The environmental justice (EJ) movement in the United States has long sought change by fighting environmental injustices. One major strategy is utilizing litigation strategies centered around federal policy such as the Civil Rights and Clean Water Acts (Pulido et al. 2016). From the top-down, President Clinton issued Executive Orders 12898 (1994) in order to incorporate environmental justice proactively into the work that federal agencies do, but the effectiveness of this policy has been widely critiqued (Pulido et.al. 2016; Moore 2017; Buckhoy 2015). More recently, President Biden issued E.O. 14008, creating an infrastructure for collaboration with EJ leaders and for distributing the benefits of some federal grants to ‘underserved communities’ through the EJ40 program. Though Justice40 provides a far-reaching set of tools, metrics, and funding for advancing EJ, critics have noted that implementation has so far moved slowly, under prioritized frontline groups, and lacked transparency (Schott and Whyte 2023). EJ practitioners working to seize the promises of these federal programs must negotiate these terms, temporalities, and ongoing exclusions precisely at a moment when many EJ-impacted communities seek a more capacious sense of “justice” than the state-endorsed frame (Sze 2020). Despite these critiques, the renewed interest in EJ in the public sphere and the subsequent debates of how to best implement this new policy, we argue, provides an opportunity for critical scholars to analyze the promises and pitfalls of EJ40 and federal engagement in EJ concerns more broadly.

We invite papers that present research related to any of the following questions:
How have EJ groups engaged with the state and/or state policies to seize these opportunities? How have they navigated the benefits, tensions, and limits of these strategies?
How does federal policy give legitimacy to particular ideas of environmental justice and community over others and what are the implications?

Organizers: Brittany Cook & Theodore Hilton

Please submit abstracts to Brittany Cook at brittanycook@lsu.edu by 15 December 2023.

Modality: Hybrid