What Does Chelsea Creek Do for You? A Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication

Horgan, Leah; Mok, Kira; Boetsch, Eliza; Kelly, Sophie; Dickinson, Katherine L.; Nost, Eric; Bongiavanni, Roseann; Wylie, Sara

doi:10.1089/env.2022.0081

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…Various methodologies are utilized in order to capture the full scope of these policy mechanisms, including both quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches. The question of whether it is useful to define environmental justice communities quantitatively and frame them as disadvantaged, overburdened, or underserved is a key topic of exploration in the environmental justice literature (Buckingham & Kulcur, 2010;Eady, 2003;Holifield, 2012Holifield, , 2014Horgan et al, 2023;Tuck, 2009;Vera et al, 2019;Walker, 2010). The chapters in this dissertation create, analyze, and evaluate methods for defining and mapping environmental justice communities, and find ways in which these definitions and mapping tools can be used to move environmental justice forward in the U.S. context, but argues against overreliance on these policy tools, especially in isolation.…”

Section: Dissertation Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental justice policy in the United States: community definition and benefits allocation in underserved and overburdened communities

Sotolongo

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The Biden Administration's Justice40 initiative promises to allocate at least 40 percent of the benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy to disadvantaged communities.In order to deliver on this promise, both the concept of "benefits" and "disadvantaged communities" need to be defined-otherwise, the promised distribution of benefits cannot be evaluated. While the Justice40 initiative is moving forward at the federal level, it is likely that over the next decade, U.S. states will follow the federal government's leadership in allocating benefits to disadvantaged communities. At the same time, U.S. states are experimenting with different approaches to environmental justice community definition and policy interventions.Environmental justice policy research, which has traditionally focused on analyzing how state characteristics are correlated with the existence of an environmental justice policy, is based on a conceptualization of justice that splits policies into procedural or substantive categories. There is little research that focuses on environmental justice policy at the U.S. state level and incorporates more complex theories of justice from a wide range of environmental justice theorists.

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Section: Dissertation Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental justice policy in the United States: community definition and benefits allocation in underserved and overburdened communities

Sotolongo

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Mitigating allocative tradeoffs and harms in an environmental justice data tool

Huynh,

Chin,

Koenecke

et al. 2024

Nat Mach Intell

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Neighbourhood-level screening algorithms are increasingly being deployed to inform policy decisions. However, their potential for harm remains unclear: algorithmic decision-making has broadly fallen under scrutiny for disproportionate harm to marginalized groups, yet opaque methodology and proprietary data limit the generalizability of algorithmic audits. Here we leverage publicly available data to fully reproduce and audit a large-scale algorithm known as CalEnviroScreen, designed to promote environmental justice and guide public funding by identifying disadvantaged neighbourhoods. We observe the model to be both highly sensitive to subjective model specifications and financially consequential, estimating the effect of its positive designations as a 104% (62–145%) increase in funding, equivalent to US$2.08 billion (US$1.56–2.41 billion) over four years. We further observe allocative tradeoffs and susceptibility to manipulation, raising ethical concerns. We recommend incorporating technical strategies to mitigate allocative harm and accountability mechanisms to prevent misuse.

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The politics of percentage: Informating justice in the US clean energy rush

Smith

2024

Critique of Anthropology

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Within days of taking office in January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order establishing the Justice40 initiative, which directed federal agencies to ensure that at least 40% of the benefits of federal investments flow to historically marginalized communities. This article traces how Justice40, as interpreted and enacted by government bureaucrats, academics, industry researchers, and activists, intervenes in the governance of the energy transition it seeks to put into motion. Drawing from ongoing critical participation in energy research and development arenas and taking inspiration from Kim Fortun’s notion of the “informating of environmentalism,” this article argues that Justice40 can be understood as an attempt to informate justice, rendering it into problems that can be understood, manipulated, and audited through information systems. Scrambling to manage their accountabilities to the executive branch, Congress, and the American taxpayers footing the bill for massive infrastructure investments, Department of Energy programs are rolling out intricate systems of quantification, whose objectives of commensurability obscure local conceptions and prioritizations of justice. While Justice40 articulates lofty goals of energy transition enhancing the wellbeing of people who have otherwise been harmed by or excluded from the country’s existing energy infrastructure, its everyday practice has the ironic effect of undermining both epistemic and procedural justice.

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What Does Chelsea Creek Do for You? A Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication

Cited by 3 publications

References 3 publications

Environmental justice policy in the United States: community definition and benefits allocation in underserved and overburdened communities

Environmental justice policy in the United States: community definition and benefits allocation in underserved and overburdened communities

Mitigating allocative tradeoffs and harms in an environmental justice data tool

The politics of percentage: Informating justice in the US clean energy rush

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