Environmental justice and the state

The pursuit of change of and through state institutions

In this section, I address empirical claims that have recently been made about the extent to which EJ activists and EJ scholarship focus on pursuing change through the state. Pulido et al. (2016) provocatively challenge U.S. EJ movements and scholars for “relying on the state” and seeing the state “as the only option” (26). Pulido (2017a) challenges U.S. EJ movements and scholarship for having “relied heavily on the state,” arguing that “in the US most activists and researchers are steeped in a liberal politics in which they work with the state” (525). In his book What is Critical Environmental Justice?, David Pellow similarly argues that EJ scholars and activists have exclusively and problematically sought change through the state:

[S]cholars and activists are not asking how we might build environmentally just and resilient communities that can exist beyond the state, but rather how we might do so with a different model of state intervention … EJ scholars and activists tend to argue for the dedication and expansion of state resources away from anti-ecological and anti-humanist purposes to the causes of ecological protection, environmental justice, civil and human rights … The EJ movement and EJ scholarship generally share a consensus that they are looking to the state and its legal systems to deliver justice, to police itself, and to regulate industry … In other words, despite a strong condemnation of the scourges of racism, class domination, and the abuse of state power and corporate power in the literature, EJ studies generally offers prescriptions for change that rely on dominant institutions and social systems serving as partners and collaborators in forging a just and sustainable future. (Pellow, 2018: 22, 23, 151)

In a thoughtful interview with Pulido (2017b), Pellow answered her question about “where the EJ movement is at” by stating: “One critique I have is that we have been very state-centric. Whether it is the legal system, the EPA, the White House, the US Congress, the Conference of Parties in the United Nations, and transnational accords—we tend to see it as the end all” (47).

To be clear, these publications occasionally acknowledge some variation in EJ scholarship and activism. For instance, Pulido et al. briefly acknowledge that “the movement” has both radical and conservative strands (2016: 26). Additionally, Pulido and De Lara (2018) and Pellow (2018) observe that U.S. EJ activism started off with a more radical critique of the structural roots of environmental injustice, as evident in the Principles of Environmental Justice developed at the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit (Delegates, 1991). Yet their overarching, primary assessment is that EJ movements and scholarship focus on appealing to the liberal state for inclusion and redress. Other scholars have subsequently treated this assessment as fact, citing these publications.

In these publications and others, the authors offer explanations for activists’ focus on the state, noting the U.S. EJ movement's roots in the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) that had found some meaningful success via the state, the early passage of the federal Executive Order on EJ (EO 12898), a lack of clear alternatives for some communities, and the fact that “capital is not about to address the needs of vulnerable communities if it impacts profits or flexibility” (Pulido et al., 2016: 13).

Later in this article, I elaborate on these authors’ reasons for finding these patterns in EJ scholarship and activism to be so problematic. First, here, I want to address this empirical characterization of the movement. That many EJ activists have sought change through government institutions is unquestionably true. A review of EJ scholarship and activism indeed reveals that legal remedies and regulatory and policy reform have long been central strategies for many EJ activists seeking to improve environmental conditions in overburdened and vulnerable communities. Many EJ activists argue that freedom from environmental harm should be a right to be protected by the state, not a privilege available only to wealthy white people and others with economic and political power. EJ activists have pursued regulatory and policy reform of settler states at multiple scales, and also of tribal governments and international governance bodies. They do so through various practices including advocating for specific new policies and regulations, challenging agency analyses and decisions, demanding greater enforcement of existing laws, bringing administrative complaints and lawsuits against government agencies, collecting data to inform regulatory decisions, and serving on government agencies’ advisory committees (Bullard, 1990; Bullard et al., 2007; Cole and Foster, 2001; Faber, 2008; Harrison, 2019; London et al., 2013; Méndez, 2020; Pellow and Brulle, 2005; Perkins, 2022; Schlosberg, 2007; Taylor, 2000). In some cases, EJ activists have gone to work within government agencies—a trend that has been growing in recent years (London and Harrison, 2021; Perkins, 2022). As these studies show, many EJ activists criticize mainstream environmental organizations and the state for relying on undemocratic market-based and individualized mechanisms of change that ignore the structural causes of environmental inequalities, perpetuate environmental inequalities, let industry off the hook, fail to redistribute power over decision making to communities of color and other disenfranchised communities overburdened with environmental harms, and otherwise do not protect human rights to a safe environment.

That said, EJ scholarship has also shown that many EJ advocates also pursue change through a variety of other, non-state routes. Notably, doing so has been central to many Indigenous communities’ pursuits of EJ. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (2014), and Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard (2014) argue that, for the Native American communities they have observed and are members of, justice entails working beyond the reach of the settler state. They articulate politics of refusal and recognition through which Indigenous peoples express and defend their sovereignty from settler states: refusing to seek recognition from the settler state and fostering the resurgence of Indigenous models of interrelating and governance that are based on self-determination, reciprocity, care, and respect for all beings.

Additionally, many other EJ activist organizations publicly shame or sue polluting industries to try to compel them to change their practices. Others work to improve conditions in overburdened and vulnerable communities by building and improving access to parks, playgrounds, community gardens, trails, and other green spaces, including through repurposing derelict industrial spaces and abandoned residences (Gottlieb and Joshi, 2010; Lee, 2005; Mares and Peña, 2010; Ottinger, 2013; White, 2018). Others do so through film, street art, and other creative work (Sze, 2020). Erin Goodling (2020) documents ways that advocates work to address the many environmental and other harms faced by people experiencing homelessness “without relying on state intervention,” such as, for example, working with these community members to construct and collectively govern a tiny house village (851). Scholars have found that some EJ activists are increasingly stepping away from the pursuit of change through state institutions and toward other strategies of change (Carter, 2016; Harrison, 2015, 2016, 2019). ¹ Such findings demonstrate the rich variety of strategies through which EJ organizations work to create more just and sustainable futures and challenge claims that EJ movements only pursue change through the state.

In her 2020 book, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, Julie Sze argues that EJ movements use many strategies for social change—some reformist and some counter-hegemonic (14). Moreover, in detailing the many ways that EJ movements are part of “a movement of movements” that pursue change through many routes—including collective protest, street art, documentaries, song, science fiction, and more—Sze shows that this complex array of practices provokes us to imagine new worlds. She frames these movements’ different actions not as disconnected, isolated acts but as interconnected nodes of a wider struggle for freedom, broadening collective imaginations about what justice and freedom can mean, inspiring hope, and thus influencing future solidarities and rebellion. She emphasizes that EJ activists’ disruptions include working through and beyond the state and that we should include all such work in our understandings and characterizations of EJ movements.

The use of collaborative, non-confrontational tactics

In addition to the general argument that EJ movements have focused exclusively on pursuing change through the state, some have argued that EJ activists’ tactics of engagement with the state have become tempered in problematic ways. Pulido and colleagues praise early EJ activism for its strongly oppositional stance vis-à-vis the state and lament that EJ movements dropped that oppositional stance as they became focused on participatory venues established by regulatory agencies. As Pulido (2017a) asserts, “Far too often the state is seen as an ally, or neutral force,” and “Environmental racism will not be solved by a research agenda that reaffirms the boundaries and frameworks established by the Environmental Protection Agency” (530). Pulido et al. (2016: 27) elaborate regarding “the EJ movement”:

Instead of seeing the state as a helpmate or partner, it needs to see the state as an adversary and directly challenge it. While the early EJ movement did this, over the decades it has been increasingly co-opted by the state and lost much of its oppositional content. It can regain its radical position by not only challenging the state, but refusing to participate in regulatory charades. The EJ movement should take a page from Black Lives Matter. It's not about being respectable, acknowledged, and included. It's about raising hell for both polluters and the agencies that protect them. Given the planetary crisis we are facing, we need a radicalized EJ movement more than ever.

These calls are consistent with a long history of social movement scholarship emphasizing the importance of activists’ confrontational, disruptive, direct-action tactics (e.g. Piven and Cloward, 1977).

To be sure, many EJ activists have participated in state-led regulatory channels that have been key parts of government agencies’ EJ policy implementation efforts. However, empirical studies show that EJ activists use a combination of tactics—oppositional and otherwise—and that they do so strategically. For instance, Lindsey Dillon (2014, in progress) draws on years of observing and participating with EJ activists in Hunters Point, California, to show that they pursue change through both formal state channels and confrontational shaming of the state and industry.

Similarly, in a detailed history of EJ movements in California, Tracy Perkins (2022) shows that EJ activists have decreased their use of disruptive, oppositional tactics and increased their investments in insider tactics (including serving on government advisory committees, taking positions within government agencies, and working with legislators to pass new laws). Yet Perkins also argues that California EJ activists continue to also employ confrontational tactics, that their tactical decisions are calculated, and that the boundaries between cooperative and confrontational tactics are not always clear.

In his recent book, Climate Change from the Streets (2020), Michael Méndez uses rich empirical detail to demonstrate that California EJ activists use a complex array of tactics to shape the state's climate change policies. He emphasizes that they strategically do so through both collaboration (such as serving on state EJ advisory committees and lobbying public officials) and conflict (including publicly resigning from those advisory committees, engaging in other public protests, suing state agencies, and other forms of “creative defiance” [206]). He illustrates how activists approach the state with caution, wariness, and anger, as well as professional collaboration, and that they use this “inside-outside game” strategically to fight for climate change policies that reduce both overall greenhouse gas emissions and the hazardous air pollutants that disproportionately burden marginalized communities. As Méndez concludes (205-206):

Perhaps most important was the presence of outspoken and “radical” environmental justice activists to pressure policymakers for change in social, political, and economic structures. At the same time that they are pushing California to alter its thinking, these activists rally against skeptics who claim that the state cannot make a difference. Their activism is a historical reminder that major transformations in society did not happen all at once everywhere or without some form of conflict. Change is often created by a small group of passionate people whose experiments rupture existing practices. They make change from the streets and scale it up elsewhere. This generative mix of conflict and collaboration mobilizes residents and encourages the development of research and data to propose solutions, instead of simply opposing policies. The environmental justice movement has engaged in a sophisticated inside-outside game and is unique in its ability to collaborate with and also work against policymakers, businesses, and regulators.

Such findings show that the EJ movements’ insistence that “all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public health laws and regulations” (per EJ scholar Robert Bullard, quoted in Pellow, 2018: 5) does not reflect “assuming” the state to be “a neutral force” (Pulido, 2017a: 525). Resistance to the state's complicity in environmental injustice takes many forms, some of which do not fit the oppositional and intentional forms that scholars of EJ and other social movements have tended to focus on. In critically reflecting on that tendency, Sarah Hughes (2020) urges scholars “to think about what (or whose) narratives, (in)actions and accounts we risk neglecting, or reinforcing, when we cling tightly to resistance-as-form,” and to “open up our attention to more ambiguous, unremarkable and less coherent practices as resistance” (1144, 1145).

Moreover, the veracity of the assertion that EJ activists have dropped their confrontational stance against the state depends on how broadly we define “EJ activism.” Perkins’ arguments are specifically about those in California who “began to self-identify as environmental justice activists in the 1980s” (2022: 10–11). That definition does not account for many other communities who strive for EJ—that is, to improve environmental conditions and futures in the most overburdened and vulnerable communities—many of whom engage in quite confrontational actions vis-à-vis the settler state in order to build more just worlds beyond its reach. Given the central role of land and relationships with the other-than-human world in many Indigenous communities’ conceptions of justice (Gilio-Whitaker, 2019), the world of EJ activists can be understood more broadly as including various American Indian communities and nations pursuing self-determination and sovereignty, some of whom identify their work as “environmental justice” and some of whom do not. Collective action at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline is one of many notable examples of confrontational EJ activism (Estes, 2019; Gilio-Whitaker, 2019). Confrontational EJ activism may in fact be proliferating; Baptista et al. (2022) found that activists who “self-identified as part of an EJ organization” view Standing Rock “as a hopeful marker for the EJM's [environmental justice movement's] ability to use repertoires of contention to both resist the status quo and construct transformative alternatives focused on climate justice” (6). In making this point, I acknowledge that broadening the sphere of EJ activism requires a wider conceptualization of what EJ means and requires. As Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019), Elizabeth Hoover (2017), and Lina Álvarez and Brendan Coolsaet (2020) have argued, EJ scholars’ common conceptualizations of “environmental justice” have not adequately addressed what justice requires for Indigenous groups and must be adjusted accordingly. EJ scholars can help rectify this by including Indigenous movements within our conceptualizations of EJ activism.

Within, against, and beyond the state

The arguments by Pellow, Pulido, and colleagues about EJ activists’ and scholars’ priorities described above draw important attention to the state's structural perpetuation of violence and its targeting of the bodies, families, communities, and lands of Indigenous peoples, people of color, and other groups. By situating the specifics of EJ policy implementation into broad historical, structural context, these scholars compellingly argue that EJ movements need to stridently challenge state institutions and foster direct democracy beyond the state. That said, I argue that, despite the complexities of their arguments, they represent the state as inevitably and fully serving the interests of capital through racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and that doing so leads them to problematic recommendations that dismiss the ways in which states also serve other ends, can be made to do so more meaningfully, must be made to do so, and are being made to do so.

Notwithstanding the state's many failures to date, government agencies’ modest responses to EJ and other environmental movements nonetheless have material benefits for communities who cannot otherwise escape from environmental hazards (Harrison, 2019; Holifield, 2018; King, 2012; Méndez, 2020; Wilson et al., 2007). The state enacts and facilitates dispossession, exploitation, and other forms of violence, but also health clinics, roads, and schools. Its policing apparatus includes racist surveillance, apprehension, and detention systems, but also environmental law enforcement that limits air and water pollution. As countless studies have shown, such institutions and protections are highly unevenly extended and otherwise insufficient and problematic. But a critical attention to the workings of state power need not preclude inquiry into the ways state institutions help reduce harm and meet other requirements of justice and can be made to do so more meaningfully.

In recent years, political ecologists and other geographers have marshaled relational conceptions of the state to challenge scholarship that treats the state as monolithic, ontologically coherent, rigid, and entirely repressive (Angel, 2017; Angel and Loftus, 2019; Bakker, 2007; Carroll, 2015; Loftus, 2020; Martin and Pierce, 2012; Robertson, 2010; Routledge et al., 2018; Thelen et al., 2014; Wright, 2010). These scholars critique structuralist accounts that focus exclusively on the coercive functions of the state, calling for greater attention to the variegations, contradictions, and inconsistencies in state practice. As Davina Cooper (2017: 337–338) describes,

Alongside those who see the only “good” states as workers’ states, or states in the process of “withering away,” are those who find transformative potential even in the depths of liberal capitalist states as they uncover contradictions, inconsistencies and plurality in state systems, logics, actors and rationalities (e.g. Chappell, 2000; Martin and Pierce, 2012; Newman, 2012; Newman and Clarke, 2014). Capitalist liberal states may reproduce dominant social relations and benefit elites but they also provide social welfare, steward resources, establish fora for public debate, make new critical forms of knowledge possible and, to some limited degree, protect populations, including more vulnerable and precarious populations, from civil society's violence and discriminations. Progressive state activities and effects vary by time and place, are routinely compromised, more promised in rhetoric than practice and, in their fragility, typically defeated by more powerful state agendas. Progressive actions may also be unofficial, or initiated by subordinate state actors drawing on residual or unintended resources. But for engagement-positive writers and activists, the potential (at least) for states to provide a productive terrain where progressive politics can happen, given not everything can be organised and resolved through outside-the-state, micro-scaled grass-roots decision-making, remains vitally important.

Scholars call for relational and processual theorizations that treat state institutions as reflecting broader social contestation within which they are embedded (e.g. Jessop, 2002). As Paul Routledge, Andrew Cumbers, and Kate Derickson (2018) argue, “To understand the state as a process is to recognize that it is constantly being reworked and remade in ways that shift the balance of power across institutions and scales with evolving implications for justice-oriented political responses … By viewing the state in terms of an ensemble of institutional structures and practices, through which particular social groups attempt to develop their own politics and strategies, we can be attentive to the openings for progressive political mobilisations” (79, 80). That is, conceptualizing states as shaped by and reflective of struggle and contestation positions them as able to be remade. Rather than reducing the state to inherently, inevitably, and wholly oppressive, it is better understood as a terrain of struggle and thus a complex patchwork of practices that cut in multiple directions. Moreover, it is also a necessary site of struggle both because it is a source of harms and a site for helping to redress them.

Pauline McGuirk and Phillip O’Neill (2012: 1377–1378) explain that recognizing the functional and relational complexity within states—viewing them as peopled sites of contestation—highlights opportunities for political change:

While they [states] can appear as actors with a more-than-provisional identity and coherency, such subjectivity belies their existence as fields of multi-vocal and multi-scalar, cross-cutting and conflicting interests … [States are] resolutely hybrid and multilayered, resistant to a common, singular rationality, driven by diverse ideologies, and holding on to multiple political projects and motivations mobilised simultaneously … States are always in play, then, but are subject to reconstruction by the changing discourses, technologies and practices of governing … Notwithstanding neoliberalism's reworking of states’ operations, then, state capacity for progressive social and redistributive interventions remains; and the practices, technologies and texts which mobilise progressive interventions are always available to be amplified.

Malini Ranganathan (2016) urges EJ scholars to specify how states produce and reproduce racist orders and also how they can be used and reformed toward more environmentally just ends—to identify ways in which “liberalism's contradictions and ambivalences provide openings for counter-hegemonic struggle”: “radical EJ movements could be deepened via an explicit unmasking of racial liberalism while also accepting and strengthening liberalism's potential for fighting structural environmental discrimination” (29–30).

In their arguments about what EJ activists and scholars do and should do, Pellow, Pulido, and colleagues dismiss this complexity of states, instead conceptualizing them as wholly repressive. This leads them to problematic conclusions. First, Pellow's wholesale condemnation of the state and constant embrace of scholarship that regards states as “inherently authoritarian and exclusionary” (58) leaves him emphasizing that EJ movements should turn away from the state and pursue justice beyond it. However, turning away from the state leaves the state open to further capture by industry and fuels neoliberal rollback that exacerbates environmental injustice (Faber, 2008; Harrison, 2011; Harvey, 2013; Mascarenhas, 2012). Also, turning away from the state leaves intact its structures of dispossession and violence. Hence the importance of social movements that challenge the state, including prison abolitionist movements that engage the state not necessarily as a source of justice but to reduce some harm it causes (Gilmore, 2017).

Additionally, Pellow's examples of direct democracy are very brief and highly localized, leaving the reader wondering how direct democracy can provide what EJ requires at the necessary spatial and temporal scales, such as restricting pollution from industry; building and maintaining infrastructures like bridges, roads, and municipal water treatment facilities; and leveraging taxes to fund such initiatives. Struggles for justice through the state have helped force the creation of public services and protections from the exploitative and hazardous practices of capital in ways other actors cannot accomplish. To be sure, these have been grossly inadequate and unevenly extended. Yet these public institutions provide important benefits which must be strengthened—including in ways that expand (certain forms of) state power—rather than abandoned, and which cannot be left to the uneven and fluctuating abilities and interests of volunteers.

Also, turning away from the state is simply an unrealistic tactic for many EJ movements. Even for Native nations enacting sovereignty and refusing the settler colonial state's attempts of elimination, doing so has entailed not separation but myriad engagements with it. As Osage scholar Jean Dennison argues, “sovereignty is not freedom from external control but is, rather, an inescapable web of negotiation, contention, and concession that leads to further entanglement” (684). ³ Cherokee scholar Clint Carroll similarly rejects the “false choice” of “assimilation or secession,” instead arguing that practicing sovereignty has meant what Tsing (2007) calls “promising contradictions” in Indigenous relations with settler states: “claiming difference and autonomy without implying secession, and holding the settler state to its responsibilities toward indigenous nations without accepting its paternalism” (18). This work demonstrates another reason that scholars should employ more nuanced language to discuss activists’ engagements with the state in the pursuit of EJ.

Pulido and colleagues’ recommendations differ in calling for EJ activists and scholars to confront the state, but they are ultimately limited in the same ways that Pellow's are. Notably, their call for EJ activists and scholars to confront the state is hamstrung by their insistence, up through the final page, that the state is solely an instrument of racial capitalism. Without any suggestion that states can also serve other ends, we are left wondering what “raising hell” can accomplish.

Purucker (2021) argues that Pellow's reductionist treatment of the state ignores the possibilities for progressive reform through engaging with the state: “If translated into movement strategy, this strong skepticism of states risks pushing the movement away from a politics that could win and utilize state power for socio-environmental ends … While structurally biased against working-class and marginalized groups, states are not doomed to reproduce oppressive relations, and are potentially open to entry and contestation by progressive forces” (177). Then, drawing on Matt Huber's (2019) work, Purucker argues that EJ movements could pursue change through the state more effectively—and must do so, given the scope and scale of climate crises—by building a broader social base rooted in the working class.

Moreover, reducing the state to an agent of repression not only dismisses such prospects for progressive change, as Purucker rightly notes, but also ignores the ways that social movements are already engaging with the state in ways that reduce harm in overburdened and vulnerable communities and foster other outcomes necessary for EJ. It is not simply a hypothetical prospect, but is already underway. Scholars show that EJ movements are working to achieve more just futures in part through engaging with the state. Their analytical openness to such possibility enables these scholars to identify mechanisms through which these movements strive to change state practice, which tactics have been effective despite state resistance, and how those efforts articulate with their or other activists’ pursuit of change beyond the state.

For instance, James Angel and Alex Loftus make this case in relation to struggles for energy democracy and the human right to water (Angel, 2017; Angel and Loftus, 2019). Following calls by Karen Bakker (2007), David Harvey (2013), Sophie Gonick (2016), and others for environmental politics that pursue change in part through state institutions, they argue that these movements can and should pursue justice “in, against, and beyond the state” (a framing they borrow from Cumbers, 2015; see also Routledge et al., 2018). While acknowledging that state institutions are structurally biased toward reproducing prevailing social relations, they emphasize that broader struggles in society permeate state institutions and thus that they can be reworked on the inside to serve different ends. As Angel (2017: 560–561) argues,

[I]t is easy to conceive of the state as “the enemy.” This, however, would be a mistake, for the state is not a unified or rigid subject or thing … [W]hile the selectivity of the state towards political strategies that reproduce prevailing relations will continuously frustrate endeavours towards emancipatory change, struggle within and outside of the state can shape its form and function. The interests of managers and employees within the state are contingent and in tension, while struggle from outside the state's apparatus can, on occasion, compel state institutions to be selective in subversive ways, shifting the balance of power.

Angel and Loftus (2019) caution against “overly capitalocentric account[s]” that “reduce the state to a monad within the capitalist production of nature”: “in recognising the ways in which the state emerges from a process of struggle along various different axes, we suggest the possibility that such hierarchical relations can be transformed. Capital accumulation can be blocked, colonial dispossession resisted, gender subverted, racism fought. By intervening in these processes, our socio-ecological world—including but not limited to the institutions of the state—can be remade” (211).

Angel and Loftus emphasize that calls for justice through the state can also problematically reify it in ways that endow the state with unwarranted capability and propensity to serve justice. Notably, they argue that “the human right to water” politics too often rely only on the state to redress water disparities despite state institutions’ continued failures to do so. Because the state is constituted in part by broader relations of domination and violence, those broader relations must be addressed—which requires pursuing change not only vis-à-vis the state but also beyond it: “Ultimately, the task must be to intervene in and transform the relations that constitute the state and the broader socio-ecological environment. Struggle oriented within state institutions is likely necessary, but not sufficient, for success in this regard” (Angel and Loftus, 2019: 211).

