Unmasking Covert Injustice? A Multilevel Analysis of Environmental Inequalities and Regulatory Enforcement in the United States

Environmental justice (EJ) has increasingly drawn the attention of scholars in a variety of fields. Less studied has been the role of bureaucracies in ensuring equitable environmental policy implementation. Consequently, this dissertation aims to assess variations in state agencies' regulatory compliance monitoring and assurance activity patterns across racial/ethnic minority and majority populations. Four primary research questions drive the analysis: (1) whether race/ethnicity-related implementation inequalities exist; (2) what factors contribute to these inequities; (3) whether these phenomena are a product of attributes of multiple levels of locales (e.g., state and local); and (4) whether and how minority-group-associated variables play a role in this process.This dissertation offers an integrated, multilevel framework to empirically evaluate the effects of a broad range of political, socioeconomic, task, and demographic factors on the inspection and enforcement patterns witnessed in the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit program of the Clean Water Act (CWA-NPDES). The research time frame for the African American and Hispanic vulnerable populations is from 1996 to 2010 and from 2005 to 2010, respectively. The unit of analysis is county nationwide.The empirical analysis, first, attests to the relevance of minority-group-related factors in the process of national wastewater management program implementation. For the socially marginalized, the patterns of agencies' inspection and enforcement activities are contingent on different political contextual determinants. For example, state legislature partisanship and citizen ideology are related to the implementation activeness for the general populace but not for racial/ethnic minorities. Neither does passive representation of people of color in state legislatures necessarily translate into active representation in wastewater management policy. The degenerative policy context - meaning the dynamics pertaining to the negative social constructions of minority groups - is also found to dampen implementation activities, at least for African Americans. As such, the dissertation recommends several areas for future research, including getting more direct measures of social construction of minorities by implementers.