ISSUE DEFINITION AND THE POLITICS OF STATE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE POLICY ADOPTION

ABSTRACT

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of research regarding environmental justice. Nearly all of this research, however, focuses on documenting the proximity and exposure of poor and minority communities to sources of environmental risk. Researchers have yet to assess systematically governmental responses to inequities in the distribution of this risk. Our paper begins to fill this gap by examining the policy responses of state governments to charges of environmental injustice. First, we provide a brief overview of environmental justice policy activity at all levels of government. Second, we discuss how issue definition may help determine the politics of policy adoption in the area of environmental justice, and develop a theory to explain these policy adoptions. Third, we model state policy activity using probit and ordered probit analysis, testing to see whether these responses are best explained by the severity of the environmental justice problem in the state, state racial diversity, state political capacity, or state administrative capacity and evaluating whether these results are more consistent with redistributive or protective regulatory policy. We close by discussing what our results imply for issue definition in environmental justice and the prospects of adequate state policy responses to inequities in the distribution of environmental risk.