Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Over the past three decades, mounting evidence has suggested that people of color and low-income communities in the U.S. are more likely to live closely to the sources of a variety of ecological risks (e.g., ambient air pollution, waste water, noxious materials), to be subject to higher levels of actual harms and poor environmental quality, and to have adverse health outcomes resulting from cumulative exposure to toxics. Equally important, a growing amount of studies have shown that these two segments of social groups are also less likely to receive government’s compliance inspections and punitive actions in the post-siting period, particularly pointing to the lax regulatory enforcements by state governments.

However, there is relatively scarce research focusing on the policy implementation practices of EPA regional offices. Given the significant institutional authorities wielded by EPA regional offices in U.S. environmental federalism and their heightened responsibilities in carrying out national environmental justice agenda, without evaluating the compliance monitoring and assurance activities of EPA regional offices, we cannot grasp a comprehensive understanding of the federal government’s environmental justice performance. This study contributes to public administration and environmental policy literature by assessing the multilevel organizational, political, economic, and demographic determinants of EPA regional offices’ policy implementation practices. Particularly important are organizational capacities of EPA regional offices and communities’ environmental justice vulnerability screened through federal information management system, which are two types of factors that have rarely been explored in the current research on policy implementation and environmental justice.

With census block group (nation-wide) as the unit of analysis, this study empirically examines EPA regions’ implementation variations across the communities in their jurisdictions from 2008 through 2012 under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. The dependent variables are regional offices’ compliance monitoring and assurance activities (measured by the aggregated number of inspections and administrative enforcement actions). The environmental information of the regulated facilities is compiled from EPA’s Integrated Data for Enforcement Analysis and Facility Registry System. The independent variables include three sets of multilevel factors. The first set is EPA regional offices’ organizational attributes: the number of EPA institutional establishments as well as the number of EPA workforce in states. The information is collected from EPA and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. States’ political environments are the second set of factors, including minority state legislators, the Democratic strength of state legislature, gubernatorial partisanship, citizen ideology, and government’s environmental spending. The third set of factors is community demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, including neighborhoods’ environmental justice vulnerability, minority populations, median household income, residents living below poverty level, household linguistic isolation, higher education attainment, unemployment rate, the universe of regulated facilities, manufacturing labor employment, criteria pollutant standard nonattainment area, population, and population density. The data are drawn from EPA’s EJSCREEN and the 2008-2012 American Community Survey. Zero-inflated or regular negative binomial regression models are employed to estimate the effects of explanatory variables on the count outcome variables.