Abstract
Background:
The environmental justice (EJ) movement has struggled for several decades to transform public agencies to be more responsive to the needs and voices of disadvantaged communities. Recently, some environmental agencies have begun to hire EJ activists as staff to help change agency practices from within. There is need for research on this shift from outside activist to insider ally.
Methods:
This article draws from 15 semi-structured interviews conducted with former EJ activists now working in environmental agencies conducted over a 6-year period. Interviews focused on the benefits, tradeoffs, and dilemmas experienced through their transition process from the outside in.
Results:
Benefits of this shift from the outside in include the potential to influence agency culture and practices, to apply skills and networks gained as activists, and to support outside activists' access to agency resources and shape decision making. The challenges included being disparaged as biased by agency colleagues, becoming frustrated by the slow pace of bureaucratic change, and the potential for outside EJ activists to reduce the radical edge of their advocacy.
Discussion:
The tradeoffs experienced by the interviewees suggest that the entrance of former EJ activists into government service is having substantive impacts on the agencies but that these changes come at a personal and professional cost and with uneven results.
Conclusion:
This research on the phenomenon of the shift of EJ activists into environmental agencies has filled an important gap in critical EJ studies. Future research should focus on the impacts on EJ movements and the long-term impacts in the government agencies.
“I definitely feel like an inside ally. … We are working on building the movement from the inside. So, we're in here. We see what's wrong. We see the systemic issues. And once our agencies change, then we will have a stronger EJ movement. Our goal is to help build the EJ movement by changing agencies from the inside.” (Gwen, former EJ activist and current EJ government agency staff person)
Introduction
S
However, there has been little to no attention in the EJ studies literature to the incorporation of EJ activists into public agency service and the tradeoffs they face in applying their social movement skills and commitments in these new organizational contexts. That is, there is a critical need for research that tracks activists moving “from the outside in.” To fill this gap, we ask: What happens when EJ activists move into agencies' formal EJ staff positions and become what we call “insider allies”? We answer this question by identifying the dilemmas that these shifts entail for agencies, movement organizations, and the individuals moving between them. We examine how this phenomenon affects these institutions' capacity to meet their EJ policy commitments, and the EJ movement's goal of transforming the social, political, and economic structures that disproportionately expose economically and racially marginalized communities to environmental hazards and sideline them from decision making.
Scholarship on EJ Policy Implementation
Critical social scientists have provided important insights into the uneven progress of agencies' EJ reform efforts. On the one hand, there has been significant growth of EJ programs and staffing in federal and state agencies and new EJ policies in some states. 1 On the other hand, despite decades of these public policy efforts, there is little to show for material improvements in the environmental conditions in disadvantaged communities, and some scholars have called for the EJ movement to look for solutions beyond and in greater confrontation with the state. 2 What accounts for this disconnect between EJ innovation within agencies and limited material impact in communities?
Much scholarship critical of government agencies' EJ reform efforts has focused on material constraints and lack of clear regulatory authority. 3 Both of these factors stem in large part from polluting industries' outsized influence in the political and regulatory arenas. 4
In recent years, scholars have identified additional factors that shape agencies' EJ reform efforts by focusing on the experiences of EJ staff—agency personnel tasked with guiding the design and implementation of EJ policies, programs, and practices. Harrison shows that agencies' EJ staff are hindered not only by insufficient resources and unclear regulatory authority but also by the fact that other agency staff reject EJ reforms. 5 Harrison documents practices through which staff push back against EJ reforms to regulatory practice, how such practices undermine EJ staff members' progress, and the various roots of that resistance. She finds that this resistance takes a particularly acute toll on EJ staff of color who, like other staff of color, experience racist prejudice at work, and face additional hostility because their EJ responsibilities include challenging the agency's role in racial environmental inequalities.
