Seeking environmental justice through the state
Insider allies in U.S. state and federal government agencies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8944841 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jill Lindsey Harrison (0000-0001-5842-4891, University of Colorado Boulder, corresponding author), Jonathan K London (0000-0001-5478-0880, University of California, Davis) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 155 |
| Pages | 104098-104098 |
| Publication date | 2024-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Geoforum (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-7185 • E-ISSN: 1872-9398 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104098 |
| OpenAlex | W4401220663 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 76 |
Geographers and political ecologists have demonstrated settler-colonial states’ longstanding key roles in producing environmental injustice through colonialism, racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and other mechanisms. Such studies tend to conclude, implicitly or explicitly, that environmental justice (EJ) movements’ pursuits of more sustainable and just futures must therefore antagonistically confront the state or work beyond it entirely to create alternative futures that do not reinforce state hegemony and violence. However, other scholars in recent years have critiqued such characterizations of the state as unilaterally and fundamentally oppressive, arguing instead that states are terrains of struggle whose contradictory programs and practices reflect not only the interests of capital but also actions of movements. They demonstrate that movements pursuing more just and sustainable futures find purchase working both through and beyond the state. Here, we follow these scholars but depart from them in one respect – namely, they frame movements as pressuring the state only from outside of it. We argue that conceptualizing the state and movements as ontologically overlapping and permeable realms in which some actors move back and forth illuminates additional movement influence on state practice and additional factors that mediate their efforts. We make this case by following a group of U.S. EJ activists who pursue EJ movements’ goals by taking formal positions inside the government agencies they seek to change. We show that they accomplish meaningful change in these roles and that their work is mediated not only by industry power over state agencies, as other scholars have rightly identified, but also by elements of regulatory workplace culture, insider allies’ skills honed in external EJ advocacy, and solidarity among EJ advocates within and beyond the state. By more fully identifying such mediating factors and showing how they shape insider allies’ work, we hope to highlight new fronts of struggle as former EJ movement activists use their insider ally positions to wrest more control over the state from capital and for liberatory ends
Capitalism · Economic Justice · Government (linguistics · Hegemony · Injustice · Law and economics · Neoliberalism (international relations · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Mining and Resource Management
From Transportation Equity to Transportation Justice
The Problem of the Capitalist State
Crossroads Tempered Radicalism and the Politics of Ambivalence and Change
Defying gravity
Environmental justice is exhausting
Faithful and Fearless
The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice
Environmental justice organizing as commoning practice in groundwater reform
Stategraphy
The Elusive Environmental Justice Area
From Environmental Justice Activist to Agency Staff
The Problem of Accountability
Indigenous Peoples and the Justice40 Screening Tool
Assessing states
Improvising against the racial state in Atlanta
From ‘marginal to marginal’
Critical environmental justice and the state
Institutions, Networks and Activism Inside the State
Regulatory capture” and “extractive hegemony”
Indigenous environmental justice and sustainability
A perspective on radical transformations to sustainability
Environmental Justice at the Crossroads
Marginalization by collaboration
Constructing a global commons in, against and beyond the state
Certainty, Fairness, and Balance
Continued Disembodiment
The “Commons” Versus the “Commodity”
Prefiguring the State
Reconceptualizing Resistance
Critical Geographies with the State
Acknowledging the Racial State
Rethinking Justice
Mutual Aid as a Praxis for Critical Environmental Justice
Towards an Energy Politics In‐Against‐and‐Beyond the State
Site Fight! Toward the Abolition of Immigrant Detention on Tacoma’s Tar Pits (and Everywhere Else)
Is there space for politics in the environmental bureaucracy? Discretion and constraint in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment
With-against-and-beyond the human right to water
Neoliberalism and environmental justice in the United States environmental protection agency
Protected areas and extractive hegemony
At home’ in state institutions
Against Neoliberal Natures
States of just transition
Toward an Interim Politics of Resourcefulness for the Anthropocene
Dangerous pipelines, dangerous people
Rebel cities
The Organization of Expert Activism
Geographies of race and ethnicity II
Political ecology II
Reimagining 'justice' in environmental justice
Thinking with Flint
State Regulation and Environmental Justice
The Women's Movement Inside and Outside the State
The racial environmental state and abolition geography in California's Central Valley
Environmental justice and the state
Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice
Evolution of a Movement
The Rise of the Environmental Justice Paradigm
Roots of Our Renewal
Dumping in Dixie
Seeing Like a State
Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice
"Wiped Out by the "Greenwave
Entangled sovereignties
Bureaucrats' Tacit Understandings and Social Movement Policy Implementation
Impossible Burdens
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |