Participatory Budgeting for Environmental Justice

Corrective measures and remediation efforts aimed at alleviating the conditions of environmental injustice usually depend on federal or state funding. However, such resources could disappear, leaving marginalized communities without the necessary means to mitigate environmental harm. Participatory Budgeting (PB), a process that allows residents to work with municipal governments to decide on community projects, holds promise as a surrogate source of funding. When examining the character of such an enterprise, however, one finds that it does not exactly fit within established paradigms of environmental justice. To account for this condition, one must examine how PB restructures the power dynamics that determine cleanup protocols. The paper ends by highlighting some avenues that municipalities can pursue to incorporate this process into existing budgeting strategies.