Although the barriers to pursuing EJ within agencies are significant, scholars have also identified factors that can shift—even if incrementally—these agencies toward improved alignment with EJ principles. In the midst of an overall hostile work environment, Harrison also identifies ways that EJ staff strive to manage colleagues' resistance. 6 This parallels work by organizational scholars who have identified how, in other organizational contexts, staff advocating for change—“insider activists,” “tempered radicals,” and “institutional activists”—can play crucial roles in advancing social movement policy reform goals even as they often face pushback from their coworkers. 7 This research identifies mechanisms that can promote or impede organizational change and examines the relative salience of pressures from within and from outside the organization. 8
One important element of institutionalizing EJ principles into government practice that EJ scholars have focused on is that of public involvement in agency EJ reform efforts. EJ movements have long emphasized that it is essential that members of overburdened and vulnerable communities help guide the design of agencies' EJ reform efforts and agencies' decision-making practices more broadly. Some scholars and activists refer to this collaborative engagement of activists from the outside with public agencies as an “inside game.” Some observers argue that agency efforts to enhance public participation have helped change regulatory scientific practice in line with EJ principles, improve material conditions in certain overburdened communities, increase legitimacy of EJ advocates in the eyes of agency staff, and otherwise change regulatory culture. 9
However, EJ activists and scholars have also widely raised critical concerns about such efforts, showing that they are often woefully underfunded, violate key norms of public participation, and require excessive time commitments from community members, and that agency decisions rarely, if ever, seem to honor public input in ways that reduce environmental inequalities on any significant scale. 10
The transition of EJ activists into staff roles in environmental agencies is one significant extension of public involvement. The EJ activists turned insider allies constitute an important, if fraught, mechanism through which members of EJ communities and EJ organizations work to change agency practice but have received no attention in EJ scholarship. Although this is not very widespread at either the federal or state levels, it is an increasing trend. This is particularly the case as high-level staff begin to hire more EJ activists to populate their programs. This raises important questions. How has the hiring of EJ movement leaders into formal agency EJ staff positions affected the achievement of EJ goals by agencies and social movements? What does this look like from the vantage point of those insider allies making this move from the outside in? These questions are crucial to understanding both the progress and the limitations of public agency efforts to achieve EJ. These questions are also urgent ones, as these positions are likely to proliferate, given the prominence of EJ in President Biden's policy priorities and of EJ-committed professionals among his top political appointees.
Methods
To examine the benefits and challenges of this transition from the outside in, we draw on confidential interviews we have conducted with 15 “insider allies”: former EJ activists who have taken EJ staff positions in environmental regulatory agencies. Most of these were selected from interviews conducted for earlier projects about changing perspectives about EJ in public agencies and several were conducted specifically for this project.
The interviewees vary in terms of racial identity, gender, age, geographic location, which agency they work for, their degree of authority within their agency, amount of time working as agency staff, their type of training and activist work before joining a government agency, and their type of position within the government agency. Most of the interviewees work for state environmental regulatory agencies, and several work for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In our findings, we distinguish whether an interviewee is in a high-level or lower-level position. However, to protect individual identities, we do not identify the state, demographic background, or organization they work for. With a small sample, it can be challenging to make generalizable analyses, and we acknowledge that this is not a fully representative sample. However, because there are so few EJ activists that have made the transition into agency service, we have been able to cover a large proportion of such insider allies in several states and at the federal level. Indeed, in some states, our sample is close to exhaustive for high-level and political appointees. Likewise, the range of types of individuals and institutional settings in our sample provides an illustrative set of voices that covers the major variations in contexts. Further, the consistency in experiences documented across the interviewees, regardless of agency context, provides confidence that we have uncovered meaningful trends and patterns.
In most cases, one or both of us interviewed each of these individuals multiple times across several or more years; thus, this set of interviews enables us to note how individuals' experiences as EJ staff have changed over time. All names given are pseudonyms, and all uncited quotes are from our interviews. These interviews were conducted with Institutional Review Board approval from the University of California, Davis, and the University of Colorado Boulder.
We conducted these interviews as part of our broader research projects on government agencies' EJ reform efforts, which inform our understanding of the contexts in which these individuals work. Combined, the authors have conducted more than 130 interviews with EJ activists, 150 interviews with agency staff from federal and many state agencies, as well as dozens of hours of participant observation of agency meetings, and analysis of agency documents over the past 20 years.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: EJ ACTIVISTS MOVING INTO THE STATE AS INSIDER ALLIES: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES
In what follows, we explore the benefits and the battles experienced by these EJ activists now in government service and the impacts that their passage has on their new organizational home and the movements they left behind.
