Adoption and Cooption of the Environmental Justice Issue Frame

• In Event: Environmental Justice: Assessing Problems and Remedies

Abstract

The concept of environmental justice has become a dominant frame for environmental policy agenda in the US federal goverment. Administrations from both parties have shifted attention from society-wide benefits and costs of environmental policy to the distribution of benefits and costs, both for regulation and industrial policy. However, as concepts of justice rooted in grass-roots advocacy and academia collide with the opportunity structure of federal policymaking and implementation, environmental justice has gained new meanings, including definitions rejected by most activists and absent from academic writing. While the adoption of environmental justice discourse is evidence of the movement's impact on policymaking, the new meanings of the phase make it difficult to assess the movement's impact on substantive policy outcomes.

Analyzing the text of over 15,000 draft and final rules from 40 agencies and 50 million public comments on these rules from 1993 to 2023, I build an empirically-rooted taxonomy of environmental justice claims made in the policy process, track changes in usage by advocates and policymakers over time, and assess the relationship between different types of claims and policy change.

Leveraging within-organization variation in efficacy across multiple lobbying attempts, I find that when organizations successfully mobilize environmental justice issue frames (i.e., policymakers adopt environmental justice language after an organization pressures them to), these organizations are more likely to achieve their substantive policy aims. However, this effect is mostly driven by large national advocacy organizations adopting environmental justice rhetoric to advance more traditional environmental policy agendas, not by the kind of environmental justice activists that social movement scholars write about. Ironically, definitions of environmental justice that align least with those traditionally used by activists and discussed in academic literature are most associated with policy change. These findings highlight the importance of tracking changes in meanings and measuring substantive policy outcomes for assessing the impact of social movements on policy and policy implementation.

Author

• Devin Judge-Lord, University of Michigan