Environmental Justice Policy Research Articles

States of Environmental Justice: Redistributive Politics across the United States, 1993–2004

AbstractIn the 20 years since a president committed federal government agencies to achieving environmental justice (EJ), states have been at the forefront of policy development. But states have varied in the nature and extent of their EJ efforts. We use Guttman Scaling to measure state EJ effort and test hypotheses regarding the relative importance of problem severity, politics, and administrative variables to variation in state policy development. Our analysis offers a novel characterization of state policy intensity and demonstrates its scalability. Income‐based problem severity, environmental group membership, and nonwhite populations were important predictors of state EJ policy intensity during our study period. The political geography of EJ policy also displayed a distinctive southern pattern and the EJ policy intensity model contrasted significantly with a model of environmental policy innovation. The findings suggest that state EJ politics are more indicative of redistributive policy than regulatory.

Environmental Reviews and Case Studies: Accounting for Diversity in Environmental Justice Screening Tools: Toward Multiple Indices of Disproportionate Impact

To comply with President Bill Clinton's Executive Order 12898 addressing environmental justice, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been working for over two decades to develop consistent indices and screening tools to measure disproportionate impact and identify environmental justice communities. Its efforts have been complicated by methodological problems, divergent interpretations of policy, and concerns about the misuse of such screening tools. This review of recent scholarship and developments in EPA environmental justice policy proposes that instead of a single index of disproportionate impact associated with a single type of environmental justice community, regulatory agencies should aim to produce screening tools that incorporate multiple indices of impact and a diverse typology of environmental justice communities. It argues that adopting such an approach would not only better reflect the environmental justice movement's emphasis on difference and diversity, but also produce more effective and acceptable screening tools that are less susceptible to misuse.

Part II: Asian American and Pacific Islander Environmentalism: Expansions, Connections and Social Change

Part Two examines the intersection of Asian American Studies and Environmental Studies, revealing information and insights that can be useful in environmental and social justice advocacy, strategic planning, policy development and programming. Professor Julie Sze (UC Davis) and Charles Lee (Deputy Associate Assistant Administrator for Environmental Justice, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) served as the consulting guest editors for this portion of the volume.

The risks of using REDD+ to manage rich socio-ecological systems

REDD+ is an important development in environmental and social justice policy instruments. However, its success depends on a network of complex contingencies, and the achievement of difficult governance transformations in countries that are under severe economic pressure. It ought be obvious that there are significant risks associated with this endeavour, but overt risk management, using standard approaches, is not evident. This paper highlights some of the many risks that the governance of REDD+ (in common with most environmental policy innovations) needs to pay attention to in order to avoid policy failure. There are eight distinct elements that have to work for the REDD+ program to achieve its public policy goals, and each of these carries its own risk. These are: securitisation of carbon sequestration; protection for complex non-carbon values, ensuring the integrity of the supply of credit; multi-level administration and aggregation of tradeable carbon interests; managing the social and economic imbalance of interests; deploying new methods for measurement and securitisation of interests; ensuring a platform of rules, administrative and enforcement systems, teams and intelligence networks; and achieving price and ‘brand’ competitiveness in a crowded carbon offsets marketplace. Although the issues listed in this paper are not comprehensive, they highlight major concerns and support the argument that a comprehensive and systematic approach to policy risk is likely to add value to the REDD+ implementation. The paper suggests that good management practice would separate risk management from policy or instrument development, and embed this aspect of good governance with a sufficient level of authority to ensure that the negative potentials are managed with a degree of vigour consistent with the importance of the issues.

The juxtaposition and spatial disconnect of environmental justice declarations and actual risk: A new method and its application to New York State

Some states are defining environmental justice areas geographically on the basis of demographic criteria alone. This is problematic as it does not consider distributive concentrations of environmental toxins. Although environmental justice is much more than avoiding concentrations of increased environmental risk, the identification of such areas could provide states with a roadmap for addressing concentrations and for the facilitation of appropriate community-targeted programs in response. This research proposes an applied quantitative approach for the geographic designation of areas determined to be at greater relative risk of exposure to environmental toxins as part of states' broader environmental justice goals and policies. Using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Risk Screening Environmental Impact Tool (RSEI) and spatial analyses, the proposed method defines geographic areas reflecting calculated risk values pertaining to exposed populations and toxic releases. The method is applied to four counties of New York, and the results are juxtaposed with current state-declared environmental justice areas, which are defined on demography alone. This approach permits geospatial mapping and exploratory spatial data analysis. The method potentially can be used by states to effectively address concentrations of toxic releases as part of their environmental justice programs and policies.

