Monitoring Environmental Justice

Introduction

In recent decades increasing activism and scholarship has focused on environmental injustice, variously defined as the disproportionate distribution of environmental benefits and harms among racial and socioeconomic groups (distributional injustice), the limited ability of these groups to participate in decision making about such issues (participatory injustice), and the restoration and enrichment of relations between those involved in and affected by environmental injustice (restorative justice). A few legal initiatives have explicitly targeted environmental injustice (Executive Order 12898 and the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) interim guidance on conforming to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), more have implicitly helped the cause (the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), etc). Yet neither direct nor indirect policies for environmental justice have been accompanied by sufficient indexes, methods of monitoring progress toward environmental justice. ¹ This lacuna is troubling because the civil rights, women's, and environmental movements indicate that major social change requires both grassroots efforts and legal innovations and because policymakers and the general public alike presume that new policies will be accompanied by a method of monitoring progress toward the goals of the policy. ² Thus, activists seeking environmental justice should advocate not only for policy change but also for methods of monitoring progress toward that goal.

To begin to overcome the limitations of existing indicators of environmental justice to support future environmental justice policy, I will articulate a framework to aid the development of indexes that link multiple environmental justice issues within and across spatial and temporal scales. The argument will proceed in three steps: First, an examination of the importance of monitoring progress toward policy targets will justify the focus on indicators and indexes. Second, evaluating trends in environmental justice indicators (e.g., their focus on specific local issues) will reveal their limitations for evaluating policies. Third, an existing integrative framework for developing indexes of sustainability will inform the creation of a framework to guide the development of environmental justice indexes at multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Discussion

Indicators and indexes are means of monitoring progress toward policy targets which monitor something about the state of a complex system such as the health of a population or the integrity of an ecosystem, often by using a number, figure, or graph. An “indicator” is one variable or piece of data while “index” refers to the aggregation of multiple indicators. ³ For example, the UV index, a feature of many weather reports, compiles many meteorological indicators to yield an index of incident ultraviolet light. Low numbers and cool colors are safer than higher numbers and warmer colors which correspond to an increasing need for sun protection. ⁴ The UV index, like all indexes, simplifies a large amount of information about a complex system to inform decision making.

Policymakers and the general public have not always assumed that new social policies would be accompanied by indicators or indexes of the success of the policy, yet this expectation certainly prevails today. ⁵ Factors contributing to this trend include 1) the stereotype that quantitative data is objective, true, and complete knowledge, 2) the widespread use of development indicators such as Gross National Product (GNP) and the Human Development Index (HDI), and 3) a desire to ensure that taxpayer money is not being squandered, which necessitates 4) an understanding of whether and how policies work.

Attempts to assess ecosystemic values exemplify their current focus on indicators and their limitations. Traditionally, decisions about interacting with ecosystems, e.g., draining a wetland to build a subdivision, were made using a monetary cost-benefit analysis focusing on the value of more land for housing and maybe the monetary value of the wetland to cleanse water and control flooding. This market-based data has been privileged over aesthetic, cultural, or intrinsic values that may be as, if not more, important to local communities. Many members of the public, however, challenge the trends of quantification and monetization. For instance, the public often assigns an infinite monetary value to ecosystems in surveys, confounding the ability to value these goods in simulated markets. Objections to the monetization or quantification of ecosystemic and cultural values as well as the challenges of monitoring the status of complex dynamic systems such as the ecosystems and societies involved in environmental justice pose significant challenges to the trend of quantifying progress toward policy targets using indicators.

Critiques of and challenges to indicators and quantification are significant and should shape the development and use of indicators. However, avoiding monitoring in general, and quantification in many cases, to escape these critiques is not a realistic option. If we wait for all of the problems of quantifiable policy targets to be solved, significant opportunities for justice and limiting environmental destruction will be lost. Additionally, it seems reasonable and desirable to be able to monitor the effectiveness of policy initiatives to determine whether funds are well spent and how to best achieve policy goals in the future. Quantifiable means of doing so may be effective and should not be dismissed off-hand merely because of their limits. Thus, in order to influence policy, scholars and activists advocating for environmental justice must articulate policy targets and methods of monitoring progress toward them that can attend to the inherent limits of indicators.

