Assessing environmental justice contributions in research and public policy: an applied framework and methodology

ABSTRACT

How can scholars and practitioners gauge the extent to which environmental justice (EJ) is present in research and policy? Through synthesizing the interdisciplinary environmental justice scholarship, we present a diagnostic framework for appraising the frequency and depth of environmental justice-based engagements in published academic research, with broader applications for gray literature, such as policy documents. We demonstrate how the diagnostic can be applied through a scoping review methodology for assessing EJ contributions in existing research on the Colorado River Basin – a global epicenter for intersecting climate change and water equity concerns. The results demonstrate that the existing literature mostly focuses on specific dimensions of justice and does not consider the interdependent nature of its multiple dimensions and measures. Overall, the applied diagnostic represents one approach for assessing EJ contributions, with important potential for informing research practice and public policy design.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• equity
• diagnostic
• climate change
• Colorado River Basin

Introduction

Environmental justice (EJ), which explores the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens amongst both privileged and marginalized groups, including their recognition and inclusion in decision-making processes (Schlosberg, 2004), is now integral to environmental policy and planning. Scholars and policy-makers increasingly seek an understanding of whether, and how, existing research and policy efforts reflect, and or operationalize, justice-based principles (e.g., Bell & Carrick, 2017; Carrick et al., 2023; Hoover et al., 2021; Yarbrough & Smith-Colin, 2023). Assessment and evaluation activities are foundational for identifying major knowledge and action gaps in environmental policy and planning approaches, many of which increasingly seek alignment with principles of equity, justice, and sustainability. Such evaluations are critical, both for reducing the risks of climate and environmental justice being co-opted (Ranganathan & Bratman, 2021), and for guiding and holding policy-makers and planners accountable when such considerations are side-lined. Therefore, we ask: How can scholars and practitioners gauge the extent to which environmental justice is present in research and policy?

EJ as a field has always been ‘applied’, precisely because it emerged from grassroots movements and struggles (Bullard et al., 2008). Its multiple dimensions – ‘recognitional’, ‘procedural’, ‘distributive’, and ‘reparational’ justice and their interconnections (e.g., Whyte, 2011; Schlosberg & Collins, 2014; Colsa Perez et al., 2015; Holifield et al., 2017; Chu & Michael, 2019; Táíwò, 2022) – emerge directly from the lived experiences of marginalized communities. Like others (e.g., Bell and Carrick, 2017; Carrick et al., 2023), we claim that EJ, as an increasingly represented paradigm in environmental policy and planning, necessitates robust, translatable, and transferable frameworks and methodologies for evaluating its representation and modalities in varied bodies of research and policy. We argue such frameworks must not be prescriptive as to what EJ constitutes, but rather, reflect its overarching and emerging principles, which present opportunities for articulating EJ concerns in situated ways (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014).

Advancing this contribution, we present a synthesized diagnostic for appraising the frequency and depth of environmental justice-based engagements in published literature. The diagnostic centers around the synthesis of a transferable framework that builds on multiple meanings and interpretations of EJ scholarship. Three reasons warrant our diagnostic. First, environmental and climate justice considerations have proliferated in academic scholarship, public policy-making, decision-support tools¹, and even in corporate social responsibility programs. The risks of diluting and ‘coopt[ing]’ critical approaches from Black, Indigenous, and people of color who are on the frontlines of environmental and climate justice have been forewarned (e.g. Ranganathan & Bratman, 2021). The availability of accessible tools is therefore vital to assessing how justice-based considerations are increasingly being conceptualized and implemented (Carrick et al., 2023). As one example, Bell and Carrick (2017, p. 109) argued:

[T]he ‘gap’ between [the] ideals of procedural environmental justice and even the best attempts to institutionalize procedural environmental justice in practice is large enough to make it difficult to use ideal principles to evaluate actual institutions. […] developing a robust framework for assessing the relative injustice of actual environmental institutions might be an important step forward. (Bell & Carrick, 2017, p. 109)

Such tools further invite opportunities for implementing agencies and organizations to reflect on their objectives, positionality, and outcomes (Agyeman et al., 2016; Méndez, 2022). Second, and relatedly, environmental justice assessments capable of reflecting the multiple, integrative dimensions of environmental justice are required. This is because it is insufficient to analyze single dimensions of environmental injustice; indeed, dimensions are interdependent (Schlosberg, 2004; McDermott et al., 2013; Schlosberg & Collins, 2014; Bell & Carrick, 2017; Méndez-Barrientos et al., 2023). Third, we require flexible diagnostics capable of being expanded. Our tool, we hope, allows for such expansion to include other increasingly prominent dimensions, such as ecological and multi-species justice.

We demonstrate the diagnostic’s application through a ‘systematic scoping review’ (Peters et al., 2020) of peer-reviewed social sciences research on the Colorado River Basin (CRB). The CRB serves as the vehicle to demonstrate the applicability of our diagnostic, which we anticipate could be applied in diverse environmental policy contexts elsewhere. As such, our contribution is neither a critical EJ analysis nor a place-based examination of CRB dynamics per se. Applying our diagnostic, we examine the extent to which published academic literature on the CRB has focused on EJ, and how it has been conceptualized to-date.

