FIGHTING AT THE MESO-LEVEL?: AN ORGANIZATIONAL APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY AND JUSTICE

Samantha Castonguay

doi:10.7273/000007921

Following the 1982 Warren County, North Carolina waste siting dispute, research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that environmental harms (e.g., pollution, hazardous facilities, extractive industries) and environmental benefits (e.g., green spaces, stocked grocery stores, green infrastructure) are distributed unequally along racial, class, gender, and geographic lines: a key assertion by environmental justice (EJ) activists and scholars. While scholars have made great strides in identifying individual and state-level barriers and solutions to the remediation of environmental injustice, the meso-level and the entities within it remain undertheorized in the generation, preservation, and interruption of environmental inequality and injustice. This dissertation offers a novel approach to understanding environmental inequality and justice (EIJ) by focusing on the meso-level and integrating insights from environmental sociology, organizational sociology, and the sociology of race and ethnicity. It presents a series of theoretical frameworks for a body of EIJ scholarship that wholly considers the meso-level, one that examines interconnected meso-level dynamics, rather than just individual meso-level actors. Additionally, this dissertation introduces environmental movement organizations (EMOs), specifically environmental nonprofits, as a critical meso-level case to elucidate mechanisms that shape environmental inequalities. I provide empirical assessments of this case, first using longitudinal qualitative content analysis of a leading organization materials. This assessment reveals minimal and inconsistent adoption of EJ principles, influenced by the organization's historical focus on wilderness conservation and an underlying white organizational logic. I follow this qualitative examination with a survey experiment to investigate whether environmental social movement organizations face financial penalties for implementing racially targeted programs. The findings suggest that while organizations may not face financial penalties in overall donation levels, they are likely to experience a change in their supporter base, highlighting the significant influence of color-blind racial ideology on donor behavior. To conclude, I offer directions for future research and organizational practices aimed at disrupting the institutionalization of environmental inequality, emphasizing the potential of the meso-level to be both inequality-generating and inequality-eliminating.

FIGHTING AT THE MESO-LEVEL?: AN ORGANIZATIONAL APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY AND JUSTICE

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