ABSTRACT What motivates US‐based environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) to incorporate social justice (SJ) into their missions and activities? How does this integration occur? ENGOs could integrate SJ issues that speak directly to their environmental mission or address non‐environmental topics, such as police reform. Their integration might also be symbolic or substantive. We hypothesize that ENGOs' risk/reward calculations, derived from their organizational characteristics, influenced whether and how they engaged with SJ issues between 2011 and 2023, as the social expectation that they would do so increased in parallel with support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. To study the extent and type of SJ incorporation, we examine a random sample of 500 US ENGOs at three time points coinciding with significant BLM events (2011, 2017, 2023). Cumulative ordered probit models reveal that ENGOs with larger budgets, operating at the national and international levels, and those already working across a wide range of issue areas were consistently more likely to incorporate SJ substantively over performatively. They engaged in SJ issues related to environmental concerns rather than broader, non‐environmental SJ concerns, implying that NGOs are willing to respond to changes in the external environment by expanding their missions and investing in new programs, but only to the extent that these changes align with their core mission and competencies.
Echavarría et al. (Fri,) studied this question.