Another illustrative example is Keith Miyake's (2021) examination of EJ activism against a proposed prison project in California's Central Valley. Miyake compellingly demonstrates that activists’ engagements with the state through lawsuits and a legislative campaign helped them explicitly challenge the carceral premise of the settler state and build momentum for their broader abolitionist struggles for freedom that pursue what André Gorz called “nonreformist reforms”: changes “conceived not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system … but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands … determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be” (Gorz, 1967: 7–8, from Miyake, 2021: 594). Miyake concludes: “On the one hand, engaging the state legitimizes its normative modes of racial and environmental governance that enable and reproduce the relations of racial capitalism. On the other hand, these engagements hold the potential for nonreformist reforms that bring immediate harm reduction, avoid reproducing the state's systems of carcerality, and forge new social relations and political formations that enliven radical possibilities for the future” (602–603).

In Our History is the Future, Sioux scholar Nick Estes (2019) demonstrates that Native American groups’ pursuit of justice has entailed both working against and beyond the settler state. Estes traces a long history of Indigenous groups’ resistance against settler state acts of trespass, dispossession, and other forms of violence, showing how Indigenous groups build on prior resistance grounded in specific Indigenous territories and Nations. He illustrates ways that the Standing Rock camp entailed the construction of new infrastructures that met people's needs (including food, health care, and legal aid) beyond the settler state and colonial capitalism. Estes argues: “Drawing from the Black radical tradition, Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the creation of this kind of world a form of ‘abolition geography’ that ‘starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place’.” Indeed, Indigenous freedom was, and is, a place; and for a moment, it took shape in the form of the #NoDAPL camps (Estes, 2019: 252–253, quoting Gilmore, 2017). But Estes also emphasizes that this alternative future building beyond the settler state has also entailed engaging with it—confrontationally challenging the settler state's domination and dispossession through its own mechanisms and institutions (such as filing lawsuits and administrative complaints against the Army Corps of Engineers).

Another illuminating example is Erin Goodling's analysis of the EJ struggle in Portland, Oregon (2020, in progress). Drawing on years of participation with EJ activists, Goodling demonstrates how and why EJ advocates can and do selectively pursue change in, against, and beyond the state and how those approaches all serve their broader, transformative goals. She uses the term “radical incrementalism” to characterize how these activists approach the state as “complicit in injustice at the same time as it holds potential for agonistic yet progressive politics” (in progress: 24; see also 2021: 851, 853fn7). The activism she showcases “acknowledges the limits of engaging with regulatory agencies, while simultaneously holding strong to a belief that public agencies must be impelled to act … [and] offers an opportunity to examine with precision how to build upon and integrate calls for simultaneously attempting to hold the state accountable, engaging in confrontations with the state, and drawing on more radical avenues to social change that may sometimes entail complete disengagement, making space for a primarily mutual aid approach” (in progress: 23).

Similarly, in her research on the siting and expansion of an immigrant detention center in Tacoma, Washington, Megan Ybarra shows how and why activists pursued municipal code and ordinance reforms and how those efforts reduced harm in the short term and challenge the logic of detention more broadly: “While relying on the state to protect citizens and residents has been roundly criticised in the environmental justice literature (Pulido et al., 2016; Ranganathan, 2016), the state here is read as a site of struggle. In the organising I detail, it is the nitty gritty of municipal codes and ordinances that tears down cages and makes space for abolition ecologies in their place” (Ybarra, 2021: 40). At the same time, Ybarra shows how these activists pursue justice beyond the state by “build[ing] liberatory practices that do not rely on state recognition … [and] do not depend on White supremacist logics” (51).

Richard Milligan, Tyler McCreary, and Na'Taki Osborne Jelks (2021) document ways that EJ organizers in Atlanta strategically work through and against the state to reduce environmental harm. They emphasize that “While state recognition has sought to contain or co-opt movements, we demonstrate the continuing vitality of mobilizations that simultaneously make demands of the state and rupture the governing forms of knowledge and practice that reinforce environmental racisms … [W]hile marginalized communities are necessarily caught up in the very structures against which they struggle, their responses are not fully circumscribed by it. As Lee (2016) argues, despite the ‘inevitable complicity and contamination of any performance of resistance’ (43), the ingenious agency of subaltern subjects enables them to rupture the disseminated script” (1586, 1589).

