Between Choice and Sacrifice: Constructions of Community Consent in Reactive Air Pollution Regulation

Morag-Levine, Noga

doi:10.2307/3054023

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Field Production of Crude Oil” 2020 ; “USDA Agricultural Projections to 2029” 2020 ; Shusterman et al 1991 ; Heaney et al 2011 ). Malodors are a commonly ignored environmental justice issue, partly because odor is seen as subjective and is poorly regulated ( Scott 2016 ; Levine 1994 ). Participants in our focus groups experienced the slow response to the H 2 S emergency as a form of injustice, which was compounded by their perception that government leaders referred to the odor as harmless and completely dismissed their concerns and health symptoms.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Residents’ experiences during a hydrogen sulfide crisis in Carson, California

Quist,

Hovav,

Silverman

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Background In early October 2021, thousands of residents in Carson, California began complaining of malodors and headaches. The odor was identified as hydrogen sulfide (H2S), a noxious odorous gas. H2S was measured at concentrations up to 7000 parts per billion (ppb) and remained above California’s acute air quality standard of 30 ppb for a month, with intermittent elevations continuing for 3 months. After 2 months of malodor in this environmental justice community, the H2S was attributed to a warehouse fire. Research has yielded conflicting results on the health effects of H2S exposure at levels that were experienced during this event. There remains a gap in understanding how people perceive and experience odor emergencies such as this H2S event. Methods Through a community-academic partnership, we conducted 6 focus groups in Carson with 33 participants who resided in the Carson area during the crisis. We sought to understand how this incident affected residents through facilitated discussion on topics including information acquisition, impressions of the emergency response, physical and mental health symptoms, and ongoing impacts. Results The majority of participants were women (n = 25), identified as Latina/o (n = 19), and rent their homes (n = 21). Participants described difficulty obtaining coherent information about the emergency, which resulted in feelings of abandonment. Most participants felt that local government and health care providers downplayed and/or disregarded their concerns despite ongoing odors and health symptoms. Participants described experiencing stress from the odors’ unknown health effects and continued fear of future odor incidents. Residents sought to take control of the crisis through information sharing, community networking, and activism. Participants experienced longer term effects from this event, including increased awareness of pollution and reduced trust in local agencies. Discussion This study demonstrates the necessity of clear, comprehensive, and prompt responses by relevant decisionmakers to chemical emergencies to appropriately address residents’ fears, curb the spread of misinformation, and minimize adverse health effects. Participant responses also point to the benefit of supporting horizontal community networks for improved information sharing. By engaging directly with community members, researchers and disaster responders can better understand the various and complex impacts of chemical disasters and can improve response.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Residents’ experiences during a hydrogen sulfide crisis in Carson, California

Quist,

Hovav,

Silverman

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We coded this article as distributive because the laws in question specify that resources will be given to poor families. In contrast, Atlas () asked whether the Environmental Protection Agency was less likely to sanction polluters in minority areas than in white areas, and Levine () addressed community efforts to trigger EPA protections. While the outcomes of these regulatory battles may have implications for the distribution of clean air, the Clean Air Act is primarily regulatory, and we coded both articles as not primarily focused on distributive law.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Legality with a Vengeance”: Reclaiming Distribution for Sociolegal Studies

Levitsky¹,

Best²,

Garrick³

2018

Law Soc Rev

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The law and society community has argued for decades for an expansive understanding of what counts as “law.” But a content analysis of articles published in the Law & Society Review from its 1966 founding to the present finds that since the 1970s, the law and society community has focused its attention on laws in which the state regulates behavior, and largely ignored laws in which the state distributes resources, goods, and services. Why did socio‐legal scholars avoid studying how laws determine access to such things as health, wealth, housing, education, and food? We find that socio‐legal scholarship has always used “law on the books” as a starting point for analyses (often to identify departures in “law in action”) without ever offering a programmatic vision for how law might ameliorate economic inequality. As a result, when social welfare laws on the books began disappearing, socio‐legal scholarship drifted away from studying law's role in creating, sustaining, and reinforcing economic inequality. We argue that socio‐legal scholarship offers a wide range of analytical tools that could make important contributions to our understanding of social welfare provision.

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“…Society‐based regulation means that social groups, whether local communities or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), will assert pressure on polluting firms in order to get them to clean up (ibid.). There is much research quoted in the World Bank report suggesting that communities play an important role in pressuring factories to decrease pollution, also supported by studies about both Western (Levine 1994; Kagan, Gunningham, and Thornton 2003) and non‐Western countries (Sonnenfeld 1998, 2002; Cribb 1990; Huq and Wheeler 1993; Carmen de Mello Lemos 1998; Chege Kamau 2005).…”

Section: Social Control Modesmentioning

confidence: 95%

Greening Industry Without Enforcement? An Assessment of the World Bank's Pollution Regulation Model for Developing Countries

Rooij

2009

Law &Amp; Policy

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BENJAMIN VAN ROOIJThe best comparative and overview source now available for knowledge about pollution regulation in developing countries is the 2000 World Bank policy research report called Greening Industry. The World Bank finds that there is a new model for pollution regulation in lower-and middle-level income countries that is an alternative to "traditional" command and control regulation. The new model stresses flexible norms and nonstate pressures on regulated enterprises coming from communities and markets. This article presents an investigation into this new model. It finds that the prevalence of weak law enforcement may undermine the new model's potential to control pollution in developing countries. It also contends that social and market pressures only occur under certain circumstances often not found in lower-and middle-levelincome countries. Therefore, the article concludes that developing countries require smart mixes of various regulatory instruments appropriate in the given state and nonstate regulatory capacities, instead of contrasting state and nonstate regulation.

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Between Choice and Sacrifice: Constructions of Community Consent in Reactive Air Pollution Regulation

Cited by 12 publications

References 46 publications

Residents’ experiences during a hydrogen sulfide crisis in Carson, California

Residents’ experiences during a hydrogen sulfide crisis in Carson, California

“Legality with a Vengeance”: Reclaiming Distribution for Sociolegal Studies

Greening Industry Without Enforcement? An Assessment of the World Bank's Pollution Regulation Model for Developing Countries

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