Bureaucrats at Work in the Neoliberal Era: Explaining the Neoliberalization of Agency Environmental Justice Programs

• In Event: 169 - Section on Environment and Technology Paper Session. Environment and Institutional Power

Abstract

Scholarship on neoliberalism has illuminated the various forms, drivers, and consequences of the neoliberalization of state agencies. Yet we still know very little about how neoliberalization happens within agencies: how bureaucrats view their own programs and practices, and how they strategically manage the neoliberal constraints within which they operate. In this paper, I open up the black box of regulatory agencies to augment scholars’ understandings of how neoliberalization of state agencies occurs. I analyze five government agency “environmental justice” (EJ) grant programs in the United States, which have taken a remarkably neoliberal form despite the fact that EJ activists – who pursue change through non-neoliberal means – called for and helped to design the programs. I use data from in-depth interviews with agency staff to show how neoliberal outcomes in agency practice stem from the fact that some staff conceptualize EJ in neoliberal terms, and from the ways in which others strategically try to protect non-neoliberal programs from neoliberal attack. I also analyze the outlier case in my study to identify conditions that have fostered a non-neoliberal regulatory program.

Author

• Jill Lindsey Harrison, University of Colorado-Boulder