Deciding on justice: environmental justice in city council agenda-setting

ABSTRACT

Environmental Justice (EJ) is a major concern for low-income communities across the US, but government responses to these injustices remain inconsistent, often because EJ issues are overlooked or ignored in government decision-making. Despite this issue, little research examines the procedural elements influencing whether EJ is considered in government activities or the factors influencing whether EJ concerns are included on local government policy agendas. We use Qualitative Comparative Analysis with embedded comparative case studies to systematically examine 1784 city council meeting minutes from the 13 largest Texas cities between 2018 and 2020 to identify key social and government characteristics driving whether EJ issues are addressed on government agendas. Our findings reveal several key characteristics that are associated with high levels of EJ attention at the local government level including liberal politics, high levels of racial representation in government, and racial and gender diversity. Even within liberal cities, local governments that are not racially diverse, supported by female leadership, or highly representative of the populations they serve are unlikely to devote substantial attention to critical EJ issues on their policy agendas. The results demonstrate the critical role that procedural justice in the agenda-setting process has on social equity.

Key policy highlights

• Local government composition drives whether EJ issues are considered on policy agendas.

• Liberal politics are a necessary condition for high EJ attention in government.

• Government representation, racial diversity, and female leadership are associated with higher EJ attention on policy agendas.

• Racial diversity and female leadership compensate for each other when determining EJ inclusion in issue setting.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• agenda setting
• local government
• diversity
• representation
• women leadership

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The COVID-19 pandemic undermined the capacity of city councils to meet and discuss policy issues normally, so we exclude meeting minutes past 2020 to avoid these complications.

2 Garland, Plano, Lubbock, Irving, and Fort Worth had the lowest levels of EJ inclusion on government agendas.

3 This map was created using Esri (ArcGIS) based on data from MIT describing voting results from the 2020 presidential election (MIT Election Data and Science Lab 2018).