Environmental Inequality: Explaining Variation in Environmental Justice Efforts in the Mid-Atlantic States

The Mid-Atlantic region is often overlooked in environmental justice scholarship, but as Kimberly Fields argues, it provides insights into broadly applicable patterns of state policymaking. Focusing on Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, Fields examines how state governments respond to claims of environmental racism—deliberate decisions about whose neighborhoods should host environmental burdens—and to sustained pressure from community activists.

Environmental Inequality examines how these states develop their environmental justice policies and approaches as a way to understand why they vary in form and focus despite similar issues and demands. Fields reviews the institutional and structural factors that shape environmental justice policymaking. She pays particular attention to how the relevant policy-formulating bodies are organized and how they engage—or fail to engage—with affected communities. She considers race-conscious and race-dismissive models, as well as open versus closed approaches to deliberations with engaged local activists. By analyzing these processes, Fields uncovers profound implications of policymaking and institutional design choices, showing how differing arrangements produce variation in states' policy focus and enactment.

Drawing on extensive original research, Environmental Inequality offers a nuanced and detailed explanation for the variation in state-level environmental justice efforts