During index construction a multistage process is often used to transform ideal attributes of a goal into concrete indicators. S. López-Ridaura, O. Masera, and M. Astier characterize this process in four steps. First, ideal attributes of the overarching goal are identified. For example, environmental justice advocates may focus on participatory justice, ensuring that people can participate significantly in decision making that affects them. ⁶ Next, a critical point for this attribute, a place in an environment or society where the attribute is “enhance[d] or constrain[ed]” ⁷ is identified. For participatory justice critical points could include participation in decision making and education about environmental safety issues. Third, diagnostic criteria, tools that identify when the critical points are reached or exceeded, are developed. Diagnostic criteria for participatory justice may focus on notices and hearings in the language of affected people written in nontechnical language, minority representation in local governments, or legal decision making that allows stakeholder participation. Finally, methods of quantifying the diagnostic criteria, the indicators themselves, are developed. ⁸ Through this process of refinement, stakeholders and decision makers can move from vague policy targets to concrete methods of assessing progress toward these targets. More examples are illustrated in Table 1.

Throughout this process of indicator construction, indicator developers must deal with a variety of technical challenges. Their indicator should be readily understood by nonexperts, yet be well justified through empirical and theoretical studies. Indexes need to balance a desire for comprehensiveness with the difficulties of integrating quantitative and qualitative indicators as well as quantitative indicators with different units (e.g., monetary, cultural, ecosystemic, and human health impacts). ⁹ Indicator developers also face challenges of data availability as when researchers settle for monitoring the proximity to environmental hazards because determining causes of health problems in a community is so difficult. Given these challenges, most environmental justice indicators focus on a single issue in a particular place.

Environmental justice indicators typically come in one of two large groups: statistical correlations, geographic information systems (GIS) studies, and traditional risk analysis which monitor the distribution of environmental burdens and benefits; ¹⁰ and surveys, interviews, and preexisting statistics which monitor participation in decision making, access to information, and restorative justice. ¹¹

The first group includes issues that can be relatively easily quantified: the toxicity of land, air, and water; the number of superfund sites or other hazards in a region; the rate and severity of environmental law enforcement by federal or state agencies; or the physical risk to a community by one chemical. This focus makes sense because mathematical methods require mathematical data. And yet many aspects of environmental justice are not easily quantifiable. For instance, deciding to limit the consumption of locally caught fish contaminated by heavy metals and PCBs may have significant economic, cultural, and psychological implications if fishing and consuming local fish is economically necessary to obtain protein for one's family or if it is central to one's community and identity as is the case with many Native American and Asian American populations. ¹² Even if such factors were quantifiable, most attempts to monitor environmental justice examine the direct effects of pollution or environmental disruption on land, air, and water and the proximity of demographic groups to such areas. Fewer examine the effects of chemicals on human bodies and the correlation of such effects with ethnicity, race, etc. ¹³ Even fewer studies examine the potential combinatory effects of exposure to multiple chemicals or the links between chemical stressors and psychological or social ramifications of environmental injustice. ¹⁴

Focusing solely on using quantifiable data may also obscure facets of injustice and its prevention. Local knowledge about ecosystems can be essential for understanding environmental injustices. Yet since it may not be quantified or collected in a manner familiar to modern western science, it may be overlooked as a method of monitoring and responding to environmental injustices.

Surveys and interviews that record community members' perceptions of their quality of life according to their own standards of quality of life may overcome some limits of the quantitative data (and move toward participatory justice). ¹⁵ Surveys may monitor 1) whether managers practice decision making that takes into account the interests of all involved, 2) whether locals have been notified about upcoming decisions in ample time and through unbiased hearings, 3) whether compensation is given to those harmed by injustices, 4) whether a commitment to fight further injustice develops, and 5) other topics. ¹⁶ These potential survey topics require significant refinement to be monitorable (they are attributes or critical features, not indicators), and will necessitate new data collection or the use of existing data that aligns with ideals of participatory justice in the target region.

Surveys, interviews, and preexisting data are also likely to be used to monitor progress toward restorative justice, building and repairing relationships between and among perpetrators and victims of environmental injustice. Existing indicators of restorative justice currently focus on single-perpetrator cases such as the relationship between juvenile criminals and their communities. Significant work is needed to adapt these indicators to restorative environmental justice cases which typically include many perpetrators, who may not know the effects of their actions and who may have had influences on spatially and temporally distant people in addition to their near neighbors. ¹⁷

Despite the significant differences between the techniques of monitoring environmental justice discussed above, to date, all have typically been employed to study a particular issue and place at a time. While the technical challenges of indicator formation and the tendency of environmental justice advocates to focus on particular communities encourage targeted indicators, such an approach cannot register the multifaceted nature of environmental justice issues or their extension across space and time. For example, environmental justice indicators cannot yet register the fact that those experiencing injustice are often significantly spatially and temporally distant from those contributing to the injustice (e.g., in climate change) or that perpetrators of environmental injustice may move to a new area rather than stopping or slowing unjust activities altogether when faced by resistance from locals. ¹⁸ Grassroots advocates often recognize these trends, e.g., in Not in Anyone's Backyard campaigns, yet this knowledge is not expressed in indicators which are limited to an issue or place. This narrow approach ignores the reality of people's lives and will make it difficult to monitor overall progress toward environmental justice as would be expected to accompany state-wide or national policies of environmental justice.

