Marketisation of environmental justice: U.S. EPA environmental justice showcase communities project in Port Arthur, Texas

This paper examines how the state responds to persistent claims of environmental injustice in overburdened communities. Our analysis focuses on activities, objectives, and processes of state intervention to understand how state actors attempt to rescript the meaning of environmental justice. We develop our analysis through a case study of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (USEPA) Environmental Justice Showcase Communities (EJSC) Programme, and its project in Port Arthur, Texas, to understand how the state responds to communities of colour facing toxic pollution. We discover a misalignment between the aims of local activists and policy interventions. If interventions do not align with the goals of activists, then what political work is done through the programme? We identify two elements of this USEPA programme: (1) how the EJSC programme targets individuals living in environmental justice communities for remediation rather than facilitating environmental remediation; and (2) how state interventions align in multiple ways with interests of the private sector, effectively redefining environmental justice from a utilitarian view of compensation. Moreover, we describe how the EJSC programme also forges new pathways for private companies to participate in environmental compensation programmes while ignoring requests to enhance monitoring and regulatory compliance in industry. Thus, rather than responding and advancing activist environmental justice objectives, programme discourses and interventions sideline collective community claims and redirect state-level EJ interventions that embrace market-centric measures. Such market-based interventions on behalf and in the name of environmental justice signal a further entrenchment of what we refer to as the marketisation of environmental justice.