper examines ways in which one regional office of the US Environmental Protection Agency translated the Clinton administration's environmental justice policy into practical guidelines for its managers. It investigates how these guidelines affected the work of personnel in the EPA's program to clean up hazardous waste sites. It asks how the Clinton administration's approach to environmental justice––emphasizing data analysis, managed public participation, and economic opportunity––helped both to deepen the neoliberal project and to transform the geography of risk and remediation. Although the EPA was unable to “normalize” the environmental justice community––to make it a standardized target for the Clinton administration's empowerment programs––its environmental justice policy both contributed to subtle changes in the distribution of hazardous waste risk and made the delivery of neocommunitarian programs an important part of the work of remedial personnel.