Significant effort is still needed to move from many attributes of environmental justice to monitorable indicators and to determine how quantitative and qualitative indicators at a variety of spatial and temporal scales can be aggregated into an index. Such work should be undertaken in consultation with local decision makers, policymakers, and academic experts, so it is not appropriate here to articulate full-fledged indexes of environmental justice. Instead a preliminary framework for developing and aggregating such indicators will be articulated.

While environmental justice scholars have not developed frameworks to guide the construction of environmental justice indexes, frameworks for sustainability indexes are comparatively well-developed. ¹⁹ The similarities between sustainability and environmental justice enable these frameworks to serve as models for environmental justice scholarship. Both 1) integrate environmental and social factors; 2) emphasize the values and knowledge of local communities; 3) utilize multiple types of data; and 4) encompass various interconnected spatial and temporal scales. Additionally, definitions of sustainability often entail both inter- and intragenerational justice. ²⁰

S. López-Ridaura, O. Masera, and M. Astier's Framework for Assessing the Sustainability of National Resource Management Systems (MEMSIS for its acronym in Spanish), is a promising guide for the development of a framework for environmental justice indicators. MEMSIS is a “systematic, participatory, interdisciplinary and flexible” method for evaluating sustainability developed through case studies assessing the sustainability of natural resource management in traditional agricultural systems. ²¹ As discussed earlier, MEMSIS leads people to refine the ideal attributes of their goal into critical points then into diagnostic criteria and finally into indicators which are used to assess past decisions and plan for the future. MEMSIS can be adapted to local social, economic, and environmental conditions, important characteristics given the variance of data between environmental justice communities and the importance of participation for environmental justice. ²² As MEMSIS is flexible and open to correction over time it enables learning and can benefit from new developments in academia, policymaking, and grassroots movements, important traits in a nascent area of study such as the development of environmental justice indicators.

Many of the assumptions about sustainability that inform the MEMSIS framework are prevalent in environmental justice studies. For example, López-Ridaura et al. maintain that sustainability can only be assessed comparatively, either through simultaneous comparison of two scenarios or through longitudinal studies of one situation. ²³ Environmental justice studies also rely on simultaneous comparison yet they have emphasized absolute indicators of environmental justice (when x is cleaned up, stopped, or prevented) more than the moving target approach of sustainability studies. Environmental justice studies could benefit from continually evaluating progress toward a target with respect to a past state of the system because fixed targets may quickly be out of date given the complex and dynamic nature of environmental justice systems in which new opportunities for injustice continually occur.

MEMSIS’ creators also assume that evaluations of sustainability must focus on a particular place, time, and management structure. ²⁴ Assessments of environmental justice do need to be particular because local circumstances and values influence the way that environmental justice is conceptualized and put into practice. However, as is obvious from prior discussions, overly focusing on a particular place or time can limit the ability to define and achieve environmental justice since injustices are often linked to spatially and temporally distant activities. Thus a departure from the assumption of particularity is needed to revise the MEMSIS framework for environmental justice.

Finally, the MEMSIS framework begins with attributes of sustainability for traditional agricultural systems including agricultural productivity, equity, and self-reliance. ²⁵ These must be replaced by attributes of environmental justice to adapt the framework for this context. I propose seven attributes of environmental justice based on the emphases of environmental justice literature: Equity of distribution of goods and harms, though problematic if narrowly defined or if it is the only element of environmental justice studied, is a substantial goal of environmental justice as articulated by activists and scholars, thus it is properly an attribute of environmental justice. At least one assessment of equitable distribution should be included in an index of environmental justice. Environmental justice also includes participatory justice, represented by the attributes of legal parity in the application of the law and empowerment to participate meaningfully in the creation of new policies and in decision making in general. Since applying existing laws will not be sufficient to achieve justice if laws, policymaking processes, or the application of laws are themselves are unjust, empowerment is necessary.

Because environmental justice includes the effects of past actions and decisions, I name three attributes of environmental justice about such effects: human health; ecosystem health; and cultural viability and coherence, the ability for citizens to continue their culture in some recognizable way to the extent desired by members of the community. Though these attributes are related, I differentiate between them because they highlight significantly different aspects of environmental justice. If they were combined into one attribute, cultural viability and coherence would likely be overshadowed by common measures of human health, a problem given the importance of culture to environmental justice communities.