Beneficial impacts
The shift of some EJ activists from opposing the state to working within it to achieve EJ goals offers many benefits to both activists and agencies. First, and most generally, they can serve as allies on the inside for their former EJ colleagues—as bridges to help enable EJ movement organizations and they communities they fight for have greater influence over regulatory decision making. Doing so helps disrupt and change the fact that agency decision making has been strongly influenced by industry and closed to community input. In interviews with us, they emphasized that serving EJ advocates and community members is an important part of their work within the agency. Darryl, a former grassroots activist and current government agency EJ staff person, emphasized that he works to make the “line” between agency staff and advocates more “porous.” Penny, who previously worked for EJ advocacy organizations and now is in a leading EJ staff position in a government agency, said: “I think of my clients still as EJ groups and disenfranchised, overburdened communities that don't otherwise have a voice at the state level, and tribal governments and tribes that don't otherwise have a permanent presence or voice here in the state.”
In interviews with us, EJ advocates now working within government agencies all specified ways they serve as allies to members and advocates of overburdened and vulnerable communities. For example, Gwen, a high-level EJ staff member, described her bridging capacity as based on her movement origins outside of public service: “What I had heard from community leaders I was working with that they needed from state government, I felt like I could go in, like no other person or like no person at least who's been in government for a long time, to build something and structure it in a way that is helpful to people.” In subsequent years, she has observed the benefits of these structures built by her and other social movement colleagues now in government service. “I think it has been helpful for the movement because EJ groups are getting more of the resources that they need, and I don't necessarily mean financial resources. But they're getting resources in terms of transparency and access.”
Mary, who worked for many years in community-based organizations before being hired into a rank-and-file EJ staff position in a government agency, also described that she uses her extensive connections with EJ activists to intentionally foster community challenges to controversial agency decisions and that doing so can push agencies or facilities to restrict pollution. Martin, who worked for several years as a community organizer before being hired to lead his agency's EJ reform efforts, described how he uses his experienced understanding of what best serves EJ organizations' needs to redirect how his office's funding is spent (such as shifting funds away from hiring expensive contractors to write reports and into grants for EJ organizations). Brian, a high-level EJ staff person with a background in EJ advocacy, described how he revised his agency's EJ grant program Request for Applications and funding decisions to reflect the priorities shared by EJ activists. Brian explained that these practices, along with others, enabled EJ advocates to gain more funding from agencies for the activities they want to work on, as well as to gain direct lines of communication with top agency officials.
Martin draws on these relationships with EJ advocates to advise them on how they can most effectively help change agency practice. For instance, he described how he has witnessed agency staff be moved by talking with and observing community advocates—in ways that motivate these staff to change the way they do their jobs so that they are better supporting EJ. He described an agency colleague's response to such community contact: “He got emotional just relating that instant to us and how he started to think about the rules he was writing in a different way from that point forward.” Martin has redirected his office's funding to pay the travel costs for community members to come to the agency and uses his relationships with EJ advocates to impress upon them the importance of telling their story to illustrate the profound and personal stakes involved in agency decisions.
Second, some skills these individuals gained through working within activist organizations make them especially well positioned to effect change within government agencies. Years of experience as activists enable these agency staff members to persist in the face of opposition that they often encounter as they seek to make changes to the structure, function, and culture of their agencies. Many emphasized that their experiences as grassroots organizers and advocates made crystal clear the scope and severity of environmental hazards in vulnerable communities. This situated knowledge compels them to push for regulatory change in ways that bureaucrats without that lived experience would not. Martin described how the visceral understanding of pollution that he gained as a community organizer constitutes a key and unique asset he and other insider allies bring into the agencies: “Remembering what that felt like when you're in those communities and you see the kids breathing that stuff every morning. You see the kids running around with it. Their hands are smudged with black when they get off the swings.… I don't think you can get that if you haven't been in that.”
Jeff, who formerly directed a regional EJ organization and now leads a government agency community-engagement strategy, described his savvy in developing a place-appropriate approach as growing from “knocking on hundreds of doors” as an activist and then using “internal advocacy” to implement his recommended strategies. He also credited his capacity to “just push, just push, just push” to see the strategy through to completion even in the face of bureaucratic inertia and opposition. His activist training to “just push” has yielded great success in his work. For instance, he related how he overcame objections from his agency to develop an app for community outreach that has now become a model across the agency.