Developing an interdisciplinary environmental justice framework

As an interdisciplinary area of research, EJ scholars have developed diverse analytical approaches to characterize EJ experiences. While some scholarship has evaluated state-centric or agency-centered approaches to advance environmental justice (e.g. Schlosberg, 2004; Schlosberg & Collins, 2014; Agyeman et al., 2016; Yarbrough & Smith-Colin, 2023), others such as Pellow’s (2018) framework on ‘critical EJ’ has a stronger critique of the state, and Pulido and De Lara (2018, p. 77) draw from abolitionist theories and decolonial epistemologies to imagine radical ‘forms of freedom’ beyond culpabilities recognized by the state. Similarly, multiple methodological approaches have pervaded EJ scholarship. As one example, Mohai (2020) highlights the quantitative methodological advancements in EJ, which reveal significant and continuing racialized disparities in the distribution of waste facilities. Other scholars use methods such as oral history, ethnography, and archival data to document the long-term impacts and lived experiences of environmental injustice (e.g., Boone & Buckley, 2017; De Onís & Pezzullo, 2017; Odera et al., 2023; Roque, 2023).

Because EJ has been defined and applied in various ways, through a review of the theoretical and empirical scholarship, we integrated three classic dimensions of EJ (i.e., distribution, recognition, and procedural justice) with restorative or reparational justice (e.g., Forsyth et al., 2021; Sultana, 2022; Táíwò, 2022). Our process began by reviewing foundational literature and searching for other literature pertaining to these dimensions and associated concepts. We iteratively grouped common concepts into justice dimensions and measures, ensuring categories were broad enough to capture multiple context-specific descriptors, while narrow enough to be distinguishable from one another, until conceptual saturation was reached (Galvan & Galvan, 2017). We summarized these justice dimensions into an integrative and applied framework of eleven justice measures across four dimensions (Table 1). Below, we introduce these EJ dimensions, not as they were chronologically developed, but rather from an environmental planning and public policy lens, which often starts by identifying the ‘stakeholders’ to be engaged. Based on this rationale, we begin with recognitional justice, and subsequently elaborate procedural, distributive, and restorative justice.

Table 1. Synthesized framework for assessing environmental justice.

Justice dimensions	Justice measures	References
Recognitional justice	a. Acknowledgement of differentiated access to resources (i.e., natural, technological, economic, human, and social) b. Acknowledgment of differentiated access to government and other institutions (i.e., access to authority and other institutional resources) c. Acknowledgment of alternative perspectives, discourses, ontologies, and epistemologies	Young (1990); Fraser (1995); Schlosberg (2004); Whyte (2011); Chu and Michael (2019)
Procedural justice	d. Access to policy processes (e.g. access to venues and agendas, information and use) e. Opportunity to influence decisions (e.g. access to representation, deliberation, and learning) f. Opportunity to structure the conditions of decision-making (e.g. capacity to choose policy venues and prioritize issues for discussion)	Bullard (2001); Purdy (2012); Gellers and Jeffords (2018); Kashwan et al. (2019); Svarstad and Benjaminsen (2020); Suiseeya (2020)
Distributive justice	g. Differentiated distribution of resources among actors resulting from policy interventions h. Differentiated support from institutions, laws, and governance arrangements resulting from policy interventions i. Differentiated allocation of impacts from the implementation of a law or policy	Bullard et al. (2008); Mohai et al. (2009); Liang et al. (2020)
Restorative justice	j. Recognition of past wrongs and root causes that explain unequal access to procedural and distributive justice k. Proposes retributions to wronged communities	Schlosberg and Collins (2014); Braithwaite et al. (2019); Forsyth et al. (2021); Táíwò (2022)

Recognitional justice

Thirty-plus years since Young (1990) argued for the expansion of justice beyond Rawls’s (1971) Theory of Justice by examining how identity or identities can be associated with oppressive or harmful conditions, justice as ‘recognition’ remains the least understood dimension of EJ (Martin et al., 2016). For Young (1990), justice could be advanced when differences in identity, background, and lived experiences – which shape the distribution of benefits and harms – are recognized and valued. Similarly, Fraser (1995) underscored how embracing diversity, instead of expecting disadvantaged groups to conform to established norms is essential for recognizing marginalized perspectives, experiences, and knowledges – and the associated systematic distributional differences (Schlosberg, 2004). ‘Recognitional justice’, per Fraser (1995) therefore, begins with acknowledging and respecting diverse participants and their lived experiences.

In environmental policy, recognitional justice is concerned with how and why privileged and marginalized groups are unevenly recognized in policy processes (Schlosberg, 2004). This dimension examines, for instance, the equity of intergovernmental relations, Tribal institutions, and access to resources (Whyte, 2011). As noted by Preston and Carr (2018), recognitional justice requires a commitment to acknowledging those who are, or may be, adversely impacted by policies or programs. It encompasses an examination of the social, political, and cultural effects of potential interventions beyond an evaluation of biophysical and financial disparities (Preston & Carr, 2018). Ultimately, recognitional justice is concerned with who is recognized as an actor, and whose values and interests are accounted for (Fraser, 1995; Chu & Michael, 2019; Méndez-Barrientos et al., 2023). We integrate recognitional justice using three measures: the recognition of differentiated access to resources, institutions, and alternative discourses and approaches that support individuals or groups (Table 1: a–c).