The Elusive Environmental Justice Area: Three Waves of Policy in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Despite almost two decades of effort, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues struggling to define “environmental justice areas” or “EJ communities” for the purpose of administering its programs and measuring its progress. One cause for the long delay is the lingering technical problem of determining disproportionate impact; another is the political and administrative challenge posed by changes in environmental justice policy. In this historical overview, I argue that the EPA's efforts to establish nationally standardized guidelines for identifying EJ areas have corresponded to three overlapping but distinct “waves” of environmental justice policy. Although the third wave of EJ policy has restored the program's original focus on low-income and minority populations, it will remain difficult to institute a consistent definition in the face of place-specific differences among communities experiencing environmental injustice.

Certainty, Fairness, and Balance: State Resonance and Environmental Justice Policy Implementation1

Little research has examined how and why institutional context and framing dynamics shape the institutionalization of movement claims into the state’s formal policies, and what the implication of these processes might be for movements attempting to mobilize on the same conceptual terms after institutionalization. In this study, I explore the role institutional context and framing play in the institutionalization of movement claims in a case: the implementation of environmental justice policy in the California Environmental Protection Agency from 2002 to 2007. I ask: How and why were aspects of the environmental justice frame institutionalized into regulatory policy while others were not? I use ethnographic field methods and content analysis of archival data to answer this question and offer two contributions to previous research. First, I add to previous scholarship on the environmental justice movement by identifying the character of newer problems faced by movement actors as they engage in regulatory policy processes with opponents in the United States. Second, I extend social movement framing theory by developing the notion of “state resonance” to understand how and why a collective action frame is institutionalized and implemented in regulatory policy.

Hot spots regulation and environmental justice

This paper analyzes whether regulating “hot spots” of toxic air pollution by increasing the spatial resolution of regulation could address environmental justice (EJ) concerns. To examine this question, this paper develops a decision model of a regulator choosing emission controls within a net cost minimizing framework. An empirical application of the model using air toxic emission data for Escambia and Santa Rosa Counties in Florida estimates the emission standards and spatial distribution of risks at a coarse and a finer spatial resolutions. Implications for EJ are analyzed by combining the simulated spatial risk distributions at the two resolutions with the demographic data. Results indicate that different measures of EJ point to different conclusions regarding the question of whether finer resolution regulation alleviates EJ concerns. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for EJ policy.

THE UTOPIAN GOAL OF ATTEMPTING TO DELIVER ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE USING SEA

Environmental justice is a contested concept. However, it became a high-level policy objective in the United States and, internationally, policy advocates and academics have identified environmental justice as a fundamental part of sustainable development. Policy appraisal, in particular Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), has been cited as a main tool to deliver environmental justice policy. Scotland, a devolved government within the UK, made a high-level policy commitment to environmental justice and linked its delivery to SEA. To evaluate how this was put into practice, this paper analyses Scottish SEA documents produced between 2003 and 2007. The study found that SEA practice in Scotland was not directed towards empirical assessment of environmental justice. More fundamentally, because assessments always reflect specific values, there is no incontestable way to represent environmental justice or injustice empirically. Therefore, this paper argues that environmental justice remains a Utopian goal, with no indisputable means to be achieved.

Monitoring Environmental Justice

Abstract To date, policies for environmental justice have not been accompanied by sufficient methods of monitoring progress toward environmental justice even though policymakers and citizens alike expect some means of evaluating policy effectiveness. Concerned that this lacuna holds back environmental justice policy, and thus the possibility of reaching environmental justice, this article articulates a framework to aid the development of indexes that link multiple environmental justice issues within and across spatial and temporal scales. The argument proceeds in three steps: First, an examination of the importance of monitoring progress toward policy targets justifies the focus on indicators and indexes. Second, limitations of environmental justice indicators (e.g., their focus on specific local issues) will be identified. Third, an integrative framework for developing indicators of sustainability will inform the creation of a framework to guide the development of environmental justice indicators. The mo...

Daniel A. Vallero, P. Aarne Vesilind, Socially Responsible Engineering: Justice in Risk Management

Daniel A. Vallero, P. Aarne Vesilind, Socially Responsible Engineering: Justice in Risk Management

Best in Show? Climate and Environmental Justice Policy in California

Abstract In this article, we outline the important role that environmental justice organizations played in the development of AB 32, California's landmark climate change legislation (AB 32) in ensuring that a wide range of environmental justice ideas were incorporated into policy. We distinguish between the formal elements contained in the legislation and the discursive impacts, particularly in relation to public health concerns and about cap and trade and market mechanisms. Drawing from interviews, public documents, and legislative archives, we document the process by which these diverse environmental justice elements were incorporated into AB 32 to ask a seemingly simple question. Is California really “best in show” when it comes to climate and environmental justice policy? The complex politics involved in the drafting and passage of the legislation show to what extent environmental justice organizations played in AB 32's passage. We then argue that understanding the contentiousness in how AB 32 was dra...

