Environmental Injustice: An Emerging Public Policy Issue

Abstract

Environmental justice is a major issue today and of interest to citizens, administrators, and scholars of public administration. In this introduction, we review the emergence of the environmental justice movement and discuss the development of the field by presenting an overview of the literature and existent research on environmental justice. This research has focused to a large extent on siting issues and on the causes and explanations of environmental equity. In particular, five causes or explanations of environmental injustice have been emphasized in the literature: (a) race; (b) economic and market factors; (c) political and administrative issues; (d) attitudinal issues; and (e) post-materialism. We review the major pieces of research and evidence in these areas and compare and contrast the explanations of environmental injustice. For the most part we find that there is considerable controversy over the different 143

Environmental justice and project development : the Sri Lankan experience

“…Background and Literature Review: Environmental Justice Mainstream society understands environmental injustice in its simplest form, as an uneven distribution of risk and benefits among people. Justice is a concept with multiple integrated meanings and there is considerable controversy with regard to the causation and manifestations of environmental injustice (Sapat et al? 2002;Schlosberg, 2004).…”

“…According to Petts (2005), environmental justice focuses on "improving the quality of life of the poor and the socially disadvantaged" while equity suggests more "structural issues related to unequal distribution of power, resources and environmental burdens which raises questions as to when inequality becomes inequitable." Sapat et al (2002) say that equity refers to "equal protection of environmental laws and holds that the burden of environmental pollution and health risks should be born[e] equally by all populations." According to Schlosberg, equity is simply related to costs and benefits while the term justice encompasses a much broader meaning.…”

“…These events largely popularized the term "environmental justice", which is now the focus of one of the largest growing social justice movements in the United States (Foster, 1998). It was a combination of initiatives by scholars and communities that eventually advanced the movement resulting in the demand for the creation of policies to solve issues of environmental injustice and mitigate such incidents from occurring in the future (Sapat et al, 2002).…”

Political control and policy-making uncertainty in executive orders: the implementation of environmental justice policy

“…Skeptics of EJ also refer to competing empirical studies that do not find clear or consistent linkages of race and class with exposure to environmental hazards (Anderton et al 1994;US GAO 1995;Oakes et al 1996). Sapat et al (2002) suggest that traditional empirical analysis of EJ problems has often been limited by narrowly operationalised measures of environmental quality or total risk exposure. An additional and important concern raised by Sapat et al is that the research focus of EJ empirical studies has frequently excluded salient dimensions of the policy-making process, such as the nature of public participation in land use planning.…”

“…Sapat et al (2002) suggest that traditional empirical analysis of EJ problems has often been limited by narrowly operationalised measures of environmental quality or total risk exposure. An additional and important concern raised by Sapat et al is that the research focus of EJ empirical studies has frequently excluded salient dimensions of the policy-making process, such as the nature of public participation in land use planning.…”