Green justice: Liberal egalitarianism and the challenge of environmental aims

Recent trends in U.S. environmental policy have witnessed a shift away from centralized command and control regulation and toward decentralized democratic processes and voluntary partnerships between government and industry. Attention has been paid to these developments from a variety of academic fields, and controversy continues to surround their evaluation. While part of any such critical evaluation must concern the practical effects of reform, this dissertation argues that conceptions of democracy and social justice also ought to be applied to environmental policies and issues, and in particular, that they serve as norms for public policy design and evaluation. Current conceptions of justice articulated in contemporary liberal egalitarian political theory, however, fall short in meeting the challenges of environmental aims in several respects. They have a difficult time identifying and proscribing environmental harms, which are often small or even imperceptible in their distinct effects, are difficult to trace to single acts or sources, and yet have a lingering and cumulative effect on persons. In addition, liberal egalitarianism has difficulty defending (as a matter of justice) environmental protection within its conceptual framework. State neutrality makes difficult the attribution of value to environmental goods (which appear to carry the status of private preferences), and the future generations problem further complicates any liberal case for protecting the environment as a duty arising from egalitarian distributive concerns owed to future others. Such a difficulty is not intractable, however, and the dissertation develops and applies a version of liberal egalitarian theory to contemporary environmental policy processes, and suggests ways in which such a normative treatment of environmental policy issues illuminates the role of concepts of democratic participation, sustainability, and social justice, and does so in a manner that captures crucial elements missed by rival approaches. Following the defense of liberal egalitarian justice theory as one that can adequately account for environmental aims, some substantive and procedural policy implications are briefly sketched.