The final attribute of environmental justice in this preliminary list is restoration, meaning that relationships between people involved in or affected by environmental injustice are being restored or strengthened. This attribute may be monitored by proxy through the other attributes' indicators, assuming that if relationships are healed, built, strengthened and different groups truly come to value each other that they will not allow environmental injustice to occur, or will at minimum, work to slow or stop injustices and to remediate past dangers. It could also be measured through surveys about attitudes and actions of the people involved. Using the four-step process outlined above and illustrated in Table 1, these attributes, or others suggested by those who use the framework, can be refined into indicators.

Yet articulating disparate indicators of environmental justice will not fully address the need for methods of monitoring progress toward environmental justice policy goals unless individual indicators can be integrated into an overall assessment that links spatial and temporal scales. If a community or national group creates indexes (hopefully in consultation with policymakers) to represent multiple aspects of environmental justice (health, culture, participation, etc.) then they will desire a way of summarizing this information for constituents to limit the confusion of trying to simultaneously interpret the significance of multiple indicators. They will also want to be able to track the ways their region influences and is influenced by other spatial regions and actions in time. Thus index developers need a) a method of aggregating indicators and b) a method of ensuring that the aggregated indicators span spatial and temporal scales.

At the level of abstraction utilized in this article, I can only suggest three general methods of aggregating indicators and a general strategy for handling data across multiple scales because I do not know the types of data (numbers, narratives, etc.) to be used or the aggregation priorities of the communities involved. The most traditional method of reporting index results is through a number obtained by adding indicator values weighted according to their assessed relative importance. This method is advantageous because it yields a clear, single-number output though it does obscure normative priorities and whether progress is made in one area at the expense of another.

To be able to track the progress or regression of individual indicators, AMOEBA diagrams may be used. AMOEBA diagrams plot the current state of each indicator in an index on its own line radiating outward from a central point. Progress toward the goal is indicated by proximity to a reference circle. ²⁶ Thus, one can tell at a glance which indicators are furthest and which closest to an ideal of environmental justice. Of course, this method requires determining an ideal numerical value for each indicator, a complicated, value-laden process.

To avoid the need to set a reference value for each environmental justice indicator, index developers may identify a target direction for an indicator. For instance, increased consultation of minority or local groups in environmental decision making may be considered a move toward environmental justice. Then the indicator's value may be graphed over time to assess its progress toward environmental justice. With two or three indicators the percent change of each indicator from one time to the next can be graphed along one axis of a graph to yield an overall picture of movement toward environmental justice while preserving the ability to study individual indicators. With more than three indicators, this method will be less useful unless indicators could be combined into two or three subindicators which would then be graphed.

The overall goals of the index and the policy it is to accompany as defined by the users will guide the selection of one or more of these methods. ²⁷ Clearly, all of these methods have significant strengths and weaknesses, traits that should be remembered so their outputs are used without reification.

Regardless of the aggregation strategy used by index developers, they should also ensure that their index spans the multiple spatial and temporal scales involved in environmental justice. The idea of farsightedness can conceptually aid this process. Though this principle has not yet been explicitly named in the environmental justice literature it arises whenever activists aiming to stop trends of injustice and/or prevent them from recurring in the future, implicitly acknowledging the temporality of environmental justice. It is also presumed when environmental justice proponents recognize that environmental injustice is not merely a local issue but involves national and international systems. Considering farsightedness as a guide when developing and aggregating environmental justice indicators should draw attention to contributions to environmental justice from outside the community or nation under study and the degree to which the community or nation contributes to environmental injustice elsewhere. For example, monitoring traffic through an area may indicate the severity of local noise and air pollution as well as local contributions to global warming. ²⁸

Of course, drawing attention to these various spatial-temporal scales raises questions of how to represent the particularities of communities, so important to environmental justice studies, in state and national level indexes. One possibility is to enable representative communities to define their own indicators of environmental justice for various attributes. Since this data may be of vastly different types, the percent change of the indicators from year to year could be aggregated. Thus, qualitative assessments using average scores from Likert scales used in surveys could be combined with quantitative assessments such as cancer rates or legal parity. In this way, the priorities of individual communities could be combined into assessments of state-wide or national trends.

Conclusion

By using the principle of farsightedness, various aggregation methods, and other tools yet to be developed within a modified MEMSIS framework, communities or nations will be able to systematically develop indexes of environmental justice aligned with their priorities and convey their results to policymakers and constituents alike. Since the modified MEMSIS framework stresses adaptability according to changing circumstances and knowledge while prioritizing farsightedness it will particularly encourage index developers and policymakers to consider multiple attributes of, community assessments of, and spatial and temporal elements of environmental justice. Thus, this framework could be a step toward a more comprehensive and overarching assessment of environmental justice, a necessary element if wide-scale policies for environmental justice are developed, conditions that will aid the quest for environmental justice.