Neoliberal environmental justice: mainstream ideas of justice in political conflict over agricultural pesticides in the United States

Numerous scholars have used political philosophy to characterise the US environmental justice (EJ) movement’s conception of justice. I build upon that work by identifying and critically evaluating the ideas of justice that manifest in mainstream (non-EJ) environmental politics. I do so through a comparative analysis of two groups of activists concerned with the threats posed by pesticides to human health in California. Mainstream agri-environmental activists’ narratives and practices evince libertarian and communitarian ideas of justice that support the neoliberalisation of an already compromised regulatory system, as they motivate and legitimise policies, practices, and discourses that undermine the state’s environmental protections and shift environmental responsibility to individuals. In contrast, California’s EJ activists, like the broader EJ movement, marshal a pluralist notion of justice as distribution, recognition, participation, and capabilities, which rejects the neoliberal project and explicitly criticises the social inequalities and relations of oppression that help produce environmental inequalities.