Third, these activists, especially those hired or appointed into high-level positions, gain access to the levers of power to create new programs and otherwise significantly influence key regulatory decisions that directly reduce environmental hazards in overburdened and vulnerable communities. Our research participants widely recognized that having an EJ-supportive legislature, governor, and top agency leadership enables insider allies and other EJ staff to pursue more numerous and innovative EJ reforms. Such benefits can grow as agencies hire more staff from EJ advocacy backgrounds into staff positions. Brian affirmed, “Between 2012 and ‘15, we tried to start building infrastructure…. So, the network of internal so-called EJ-focused people has expanded largely…. We set that infrastructure up. We were intentional about hires, carving out positions.” Brian and other interviewees noted that this infrastructure creates the critical mass needed to collaborate with EJ advocates and promote impactful initiatives such as prioritizing enforcement and grant-making in disadvantaged communities.
Fourth, some former activists noted that working within these agencies has enabled them to gain new professional skills and knowledge that will make them more effective professionals in their future work. For example, Elise, a former EJ activist and now high-level official in an environmental agency, describes this in terms of her deepened analysis of power relationships and organizational change: “It has really allowed an opportunity to see why certain systemic inequities persist. And then once we can better identify the problem, [we can] better identify solutions.” And yet, Elise also is sobered by how long it takes for what she refers to as “seeds” of systemic change to sprout. This clear-eyed view of both the power and the complexity of making these changes in her home agency raises the questions of why these seeds take so long to sprout and what are the challenges experienced by these former activists now in government roles as they seek to nurture them.
Challenges
Our interviews also reveal negative tradeoffs that can occur when EJ movement members move into formal staff positions within government agencies. First, some former activists noted that some of their agency colleagues disparage them as biased toward the EJ movement and not sufficiently aligned with an agency culture of ostensible neutrality. Until recently, there has been little to no precedent for hiring community activists into these agencies, and Elise noted that these hires are viewed as controversial by agency staff: “There are a couple more people directly from the EJ community and organizations that have actually moved into [the agency] in recent years. We've gotten some eyebrow raises for that.” She elaborated that, despite her high-level position, many other agency staff distrust her because of her background as an EJ advocate: “I feel confident that I've built some very important bridges. But I know, well I've heard from reliable persons, in my opinion, that there are others who just simply will not trust me because of the background I come from.” She related that a senior manager belittles her as biased, undermining her authority vis-a-vis other staff. In our interviews with and observations of other agency staff, we have observed that agency staff belittle EJ staff who explicitly support concerns raised by members of EJ organizations. This marginalizing experience can have an emotional impact on these insider allies who are devoting great personal and professional resources into their work.
This distrust of community advocates can not only manifest in vocal disparagement—which itself can undermine these EJ staff members' authority—but also compel some regulators to try to punish insider allies for maintaining and using their connections with EJ organizations and other community advocates. For instance, Mary noted that she and a fellow EJ staff member contacted two local stakeholders who had previously expressed concern about a certain polluting facility to let them know that the agency would soon be reviewing the facility's air pollution permit and to describe what the permit process would entail. Mary told me that one of her managers reported to Mary's supervisor that Mary and her colleague were “saying too much to some of these stakeholders,” although Mary insists that they shared only public information. As a rank-and-file staff member (as opposed to many of the high-level and appointee officials interviewed), Mary faces additional pressures to achieve her EJ-related goals without the benefit of significant formal authority in the agency.
Second, the limitations of operating in a bureaucratic environment—its slow pace and its focus on incremental instead of structural change—can be frustrating to the former activists and make them feel that they are disappointing those in the movement. The positioning on the boundary on the outside edges of both their agencies and their former social movements places these staff in a kind of Catch-22. Brian recalled a conversation he had with an agency colleague who had also made the shift from the outside in: “[He] called the other day, he said, ‘Man, I remember before I was in government, and you used to tell me that you wish we had it on camera. The bullshit that I'm putting up with inside, and then I get pummeled on the outside.… Man, you were so right on these positions.’ … The battle inside is just as hard as the battle outside. It's tough to move things.”
The insider allies we interviewed underscored what a drastic and unsettling career shift this is. Elise described the inner conflict she feels when critiqued by her former social movement colleagues: “[Some] relationships have changed completely, and I'm now seen as co-opted and part of the problem. And that's been tough because in entering a bureaucracy, it's a strange space of having to depersonalize a lot of the things and a lot of times where I'm not personally responsible for this systemic racism that's been taking place in this government organization for the past years. However, I'm in this position now and I have an opportunity to change course to be part of the solution. So, what can I do?” She underscored that not being able to accomplish as much change as she would like makes her feel that she disappoints her movement allies and challenges her relationships with them: “The loneliness I've been feeling lately is [missing] this connection to EJ allies. I have definitely been able to maintain some relationships with folks in the EJ community, and I have not been able to maintain others. And it can be a very lonely place when you feel that you are not able to bring things to fruition for your EJ allies.” She has, therefore, tried to build informal support networks for EJ activists hired into regulatory agencies to help them manage the erosion of their relationships with former colleagues in movement organizations. That said, such support networks are difficult to build when agencies hire so few movement members into agency staff positions.