The work that Kate Derickson and colleagues have conducted in partnership with community members also demonstrates the value of EJ activism aimed (in part) at reforming state practice (Derickson et al., 2021; CREATE, 2021). In one of their key projects, they work with politically active residents in Minneapolis and St Paul to advise government agencies on how to design and implement urban greening policies and programs in disenfranchised communities of color without leading to the displacement documented in studies of green gentrification (Checker, 2011; Gould and Lewis, 2017; Anguelovski et al., 2019). Through an extensive collaborative engagement with government agency staff and others, these scholars and their community partners developed a detailed “toolkit” that helps various actors “understand the intersection of green investment and displacement” and identifies “existing anti-displacement policy tools and new policy possibilities in the context of greening cities” (Derickson et al., 2021: 2). Community members work to build community power and otherwise pursue more just outcomes beyond the state, and also have used the toolkit to encourage siloed government agencies and organizations to make connections with other agencies or initiatives so that urban greening efforts do not replicate past patterns of displacement (Derickson, personal communication).

Tracy Perkins’ (2022) research on California EJ activists provides substantial insights into the benefits activists see in engaging with the state in professionalized ways. Frustrated by the fact that California's early, confrontational EJ activism produced wins that were largely localized and disconnected and did not in general translate into large-scale, widespread change, many EJ activists increasingly adopted institutionalized tactics to rectify those shortcomings: electoral politics, securing positions in public office, policy advocacy, and participating in public hearings and state agencies’ EJ advisory committees. Perkins and her research participants acknowledge the limitations and pitfalls of institutionalized tactics—that they are time-intensive, pull activists away from other activities, and are often used by state actors to misrepresent decision-making as more democratic than it is. Yet she also emphasizes that these engagements with the state foster coalition-building among EJ activists, help activists learn how to strategically promote their causes with state actors, enable activists to build relationships with state actors sympathetic to their interests, and influence decisions in ways that scale up environmental protections across communities.

These examples illustrate how EJ activists’ engagements with the settler colonial state—sometimes quite confrontational, and sometimes less so—have contributed to their broader EJ goals. While the relatively modest outcomes of such efforts do not unseat racial capitalism and settler colonialism or otherwise constitute all that justice requires, they do help reduce harm in overburdened communities and thus, as Miyake (2021) states, “shouldn't be summarily dismissed because of their proximity to the state” (593). Reductionist characterizations of the state too easily dismiss the prospects for change through the state—including reforms that are modest but nevertheless reduce harm as well as “nonreformist reforms” that more fundamentally support justice, all of which can be pursued through both collaborative and confrontational practices.

To be sure, there are tensions across these tactics. For instance, some scholars have found that EJ activists’ engagements in collaborative practices with state actors can draw activists away from other activities and pressure them into neutering their practices (Checker, 2011; Harrison, 2016; Holifield, 2004; Ottinger, 2013; Perkins, 2022). Also, the fact that some activists focus on oppositional strategies while others pursue work with and within the state could deepen internal political fractures among EJ activists. Additionally, EJ activists’ professionalization and institutionalization, including relationship-building and engagement with state actors, can compel activists to conform to existing state practices and withdraw from confrontationally challenging the state. That said, as scholars have found, confrontational and collaborative tactics have been seen to work in mutually supportive ways (Dillon, 2014, in progress; Goodling, in progress; Harrison, 2019; London and Harrison, 2021; Méndez, 2020; Perkins, 2022).

My point is not that all activists must employ all of these tactics. Many EJ groups have limited capacity to engage in all of them, and some oppositional strategies make it difficult to also collaborate with state agents. Rather, the point is that EJ activists find purchase in using these in various combinations, which gets dismissed when scholars reduce the state to a fundamentally, inevitably repressive arm of racial capitalism.