Finding “Community” in the Justice40 Initiative

• In Event: Environmental Justice

Abstract

Climate policy scholars have recently dedicated attention to analyzing “community” and have identified the resulting policy inequalities from definitional choices (Brazilian et al. 2021; Klinsky and Dowlatabadi 2009). However, this analysis has not extended to interrogating the “community” in climate justice policy. By contrast to climate policies, climate justice policies pay particular attention to longstanding, often racial, inequalities that overburden some communities with climate impacts and attempt to rectify them with redistributive stipulations. For example, the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Initiative directs 40 percent of certain federal climate and environmental investments to “disadvantaged communities,” in a suite of climate policies, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). In this paper, I argue that climate justice policies unintentionally exclude some frontline communities (often a synonym for disadvantaged communities)—those hit first and hardest by the climate crisis—despite the hopes and intentions that climate justice policies are equitable. Indeed, the exclusion of frontline communities occurs even when they are part of the climate justice policymaking process.

To demonstrate how climate justice policies paradoxically further inequalities I use a political keyword analysis approach (Strolovitch 2023) to study the meanings and contexts of “community”—what it means and what it accomplishes—and analyze how different actors mobilize the frequently used climate justice terms of “frontline communities” or “disadvantaged communities” in climate policy. In this paper, I draw extensively from the case of the Justice40 Initiative and the Biden Administration’s and environmental justice organizations’ protests, press releases, and documents, e.g., the Department of Energy’s “General Guidance for Justice40 Implementation,” which provide limited meanings and uses of “disadvantaged communities.” Specifically, both Justice40 definitions of disadvantaged communities— “geographic” and “common condition”—reinforce marginalization by failing to recognize intersectionality and subtly excluding gender & sexuality. Furthermore, even as environmental justice organizations contest the limitations of Justice40’s exclusion of race within the “disadvantaged community” definition, they similarly fail to advance intersectional climate policy. The paper's findings are important for developing critical lenses toward policy analysis and identifying how policies and the terms used in them are imbued with power asymmetries in which “justice” terminology still reproduces inequalities.

Author

• Jeff L Feng, Northwestern University