Procedural justice

Bullard (2001, p. 156) categorized equity as ‘procedural’, ‘geographic’ and ‘social’. The former, for Bullard, ‘refers to the ‘fairness’ question: the extent that governing rules, regulations, evaluation criteria, and enforcement are applied uniformly and in a non discriminatory way’ (Bullard, 2001). Bullard, like other EJ scholars, explicitly notes how procedural inequity or injustice may result in ‘unequal protection’ from environmental disamenities. On ‘procedural fairness’, Young (1990, pp. 184–185) argued that democratic participation could promote it through establishing public agendas and actions for addressing agenda items.

Importantly, however, and interrelated to recognitional justice, scholarship finds diverse participation in decision-making processes does not inherently result in procedural fairness nor recognizes inclusive diverse values and worldviews (Gellers & Jeffords, 2018; Suiseeya, 2020) – or, in other words, contribute to ‘recognitional justice’ (Fraser, 1995). It requires the meaningful participation of marginalized peoples in decision-making processes, and a commitment to recognizing and addressing how power, authority, and suppression operate in such arenas (Koebele et al., 2023; Méndez-Barrientos, Under Review), shaping broader notions of procedural fairness.

Following Svarstad and Benjaminsen’s (2020) observation that power theories are insufficiently integrated within procedural justice, and EJ generally, we integrate three procedural measures: access to policy processes, opportunities to influence decisions, and opportunities to structure the conditions of decision-making processes (Table 1: d–f). These measures distinguish policy processes that merely inform or invite participants to predetermined decision-making forums (e.g., ‘consultations’) from arenas in which participants can define the rules and norms of participation, topics to be discussed, and deliberate and shape outcomes. For instance, the first justice measure acknowledges how technical processes combined with limited capacity and governance experience can leave policy processes inaccessible to marginalized groups (Purdy, 2012). The second justice measure recognizes the importance of discursive power, including capacities to develop and mobilize narratives and governance paradigms (Bachrach & Baratz, 1962). This is relevant for water governance, where Indigenous knowledges are seldom recognized as feasible alternatives by settler-colonial decision-making institutions and forums (Wilson et al., 2021). The third justice measure distinguishes the capacity to establish rules and norms underlying participation (Kashwan et al., 2019), including who can and should participate, what alternatives are open to be implemented, and where and under what conditions decision-making occurs. Within these three measures of procedural justice, we further integrate a ‘capabilities-based’ approach (Sen, 1999), which stresses choices and deliberate processes of participation (Schlosberg, 2007).

Distributive justice

Distributive justice has been widely held as the central dimension of the EJ scholarship (Bullard et al., 2008). Focused on the outcomes of recognition and decision-making, distributive justice stresses how environmental benefits and harms are (unevenly) distributed within and across societies (Liang et al., 2020; Pellow, 2004). Distributive environmental injustices disproportionately affect underrepresented and marginalized communities, resulting in negative intergenerational impacts (Mohai et al., 2009; Bullard et al., 2008) While often thought to be about the distribution of harms, Liang et al. (2020) found that increased political representation of marginalized communities can increase the distribution of benefits for historically disenfranchized groups. Distributive justice approaches, hence, stress the uneven allocation of environmental risks and benefits across racial and socio-economic groups, and foreground the underlying inequities that produce these distributed outcomes (Mohai et al., 2009).

We integrate three justice measures to distribute justice for analysis: perceived differences in allocation of resources (i.e., benefits) among actors, support from institutions, such as from laws and governance arrangements, and differentiated impacts (i.e., harms) that may be detrimental to different groups (Table 1: g–i).

Restorative justice

Restorative justice emphasizes healing between responsible and systematically marginalized groups (Braithwaite et al., 2019; Forsyth et al., 2021). Forsyth et al. (2021) characterize environmental restorative justice as requiring participation and commitment from powerful actors to effect change; expressed through story-telling and dialogue; centering harms experienced by victims and survivors of institutional oppression; and institutionalizing accountability. Furthermore, complex processes of healing not only require recognition of the harms inflicted upon systematically marginalized and disenfranchised groups, but social, economic, political, and ecological reparations to the oppressed from their oppressors (Táíwò, 2022).

From a public policy perspective, this dimension signifies a governance opportunity to restore justice and avoid future re-occurrences and associated harms ( Forsyth et al., 2021). In brief, restorative justice seeks the prevention and re-occurrence of structural and place-based harms; policy processes open to re-imagination through recognizing and valuing diverse positions and knowledge systems; and commitments to practicing meaningful accountability for those responsible for social and ecological harms (Forsyth et al., 2021).

This aspect of restorative justice is salient in climate justice literature (Táíwò, 2022; Sultana, 2022). For example, reparations are informally equated with commitments from countries in the global North to provide climate financing, particularly for ‘Loss and Damage’ to the global South. This lens has centered important critiques, including around the scale of financial contributions, what will be financed and why, including the decision-making dynamics inherent to these processes, and whether efforts to reduce future loss and damage will include transforming systems of inequality, including the colonial forms of domination that have, and continue to, underlie climate vulnerability (IPCC, 2022, p. 12). Relatedly, Táíwò (2022, p. 74) argues reparative justice must be informed by a historical interpretation of distributive justice. This requires moving beyond immediate efforts to close distributional inequalities, or ‘snapshot’ approaches (Táíwò, 2022, p. 85) and into understanding the diverse and on-going processes by which injustice continues to pervade, even after distributional inequalities have been closed in a moment-of-time (Táíwò, 2022). We integrate related aspects of restorative justice by detailing two measures: recognition of past wrongs and recognition of retributions to harmed groups (Table 1: j,k).