Environmental Justice

The article reviews two decades of scholars' claims that exposures to pollution and other environmental risks are unequally distributed by race and class, examines case studies of environmental justice social movements and the history and politics of environmental justice policy making in the United States, and describes the emerging issue of global climate justice. The authors engage the contentious literature on how to quantitatively measure and document environmental injustice, especially the complex problems of having data of very different types and areas (such as zip codes, census tracts, or concentric circles) around polluting facilities or exposed populations. Also considered is the value of perspectives from critical race theory and ethnic studies for making sense of these social phenomena. The article concludes with a discussion of the globalization of the environmental justice movement, discourse, and issues, as well as with some policy implications of finding and understanding environmental justice. One unique feature of this review is its breadth and diversity, given the different approaches taken by the three coauthors.

The Limited Effects of Federal Environmental Justice Policy on State Enforcement

The federal government adopted several measures during the mid‐1990s to address concerns about race‐based and class‐based disparities in environmental protection. This article examines whether these measures affected the pattern of state enforcement of three federal pollution control laws. Using differences‐in‐differences models to estimate the effects of the federal policy adoption, I find evidence of increases in state enforcement of the Clean Air Act in large African‐American communities, but declines in enforcement in communities with large poor and Hispanic populations. Similarly, there is evidence that state enforcement of the Clean Water Act decreased in poor and African‐American communities, but there were no real changes in enforcement of facilities regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Collectively, the analysis suggests that the federal policy had minimal positive effects on state regulatory enforcement.

Capitalizing on environmental injustice: the polluter-industrial complex in the age of globalization

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Polluter-Industrial Complex: Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice Chapter 2 Not All People are Polluted Equal: The Environmental Injustices of American Capitalism Chapter 3 Eroding Environmental Justice: Colonization of the State by the Polluter-Industrial Complex Chapter 4 Against Our Nature: Neo-Liberalism and the Crisis of Environmental Justice Policy Chapter 5 The Unfair Trade-Off: Globalization and the Export of Ecological Hazards Chapter 6 Transforming Green Politics: Challenges Confronting the Environmental Justice Movement Chapter 7 What Does the Future Hold? The Struggle for Productive Environmental Justice

Tools of Environmental Justice and Meaningful Involvement

Environmental justice policy goals encompass the fair treatment and the meaningful involvement of all people in environmental policy formation and implementation. Few studies consider how new environmental justice programs foster meaningful involvement; this study addresses this gap by examining seven years of an environmental justice small grants program implemented by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We frame our research in the theory of environmental discourses, dividing policy implementation among adherents with a managerial, pluralist, or communitarian perception of remedies to environmental injustice. We hypothesize that EPA awards will emphasize the managerial and pluralist discourses. Our study's empirical foundation included a content analysis of documents on 736 small grant awards. We supplemented this data with 23 interviews of grant recipients and four interviews with EPA officials. During seven years, more than half of the grants (58%, or 501) funded programs to primarily increase environmental justice information in the recipient community. Grants for technical capacity came in a distant second (21%, or 186) of the programs funded by EPA. Organizational efforts were the third most frequent award, representing 14% of all grants. Finally, only 7% of awards funded an initiative to expand public participation in environmental decisions. The EPA policy objectives included the goal of building participatory capacity in the design and implementation of local environmental decisions; however, funded programs emphasized efforts to generate and disseminate information, instead of building civic capacities for citizens to use information in meaningful ways. We conclude that environmental justice practitioners should better balance technical and informational efforts with “civic-minded” capacity-building programs.Environmental Practice 10:152–163 (2008)

Evidence of Environmental Justice: A Critical Perspective on the Practice of EJ Research and Lessons for Policy Design*

Objective. This article gleans important lessons for environmental justice (EJ) policy from the empirical literature and demonstrates them using EJ analyses of Superfund sites. It constructively critiques the EJ literature and suggests some future directions for designing policy and framing the discourse.Methods. The research methods of many quantitative EJ studies are reviewed. To demonstrate sensitivity to researchers' choices, logit models are estimated to explain the nationwide distribution of Superfund sites (and deletions from the NPL) using various spatial scales, control variables, and definitions of proximity.Results. Most empirical EJ studies examine cross‐sectional distributions for aggregated demographic measures, dwelling on the implied counterfactual or causal mechanism briefly, if ever. The EJ analysis for Superfund sites exhibits much sensitivity to modeling choices and to whether environmental conditions or policy impacts are modeled.Conclusions. The findings highlight the limitations of conventional EJ research designs. Several implications for the design of EJ policy are drawn, emphasizing the importance of clarity about counterfactuals and which sorts of impacts are relevant. Principles for a revised EJ policy framework are proposed.

