Who Is Planning for Environmental Justice—and How?

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings

Environmental justice (EJ) seeks to correct legacies of disproportionately burdening low-income and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities with environmental hazards that contribute to health inequalities. Federal and state policies increasingly require plans to assess and incorporate EJ principles. The current lack of accessible data and plan evaluation on EJ has been a barrier to policy setting and benchmarking. We created a framework for analyzing content across a large corpus of plans by using quantitative text analysis on 461 California city general plans, also known as comprehensive plans. To verify results and identify specific policies, we conducted content analysis on a subset of seven plans. Demonstrating the broad applicability of EJ principles in planning, policies spanned all required elements of general plans: housing, circulation, land use, health, safety, open space, air quality, and noise. We found that the most headway in EJ planning has been made in cities with a majority population of color and well before the 2018 California state mandate to address EJ. Policies were primarily focused on preventing adverse exposures as opposed to correcting for legacies of inequality. Further, although all policies address vulnerable populations and places, very few specifically address race or racism. Thus, EJ has been largely operationalized as health equity.

Takeaway for practice

We identified 628 EJ policies focused on vulnerable populations across the seven city plans included in content analysis. The smorgasbord of policy approaches provides fodder for cities across the United States to incorporate an EJ approach to planning. Gaps in focus areas reveal room for policy innovation (e.g., emphasis on language justice, formerly incarcerated individuals, and noise ordinance policing). We invite planners and community advocates to search across California’s plans for EJ policy inspiration and to use the appendix of EJ policies cataloged in this research as a benchmark of city-level innovation.

Keywords:

• environmental justice
• health equity
• health in all policies
• machine learning

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank our community partners in the California Environmental Justice Alliance, particularly Tiffany Eng, for their feedback and guidance as this research progressed.

RESEARCH SUPPORT

We thank the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 1750621) and National Institutes of Health (Grant No. P30 ES023513) for financial support.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the General Plan Database Mapping Tool (Antonio et al., 2021) and the UC Davis DataLab (Stahmer & Brinkley, 2021).

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2022.2118155.

Notes

1 Throughout our findings sections, we specify the number of policies that fit each topic definition listed in Technical Appendix A. These counts are intended only to compare the relative focus of plans on policy areas and populations. Policies were often coded under multiple subject areas depending on their content; thus, there was overlap in policy counts across categories. In addition, some cities included the same policies in multiple elements of their general plans, meaning some policies may have been coded more than once during our analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Brinkley

CATHERINE BRINKLEY ([email protected]) is an associate professor in human ecology and directs the Center for Regional Change, a research center focused on community-based scholarship that centers environmental justice.

Jenny Wagner

JENNY WAGNER ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate in public health sciences at the University of California, Davis. Her research is focused on racial justice and human health.