Methods

We applied our diagnostic (Table 1) to assess the extent to which EJ is present in academic scholarship focused on the CRB. We selected the CRB following a ‘most-likely’ case study selection methodology, which seeks to analyze empirical examples where a theory, herein environmental injustice, is most likely to be evidenced (Gerring, 2017). In our case, this translated to a case with an abundance of opportunities to document and expose a variety of historical and on-going injustices, all of which facilitate opportunities to apply our diagnostic, assess multiple dimensions of justice, and even consider how the framework may be expanded.

To this end, the CRB is an active, inter-regional basin within a settler-colonial context that defined water rights and governance based on expropriation, unequal access, and injustice. Formalized water governance dates to 1922 when the Colorado River Compact Agreement was signed between seven Western states, excluding Native American Tribes and Mexico. Since, multiple laws and agreements have created a fragmented governance system that together is colloquially referred to as the ‘Law of the River’ (Koebele et al., 2023). Physical water shortages have worsened over-allocation and overuse, and laid bare the historical and contemporary inequities in water distribution. Calls for greater inclusion have underscored ongoing marginalization from Tribal Nations and pueblos², who have been largely excluded from water governance despite holding rights to 25-30% of the river’s historic flow (Water and Tribes Initiative, 2020). Today, the CRB is on the precipice of a new set of negotiations. The application of our diagnostic could thus demonstrate a forward-looking approach to develop an empirical baseline to gauge EJ contributions and identify future areas for research.

Our exercise aimed to: i) develop a baseline analysis of social and interdisciplinary science literature supporting justice-based inquiry, and ii) identify gaps and future areas of EJ research (cf. Peters et al., 2020). To achieve this, we first performed a systematic scoping review, complemented by a traditional literature review.

Systematic scoping reviews use a standardized and rigorous assessment methodology for capturing and analyzing published documents (Arksey & O'Malley, 2005; Peters et al., 2020). This review is an appropriate methodology for our research objectives given it aims to map and synthesize broader themes and connections present within interdisciplinary literatures (Arksey & O'Malley, 2005; Peters et al., 2020). Our search was executed in the Web of Science Core Collection (hereafter WoS), which is a multidisciplinary index of scientific and scholarly literature (Clarivate, 2023). As a highly generalist and multidisciplinary database, record retrieval is likely to reflect a wide range of scholarship, versus more disciplinary and field-specific databases. Search criteria string was limited to the geographic area of focus: the Colorado River Basin. This enabled us to retrieve the broadest set of literature, and subsequently exclude publications outside the social sciences scope. We searched for publications published in English between 31 December 1971, and 31 December 2022 to account for the last fifty-years of published scholarship, including Indigenous-centered scholarship that may pre-date the ‘formal’ birth of the U.S. environmental justice movement. Appendix A lists the studies reviewed, and Appendix B provides a histogram with the distributions of articles included in review by year. This period coincides with acute changes in water availability, reliability, and recurrent droughts in the CRB, which precipitated a growth of collaborative forums, negotiations, and governance policies (Koebele et al., 2023). As such, we aimed to capture a contemporary period of critical environmental policy interventions that was marked by efforts to engage diverse actors in policy-making. The complete record resulting from the search yielded 719 articles. The adapted PRISMA Diagram (Moher et al., 2009; Figure 1) describes our inclusion-exclusion process.

Figure 1. Adapted PRISMA diagram. Source: PRISMA Diagram adapted from Moher et al. (2009).

To focus our analysis on the social and interdisciplinary sciences literature, specific and well-justified filters from the WoS were applied to narrow the subset of peer-reviewed articles for analysis. Table 2 details the search criteria and filters used to capture the literature, which enhanced the specificity of retrieved records, yielding 439 records. While the WoS filters aimed to capture only social science and interdisciplinary research, a rapid review of the 439 publications indicated that a manual screening was necessary due to the presence of publications from other disciplines. After screening for possible inclusion and exclusion errors, we found that a total of 90 out of 439 (20.5%) articles yielded from search, or 90 out of 719 (12.5%) when considering the complete record, corresponded to social and interdisciplinary publications. Articles excluded in the ‘Screening’ phase (n = 349) were outside of the scope of the study (e.g., atmospheric, hydrologic, ecological sciences, among others). To determine ‘Eligibility’, the first author reviewed the article’ s Title and Abstract (n = 90) to determine explicit references to EJ in the CRB. A publication was eligible for ‘Inclusion’ and full-text assessment if justice, equity, inclusion, diverse actors, and disadvantaged communities, and Indigenous or Native Americans and other cognate concepts were mentioned. A total of 14 articles met this inclusion criteria. Then, we complemented this approach with a traditional literature review on EJ in the CRB. This involved reviewing the reference lists of the articles that met the inclusion criteria (n = 14) and identifying publications that were not indexed and retrieved through our original WoS search. We identified a total of seven (n = 7) articles. Overall, 21 articles were examined (see Figure 1).

Table 2. Search criteria and filters.

