Federal environmental justice institutions were built to institutionalize community participation procedures

Evidence

One of the earliest political victories for environmental justice advocates in the USA was the establishment in 1992 of the Office of Environmental Justice in the Environmental Protection Agency; this office serves as the home of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), which is chartered to provide advice to the EPA and the federal government on a range of issues. The NEJAC established a subcommittee on Public Participation, which developed a ‘Model Plan for Public Participation’ to be used by federal agencies in designing a process for participation for communities affected by environmental policies under consideration (USEPA 1996, updated 2000a). The Model Plan suggests that policymaking procedures must encourage active community participation, institutionalize public participation, recognize community knowledge, and utilize cross-cultural formats and exchanges to enable the participation of as much diversity as exists in a community. — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 245

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is the EPA Office of Environmental Justice a case of procedural justice genuinely institutionalized, or a token gesture? Useful for the Soundscape/EJ litigation comparison.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Legal Systems course — procedural justice codified into federal advisory bodies is exactly the ‘law/institutions’ thread. — connects to: Academics’ 1990 lobbying directly created the EPA’s environmental equity bureaucracy — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 144; Clinton’s 1994 executive order made environmental justice part of federal agency missions — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 618; Environmental justice groups organize already-existing communities that insist on recognition — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 230 (+1 more)