Problems, Promise, Progress, and Perils: Critical Reflections on Environmental Justice Policy Implementation in California

I. INTRODUCTION II. ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT IN CALIFORNIA: PROBLEMS AND PUBLIC POLICY A. Defining the Problem B. State Legislation and Regulatory Agencies III. FROM PROMISE TO PROGRESS A. Developing the Cal/EPA Environmental Justice Action Plan B. Implementing the Action Plan: Pilot Projects and Small Grants IV. THE PERILS OF INCORPORATION A. The Politics of Environmental Justice-As-Participation: Where is the Justice in Advice? B. Environmental Justice at the Department of Pesticide Regulation 1. Public Participation at DPR: The Environmental Justice Advisory Workgroup 2. DPR's Pilot Project: I keep coming back to Parlier 3. Litigation and Legislation: Environmental Justice and Pesticides a. Citizen Suits: El Comite v. Helliker et al b. SB-391: Activism Drifting In and Out of the Legal Focus V. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION Over the past two decades, the environmental justice movement has made numerous inroads in defining a number of problems as environmental racism and environmental inequalities. Entire areas of academic research and public policies have emerged to address these sets of social movement concerns. (1) Despite considerable research on environmental justice as a social movement, several important gaps still exist. This article seeks to address those gaps, particularly by elucidating the dynamic relationships between social movement actors and state agencies. California has undertaken, in many ways, the most aggressive and robust high stakes in passing environmental justice legislation and in institutionalizing environmental justice policy. (2) This article provides a critical assessment of environmental justice policy implementation in California since 2004. We chose 2004 as our start date because that is when the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) developed the landmark Environmental Justice Action Plan, enabling the following period to serve as a kind of large-scale laboratory in environmental justice policy implementation. There is a substantial gap in the literature on California, although the state has experienced important experiments with environmental justice policy implementation and activism. (3) This article seeks to remedy the surprising dearth of research on California environmental justice movements. (4) It also addresses the curious gap in the environmental justice literature that has under-analyzed the policy-making implications of environmental justice activism. Specifically, a large portion of the academic research has either focused on social movements, or the application of environmental justice analytic frameworks to different issues (including transportation, air quality, land use and public health). (5) While studies generally cite, for instance, President Clinton's Executive Order 12898 (6), there is less understanding about the ways in which state agencies have regulated and enforced environmental justice. Likewise, many policy analyses, by focusing exclusively on public actors, neglect the interrelationships within the social movement/law/policy-making apparatus that influences the form and outcomes of environmental justice policy. Such an interactive analysis is needed to truly understand and explain the patterns of policy success and failure. We intend our analysis of the successes and failures of California's ongoing experiment with environmental justice policy to inform scholars, the public, legislators and those staff working within state agencies who are grappling with whether these experiments have succeeded, the reasons why or why not, and how to improve their own operations. Our findings are that environmental justice policy in California is implemented primarily as a function of improving participation. …

Superfund: evaluating the impact of executive order 12898.

BackgroundThe U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) addresses uncontrolled and abandoned hazardous waste sites throughout the country. Sites that are perceived to be a significant threat to both surrounding populations and the environment can be placed on the U.S. EPA Superfund list and qualify for federal cleanup funds. The equitability of the Superfund program has been questioned; the representation of minority and low-income populations in this cleanup program is lower than would be expected. Thus, minorities and low-income populations may not be benefiting proportionately from this environmental cleanup program. In 1994 President Clinton signed Executive Order 12898 requiring that the U.S. EPA and other federal agencies implement environmental justice policies. These policies were to specifically address the disproportionate environmental effects of federal programs and policies on minority and low-income populations.Objective and MethodsI use event history analysis to evaluate the impact of Executive Order 12898 on the equitability of the Superfund program.DiscussionFindings suggest that despite environmental justice legislation, Superfund site listings in minority and poor areas are even less likely for sites discovered since the 1994 Executive Order.ConclusionThe results of this study indicate that Executive Order 12898 for environmental justice has not increased the equitability of the Superfund program.

The Air Is Always Cleaner on the Other Side: Race, Space, and Ambient Air Toxics Exposures in California

ABSTRACT:Environmental justice advocates have recently focused attention on cumulative exposure in minority neighborhoods due to multiple sources of pollution. This article uses U.S. EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) for 1996 to examine environmental inequality in California, a state that has been a recent innovator in environmental justice policy. We first estimate potential lifetime cancer risks from mobile and stationary sources. We then consider the distribution of these risks using both simple comparisons and a multivariate model in which we control for income, land use, and other explanatory factors, as well as spatial correlation. We find large racial disparities in California’s “riskscape” as well as inequalities by other factors and suggest several implications for environmental and land use policy.