Search component	Search criteria
Search String	‘Colorado River Basin’
Applied Filters via the Web of Science	Water Resources
	Environmental Sciences
	Environmental Studies
	Geography
	Law
	Anthropology
	Economics
	Political Science
	Public Administration
	History
	Sociology
	Urban Studies
	Biodiversity Conservation
	Agricultural Economics Policy
	Archaeology
	Regional Urban Planning
	Public Environmental Occupational Health
	Philosophy
	Development Studies
	Cultural Studies
	Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
Query Link*	https://bit.ly/42×7y1m

Note: Re-indexing by the Web of Science database from the date of searching may result in minor discrepancies in the ‘Total Records from the Web of Science’ (n = 719) and ‘Records Screened for Inclusion’ (n = 439) per Figure 1 and ‘Query Link’ reported in Table 2.

All publications (n = 21) were reviewed by at least two reviewers with coordination and in-person discussions with a third co-author to resolve clarifications and questions on article coding. To begin the full-text assessment, 25% of the articles were simultaneously reviewed and analyzed by two co-authors. To reduce coder bias, authors independently reviewed each publication, tracking the inclusion and the frequency of the EJ dimensions and measures (Table 1). This prevented each reviewer from viewing others’ assessments. Then, these two authors with the lead author discussed analysis for each publication reviewed at an in-person meeting. This collaboration facilitated clarification of conceptualizations (i.e., dimensions and measures of EJ), and appropriate qualification for publications reviewed (i.e., extent and depth for each publication reviewed). A numerical value of one was given for each justice measure when it was included by authors, and therefore identified in our review (Table 3). In addition, articles were evaluated based on frequency and depth of attention (Table 4). Articles classified as presenting a well-thought-out discussion of a given dimension had to meet both conceptual completion (i.e., discussing all measures of an EJ dimension), and depth of attention by discussing justice measures at least three times for each dimension. This process was repeated with an additional 25% of articles, with half of articles reviewed ultimately used to improve inter-coder reliability. The remaining 50% of articles were independently reviewed by two co-authors and analysis collectively reviewed by three authors at another in-person meeting.

Table 3. Diagnostic for assessing dimensions and measures of justice discussed in social and interdisciplinary science literature on the Colorado River Basin (n = 21 articles).

Dimension	Justice measure	Number, (%) of articles
Recognitional Justice	a. Acknowledgement of differentiated access to resources (i.e., natural, technological, economic, human, and social)	11 (52%)
	b. Acknowledgment of differentiated access to government and other institutions (i.e., access to authority and other institutional resources)	8 (38%)
	c. Acknowledgment of alternative perspectives, discourses, ontologies, and epistemologies	11 (52%)
Procedural Justice	d. Access to policy processes (e.g. access to venues and agendas, information and use)	16 (76%)
	e. Opportunity to influence decisions (e.g. access to representation, deliberation, and learning)	11 (52%)
	f. Opportunity to structure the conditions of decision-making (e.g. capacity to choose policy venues and prioritize issues for discussion)	4 (19%)
Distributive Justice	g. Differentiated distribution of resources among actors resulting from policy interventions	10 (48%)
	h. Differentiated support from institutions, laws, and governance arrangements resulting from policy interventions	12 (57%)
	i. Differentiated allocation of impacts from the implementation of a law or policy	11 (52%)
Restorative Justice	j. Recognition of past wrongs and root causes that explain unequal access to procedural and distributive justice	12 (57%)
	k. Proposes retributions to wronged communities	5 (24%)

Note: Articles can fall into ≥ 1 categories.

Table 4. Diagnostic for assessing depth of attention to environmental justice in social science literature on the Colorado River Basin (n = 21 articles included in review).

Depth	Description^a	Number, (% of articles)
None	1. No acknowledgement of specific dimensions of justice	1 (5%)
Minimal	2. Identification of Recognitional Justice as an issue without further discussion or analysis	3 (14%)
	3. Identification of Procedural Justice as an issue without further discussion or analysis	0 (0%)
	4. Identification of Distributive Justice as an issue without further discussion or analysis	2 (10%)
	5. Identification of Restorative Justice as an issue without further discussion or analysis	4 (19%)
	6. Attention to at least one measure of Recognitional Justice (codes ‘a’ – ‘c’)	8 (38%)
	7. Attention to at least one measure of Procedural Justice (codes ‘d’ – ‘f’)	14 (67%)
	8. Attention to at least one measure of Distributive Justice (codes ‘g’ – ‘i’)	9 (43%)
	9. Attention to at least one measure of Restorative Justice (codes ‘j’ – ‘k’)	7 (33%)
Partial	10. Attention to at least two measures of Recognitional Justice with sufficient discussion or analysis (codes ‘a’ – ‘c’)	3 (14%)
	11. Attention to at least two measures of Procedural Justice with sufficient discussion or analysis (codes ‘d’ – ‘f’)	4 (19%)
	12. Attention to at least two measures of Distributive Justice with sufficient discussion or analysis (codes ‘g’ – ‘i’)	4 (19%)
	13. Attention to both measures of Restorative Justice with sufficient discussion or analysis (codes ‘j’ – ‘k’)	3 (14%)
	14. Well-thought-out acknowledgement of the three measures of Recognitional Justice broadly speaking, but incomplete attention throughout	1 (5%)
	15. Well-thought-out acknowledgement of the three measures of Procedural Justice broadly speaking, but incomplete attention throughout	0 (0%)
	16. Well-thought-out acknowledgement of the three measures of Distributive Justice broadly speaking, but incomplete attention throughout	1 (5%)
Strong	17. Demonstrated acknowledgement of recognitional, procedural, and distributive justice	0 (0%)
Very Strong	18. Well-thought-out discussion of all aspects of recognitional, procedural, distributive, and restorative justice	0 (0%)

^a Articles can fall into one or more of the following categories.

