Environmental Justice and Collaborative Governance: Building a Socio-Spatial Perspective for Facility Siting

Environmental justice concerns, in part, the distribution of both environmental hazards and nuisances such that impoverished communities, particularly impoverished communities of color, contend more with the effects of industry than those who are affluent. As communities of color have organized to confront this problem, their claims of injustice have revealed significant issues across all sectors of environmental governance, both in the U.S. and internationally, and reflect failures of representative institutions in urban land management. In this manuscript, we derive a socio-spatial approach to management of facility siting decisions based on the research in environmental justice. Then we discuss some reforms to facility siting that have been proposed and implemented in the U.S., Canada, and western Europe over the course of three decades, and how these reforms can improve the legitimacy of facility siting decisions.