Penny noted that although she greatly values her former experience in the EJ movement, she has increasingly come to question the benefits of improved relationships between agency staff and EJ activists on their own. Referring both to herself and for her agency as a whole, she describes the limits of the bridging function between government and EJ social movements. “We cannot ride on the fact that we have good working relationships with external stakeholders. We actually have to do the work to continue to deserve their trust.”
Third, the transformations of activists into agency staff can also pose dilemmas for leaders in EJ social movements who may feel they need to pull their punches in dealing with their former movement colleagues. Darcy, a long-time EJ activist, remarked to one of us that she did not like the trend of EJ leaders joining government agencies because these personal relationships made it harder to confront the agencies. She said she would prefer these leaders stay on the outside and maintain their focus on pushing for fundamental change from that direction. That is, hiring activists into the agencies can reduce the space for more adversarial politics and may dull the more radical edge of the movement. In contrast, when asked about whether EJ groups tend to limit their critiques of the agencies because of the presence of these insider allies, Gwen disagreed, “I don't think so at all, because they know that we have thick skin, and we don't take it personally. I know that they are doing their job when they sue us, when they—whatever it is that they need to do to further EJ, I know that it's not about me.” Instead, Gwen often works with her agency leadership to develop constructive responses to criticism and demands from EJ groups. This issue deserves further investigation, as other scholarship has shown that community activism has become problematically tempered when representatives of the state and industry define appropriate public participation in regulatory decision making in terms of professionalized, nonconfrontational action. 11
Conclusion
In this article, we have identified benefits and challenges of the transition of EJ activists from pushing on the outside for government change into public agencies as insider allies. We showed how these insider allies are doing hard, personal, vulnerable, and yet rewarding and impactful work, often under great cross-pressures. Our intention is to share their voices as they make meaning of their experiences and to draw upon them to examine an important dynamic occurring in the EJ movement's relationship with the state.
Through our interviews, we heard about the factors that influence the transformative potential of these changes, including the degree of authority of the new positions; the level and kind of resources available to pursue a change agenda; the opportunity to use their social movement-honed skills and connections; the support of the top agency leadership; strength of networks with other similar-minded agency colleagues; and the ability to stay connected to the social movements. Although there was some variation across these contexts, we found that the insider allies in both state and federal agencies and in rank and file and high-level leader positions experienced similar benefits and challenges associated with their transitions from the outside in. We believe that the interviewees' shared social movement backgrounds shape their current experiences more than the particular organization they work in. The one exception was that, although high-level staff have greater formal authority, they tend to suffer more from the gap between high expectations and limited degrees of effecting actual change. Conversely, rank and file staff confront more significant direct pushback from their supervisors in trying to implement even their more limited EJ scope of work.
We have explored the ability of this phenomenon to transform public agencies to better support EJ policies, practices, and outcomes. We have sought to identify the extent to which changing staff composition in this way promotes a shift in power relations toward overburdened and marginalized communities versus how it may preserve the status quo. One consideration in answering this question is that shifts in personnel and agency processes are means, not ends. The true measure of success is not who sits in which office, but how well changes in staffing of public agencies improve environmental and health conditions in the most overburdened and vulnerable communities.
Although we found that the scope and scale of changes sought by these insider allies is often constrained by bureaucratic inertia and internal opposition, they keep pushing, nonetheless. Future research should assess these conditions within public agencies and use them as evaluative criteria for determining how this strategy of cultivating insider allies is shaping efforts to achieve the visions of the EJ movement.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the many former EJ activists now in government service for sharing their experiences and insights with them. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Several quotes are reprinted from From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies, by Jill Lindsey Harrison, published by The MIT Press. All errors are the authors'.
Authors' Contributions
Both authors contributed equally to the production of this article.
Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.
Funding Information
Dr. Harrison's work was supported by the University of Colorado Boulder and a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society. Dr. London's work was supported by the University of California Davis, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, and the California Wellness Foundation.