Results

Extent of Focus on Environmental Justice

We find that only 21.6% (21 out of 97)³ social science and interdisciplinary articles recognize and elaborate EJ considerations in the Colorado River Basin. This is an important finding given the expansive geography of the basin, its history of sharp inequality in water rights and water access, and on-going political tensions that have garnered increasing media attention and exposed deep inequalities between U.S. states, Mexico, and Indigenous Nations. Notably, our WoS search, limited to English-language literature, did not include Spanish-language literature which would have likely identified, at a higher rate, environmental injustices in the CRB. Our search did, however, yield literature discussing U.S.-centricity in decision-making processes, including transboundary processes (Karambelkar & Gerlak, 2020; Koebele, 2020). Table 3 records the different dimensions and measures of EJ within analyzed articles, whereas Table 4 tallies their overall depth and engagement with EJ.

Procedural justice was present at a relatively higher rate – in comparison to distributive, recognitional, and restorative justice – with one measure, access to participation in policy processes, discussed in 76% of reviewed articles. Its second and third measures were less salient in the literature reviewed, with 52% and 19% of articles elaborating opportunities to influence decisions and structure the conditions of decision-making, respectively. For example, Karambelkar and Gerlak (2020) discuss whether non-state actors had access to multiple Colorado River Basin governance programs. Their reference to the first measure of procedural justice is clear. Moreover, they acknowledge lack of access from Indigenous groups, pointing to the existing governance structures that limit meaningful participation for marginalized groups (Karambelkar & Gerlak, 2020). Further, the authors probe the specific mechanisms that impact Indigenous and environmental groups, elaborating on the unevenness in representation and participation between state and non-state actors across venues, and how techno-managerial water management effectively limits participation.

Distributive justice was integrated in at least 48% of the articles reviewed. The first, second, and third measure were discussed in 48%, 57%, and 52% of articles. As one example, Shepherd (2011, p. 436) discusses the first measure by elaborating how the federal government, operating as a ‘guardian and trustee’ for Tribes, re-distributed Tribal water resources under terms and conditions that were often unfavorable to Tribal water users. Additionally, the author elaborates on the second measure by explaining the institutional limitations incorporated into federal reserved water rights and their implications for addressing reserved Tribal water rights, and elaborates on the disproportionate impacts to Native American communities in the basin, many of which continue to struggle to establish water rights and use them, in the absence of water infrastructure.

Recognitional justice’s first and third measure were also discussed in more than half (52%) of papers, acknowledging differentiated access to resources, and of alternative perspectives, epistemologies, or ontologies. In addition, 38% of articles discussed the second measure, acknowledging differentiated access to government and institutions. Bass (2018) describes how for two decades, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians attempted to engage with agencies without success. In turn, the agencies ‘consistently … ignored’ the Tribe, the asymmetries in resource allocation and government capacity, and importantly, their diverse perspectives around water governance (Bass, 2018, p. 234). Bass (2018) links this misrecognition of Indigenous groups to procedural and distributive injustice and acknowledges the cultural and spiritual importance of water to Indigenous communities.

Restorative justice measures differed substantially in frequency. While 57% of articles reviewed discussed the recognition of past wrongs that explain unequal access to procedural and distributive justice, only 24% elaborated its second measure, the proposition of retributions to wronged communities. Robison et al. (2018) are one of three articles that acknowledge both measures of restorative justice. These authors recognize the cultural and relational significance of water for Indigenous communities, unpacking how settler resource extraction and environmental degradation continue to affect these relations. Finally, the authors advocate for a stronger emphasis on ‘wet water and infrastructure funding for water deliveries, water quality enhancements, and ecological restoration’ (Robison et al., 2018, p. 944).

Depth of discussion on environmental justice

First, only one article was classified as giving ‘no attention’ to justice concerns because it lacked mentions of equity, justice, or rights of marginalized communities in the body of the paper, even though equity was mentioned in abstract. Second, we assigned ‘ minimal attention’ when articles broadly identified one of four justice dimensions, or gave attention to at least one measure of recognitional, procedural, or distributive justice. Notably, 14 out of 21 articles (67%) were classified as giving attention to at least one measure of procedural justice. The other three dimensions were more evenly distributed, with: three articles (14%) identifying recognitional justice and eight (38%) attending to at least one measure of recognitional justice, summing 11 articles (52%); two articles (10%) identifying distributive justice and nine articles (43%) discussing at least one measure of distributive justice, tallying 11 articles (52%); and four articles (19%) identifying restorative justice and 7 articles (33%) paying attention to at least one measure of restorative justice, also totaling 11 articles (52%). One example in this ‘minimal’ classification is Sullivan et al. (2019) who discussed the first measure of procedural justice in the 2019 Drought Contingency planning process. They explain how meetings were accessible to all interested parties, but took place mostly in Phoenix, Arizona, with representatives from relatively distant Native American reservations expressing challenges associated with travel. While the authors acknowledged these limitations for specific groups, they did not engage in a deeper conversation of the implications of excluding Indigenous voices in the collaborative governance process, nor touch on other dimensions of justice throughout.

