Multinationals and Community Development. Citizens' Assessment of Multinationals' Impacts Towards Building Environmental Justice

This article examines how citizens assess multinational enterprises' impacts on local communities to inform justice‐oriented practices towards achieving more just relationships between multinationals and local communities. Using a novel mixed‐methods research design grounded in environmental justice, this research examined the views of the citizens of the Huasco Valley in Chile regarding the impacts of two closed and two operating multinationals on communities. Ninety‐one citizens responded to a survey and 15 were interviewed; their responses were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. Community citizens assess multinational projects and all justice dimensions as unjust, leading to a sense of injustice. This research also ranks justice variables, identifying their relative weights and effects to build just multinationals‐community relationships and suggests that mainstream justice is insufficient to understand how to build justice and that alternative approaches are required to redefine environmental justice. This article advances environmental justice and sustainability management literature by highlighting the relevance and limitations of mainstream justice variables, proposing a justice framework based on the variables' weights and effects, and underlying other justice approaches to consider when assessing multinationals' impacts on communities. Findings suggest justice should be understood as a contextually grounded and historically informed process shaped by unequal power relations, ecological concerns, and competing knowledge systems.