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Abstract

The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as the “just treatment and meaningful involvement” of all people in the decisionmaking that affects the environment and human health. Since the origins of the modern American environmental justice movement in the 1980s, activists have emphasized the importance of self-determination. Environmental justice requires that decision making processes center the voices of the individuals impacted by decisions made about the distributions of environmental assets and harms. There is a significant challenge, however, in designing community engagement practices that meaningfully involve community members. Since the 1990s, community benefits agreements have been heralded as an effective tool of community and grassroots control over development projects. In 2016, Detroit became the first city in the country to adopt an ordinance mandating the use of community benefits agreements in qualifying developments.

This Note endeavors to analyze Detroit’s community benefits ordinance as a tool for achieving environmental justice by examining where the ordinance succeeds in empowering community control over environmental decision making and falls short of this potential. Examining Detroit’s community benefits ordinance in the context of the larger environmental justice movement provides a rich opportunity to consider what communities stand to gain, and lose, when public participation is funneled through formalized legal processes, and what avenues environmental justice activists can explore to ensure that community members are meaningfully involved in decisions that intimately impact them.

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