Third, articles classified as lending ‘partial attention’ identified at least two thirds of measures within each justice dimension. Specifically, three articles (14%) gave attention to at least two measures of recognitional justice, four articles (19%) to at least two measures of procedural and distributive justice, and three articles (14%) to both measures of restorative justice. Additionally, only one article presented a well-thought-out acknowledgement of the three measures of recognitional justice and distributive justice. No articles were classified as giving a well-thought-out analysis of all measures of procedural justice. Price and Weatherford (1976) were the only authors classified as sufficiently discussing all measures of distributive justice. By recognizing disparities in institutional and financial support for different groups, the authors engage in an in-depth discussion of this impacts the distribution and use of water, highlighting the Navajo Nation’s experience navigating negotiations of their water rights.

Fourth, and finally, no articles earned a ‘strong’ and ‘very strong’ classification that demonstrated an in-depth discussion of the traditional three EJ dimensions: recognitional, procedural, and distributive justice or the four dimensions of EJ, including restorative justice.

Discussion

This paper began with the observation that while EJ is now ubiquitous in environmental policy and planning, scholars and practitioners seek practical tools to understand whether and how their research and practice adequately addresses justice-based principles. By applying a synthesized EJ diagnostic to social and interdisciplinary science literature studying the CRB, we find that articles have not adequately integrated multiple dimensions and measures of EJ in their analyses. Most publications tend to focus on one dimension and measure of justice, with very few publications (n= ≤4) elaborating on multiple dimensions and measures. This under-application signals important blind spots that merit discussion to encourage a future research agenda.

First, authors limit procedural justice to access to policy processes and opportunities to influence decisions. These two measures of procedural justice are important because they consider diverse stakeholder engagement (Siddiki et al., 2017) and deliberative interactions (Fishkin, 2009; Choi & Robertson, 2014). However, omitting attention to opportunities to structure the terms and conditions of decision-making processes fails to account for power asymmetries that shape policy processes and their outputs (Koski et al., 2018; Liang et al., 2020; Méndez-Barrientos, Under Review).

Second, fewer articles considered restorative justice. While this could be partly expected due to the more recent emphasis on reparational justice (Forsyth et al., 2021; Táíwò, 2022) in environmental and climate justice, it is notable that reparational perspectives date back to the abolition of slavery in the U.S. (Du Bois, 1998; Gilmore, 2022). In our findings, authors more often recognized past harms to marginalized communities rather than proposed reparations to wronged communities. While we would have expected not to see mentions of retributions in policy documents, the absence and limited consideration of retributions in academic literature speaks to the entrenched legacy of settler-colonial institutions in the basin (cf. Coates, 2014). From our perspective, the failure of academic literature to acknowledge this dimension limits the production of more ambitious proposals, programs, and justice pathways.

Third, the underrepresentation of recognitional and restorative justice, we argue, may hamper transformative efforts for EJ. Without recognitional justice, procedural justice may be more difficult to realize, which has subsequent implications for policy outcomes – distributive justice. On the other hand, the efficacy of distributive justice may be challenged if processes to repair past and on-going harms are not treated seriously. More specifically, our diagnostic revealed that articles paid less attention to four justice-based measures (Table 1: b,f,g,k). Herein, differentiated access to government and related institutions affects opportunities to structure conditions of decision-making and proposals for retribution to wronged communities – all of which in turn shape distributive justice from policy interventions. Thus, we stress that justice-based contributions must be conceptualized and evaluated using relational and integrative approaches (cf. Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014; Joy et al., 2014).

Last, this becomes clearer upon understanding that the multiple dimensions of EJ are deeply interrelated (Schlosberg, 2004; McDermott et al., 2013; Schlosberg & Collins, 2014; Bell & Carrick, 2017; Méndez-Barrientos et al., 2023). As part of this, it is imperative to recognize how injustices can be reinforced through institutional, spatial, and temporal scales (Méndez-Barrientos, Under Review). Some examples include how different levels or forms of government, new environmental stressors, and complex processes related to how racism manifests across time, can support unjust path-dependent trajectories. As one recent example, Méndez-Barrientos et al. (2023) showed that while municipal infrastructure was extended to rural and unincorporated residents in California (i.e., achieving some distributive justice), historically underserved residents were presented with prescribed solutions by state agencies, failing to recognize them as citizen-actors and adequately involve them in the solution process (i.e., re-producing recognitional and procedural injustices). This shows that unpacking the iterative, co-evolutionary, and often path-dependent processes that communities experience across the various dimensions of EJ can thus support accountability for the root causes that perpetuate injustice. Hence, drawing from the work above, it is not sufficient to examine EJ using single (e.g. ‘distributive’) or even multiple siloed dimensions.

Limitations and Further Applications

We now identify several important limitations and areas for future application. First, we recognize our diagnostic integrates four dimensions of EJ, which are anthropocentric. An increasing body of environmental justice research incorporates justice for both human and non-human species (Tschakert, 2022; Fitz-Henry, 2022; Boelens et al., 2023). Future research could involve determining how such considerations could be incorporated. Second, we analyzed articles published in the English-language, which were identifiable through the WoS. These results do not reflect the entirety of the academic scholarship related to our study, in part because authors may use different terms to characterize the Colorado River Basin (e.g. a city or town name without the basin name) and because we omitted non-English language peer-reviewed literature. Third and last, we hope our diagnostic and broader methodological approach will be applied and revised to a diversity of examples that are not confined to water-related justice concerns.

