Regulatory Enforcement, Riskscapes, and Environmental Justice

Abstract

Does environmental regulation vary over poor and minority communities? An uneven governmental response may follow from regulators’ varying incentives to negotiate enforcement challenges. We argue that regulators confront two in particular. Regulators can pursue political enforcement, responding to mobilized interests, regardless of environmental risk, or they can pursue instrumental enforcement, responding to at risk communities, regardless of political mobilization. To examine these competing strategies, we use an original dataset from the EPA’s Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI) model to develop a geographic “riskscape” combined with census tract community data and facility-level enforcement data. We find that state regulatory agencies pursue a mixture of political and instrumental enforcement but that these tactics are applied unevenly across traditional environmental justice communities. Poor communities and those exposed to higher risks attract regulatory attention, while African American and Hispanic communities do not. Importantly, inattention to Hispanic communities is not mediated by the relative risk levels they face.

Keywords: Environmental Justice, Risk, Regulation, Policy Implementation