The Environmental Justice Movement's Impact in Agency Rulemaking

• In Event: From Framing to Shaming: Generating Support for Environmental Policy

Abstract

This paper explores the role of the environmental justice movement in shaping policy made in the United States executive branch. Environmental justice concerns focus on unequal access to healthy environments and protection from harms caused by things like pollution and climate change. Specifically, I focus on the role of public comments in federal agency rulemaking. To assess the effect of activist engagement in rulemaking, I first quantitatively compare policy outcomes where environmental justice claims were and were not raised. Second, I qualitatively trace environmental justice discourses across activists' comments and policy documents. The ways in which agencies consider (or fail to consider) environmental justice highlights how rulemaking has distributive consequences, how the public comment process creates a political community, and how claims raised by activists are addressed.

Examining over 20,000 rulemaking processes across 32 agencies, I find that when public comments raise environmental justice concerns, these concerns are more likely to be addressed in the final rule. Effect sizes vary across agencies, possibly due to the alignment of environmental justice aims with agency missions. The correlation between activist engagement and policy changes is largest and most significant in agencies with missions focused on environmental and distributional policy, i.e. the kinds of agencies we may expect to be most responsive to environmental justice concerns. For example, most agencies were over twice as likely to add new language addressing environmental justice issues in final rules when these issues were raised by comments on draft rules. However, both baseline rates of using environmental justice language and the magnitude of the effect of public comments were much larger at agencies where environmental justice conflicts are more common, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Forest Service, and Department of Transportation. While we cannot infer that public comments themselves caused agencies to address environmental justice concerns, public comments may be a good proxy for activist mobilization in general. Case studies of several key remaking processes that cross presidential administrations show that environmental justice discourse has shaped policy documents across both Democratic and Republican administrations. Whereas the prevailing wisdom is that rulemaking is dominated by business interests, this research suggests that public interest coalitions may be more important in rulemaking than previously assumed.

Author

• Devin Judge-Lord, Harvard University