Conclusion

To support scholars and practitioners in evaluating the extent to which EJ principles permeate academic scholarship and policy, we synthesized an interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional EJ diagnostic. Through identifying 11 measures across four dimensions of justice, the diagnostic facilitates gap identification and agenda-building for research programs and policy development.

Using the CRB as a case study, we applied our diagnostic to highlight the progress of EJ scholarship within the social science and interdisciplinary literature. Applying this framework revealed that a well-thought-out focus across the four dominant tenets of EJ in the CRB is largely absent in the existing literature. This is of critical importance due to the interconnectedness of these dimensions, from recognizing environmental burdens and benefits, to shaping proposals for harmed communities. Throughout this scoping review, a minor literature and lack of depth in discussing restorative justice was evident. This is an important gap to address in future research and policy: Providing proposals that not only recognize past wrongs, but support reparations for impacted communities. Overall, the application of our framework has produced a comprehensive examination of how EJ has been studied in the CRB. As the basin continues to experience water shortages and on-going political interventions, there is immense opportunity to advance scholarship that can comprehensively examine the environmental injustice experiences for advocacy and structural change. In this regard, our diagnostic allows researchers, policy-makers, and activists to identify areas to advance EJ from a policy perspective.

Author contributions

L.M.B. conceptualized the idea, developed the framework and methodology, and performed the analysis. L.M.B., S.H.S., and A.D.R. provided interpretation of results and discussion, writing, and editing of manuscript. V.M. contributed to data collection and analysis. A.K.S. provided research assistance.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was financially supported by the Josef Korbel School of International Studies and the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of (In)Equality (IRISE) at the University of Denver, and by the Household Water Insecurity Experiences - Research Coordination Network (NSF BCS-1759972).

Notes

1 For examples in the United States, see the Environmental Protection Authority’s (EPA) EJScreen, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), and the CDC/ATSDR’s Environmental Justice Index.

2 The term Pueblos refers to Indigenous peoples and groups native to the southwestern United States (Merriam-Webster, n.d.).

3 n = 97 includes articles screened for full assessment, and articles identified in the complementary literature review.

Appendices

Appendix A: Included articles (n = 21).

Table

Title	Author(s)	Journal
Colorado River Basin Development and Its Potential Impact on Tribal Life	Hackenberg (1976)	Human Organization
Indian Water Rights in Theory and Practice – Navajo Experience in Colorado River Basin	Price and Weatherford (1976)	Law and Contemporary Problems
Innovations in Water Management New Responses to Municipal Demands in the Lower Colorado River Basin, USA	Muys (2000)	Water International
Consensus Versus Conservation in the Upper Colorado River Basin Recovery Implementation Program	Brower et al. (2001)	Conservation Biology
Equity in Policy: Failure and Opportunity	Vaux (2010)	Natural Resources Journal
Implementing the Human Right to Water in the Colorado River Basin	Shepherd (2011)	Willamette Law Review
Challenge and Response in the Colorado River Basin	Robison et al. (2014)	Water Policy
Utilizing Sustainability Criteria to Evaluate River Basin Decision-Making: The Case of the Colorado River Basin	Berggren (2018)	Regional Environmental Change
Agua Caliente: A Case Study and Toolkit for Securing Tribal Rights to Clean Groundwater	Bass (2018)	Ecology Law Quarterly
Colorado River Lessons for International Water Law	Larson (2018)	Jurimetrics
Indigenous Water Justice	Robison et al. (2018)	Lewis and Clark Law Review
Incorporating Social-Ecological Considerations into Basin-Wide Responses to Climate Change in the Colorado River Basin	Bair et al. (2019)	Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
Designing Collaborative Governance: Insights From the Drought Contingency Planning Process for the Lower Colorado River Basin	Sullivan et al. (2019)	Environmental Science and Policy
A Confluence of Anticolonial Pathways for Indigenous Sacred Site Protection	Ellis and Perry (2020)	Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education
Collaborative Governance and Stakeholder Participation in the Colorado River Basin: An Examination of Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion	Karambelkar and Gerlak (2020)	Natural Resources Journal
Cross-Coalition Coordination in Collaborative Environmental Governance Processes	Koebele (2020)	Policy Studies Journal
Agricultural Water Governance in the Desert: Shifting Risks in Central Arizona	York et al. (2020)	Water Alternatives
Knowledge Governance and Learning: Examining Challenges and Opportunities in the Colorado River Basin	Gerlak et al. (2021)	Environmental Science and Policy
Can Philanthropy Enable Collective Action to Conserve Rivers? Insights from a Decade of Collaboration in the Colorado River Basin	Gilson and Garrick (2021)	Conservation and Society
Evolving Together: Transboundary Water Governance in the Colorado River Basin	Rivera-Torres and Gerlak (2021)	International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law, and Economics
The Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan: An Opportunity for Exploring Demand Management Through Integrated and Collaborative Water Planning	Spivak (2021)	Natural Resources Journal

Appendix B : The distribution of EJ articles in the Colorado River Basin included in systematic scoping review by publication year(n=21).