‘We do ecology, not sociology’: interactions among bureaucrats and the undermining of regulatory agencies’ environmental justice efforts

Environmental justice (EJ) scholars have argued that agencies’ EJ efforts have done little to accomplish core goals of the EJ movement: democratizing decision-making and reducing environmental inequalities. Scholars explain that agencies’ EJ efforts are undermined by industry and political elites hostile to environmental regulations, shortcomings of existing EJ policy, and limited technical tools. I augment these explanations by taking a constructionist approach, identifying interactions through which bureaucrats – with each other and with me – defend or contest their agency’s EJ reform efforts. Drawing on interviews with agency staff and observations of agency meetings, I show that EJ staff – those tasked with leading their agencies’ EJ efforts but wielding little authority over their colleagues – experience working in an environment in which colleagues can challenge and dismiss EJ and those who promote it. I thus argue that scholars aiming to explain why agencies’ EJ efforts have failed to meet EJ advocates’ expectations must attend not only to factors other scholars have rightly noted but also to interactions among staff through which some define EJ as anathema to agency practice and hence stifle proposed EJ reforms.