ABSTRACT
It took a special kind of neoliberalism to make room for the concerns of the
US grassroots environmental justice movement. Concerns that non-white and poor communities bore a disproportionate share of the nation’s envir-
onmental hazards found a receptive ear in the Clinton administration,
which in the 1990s replaced the aggressive neoliberalization of the Reagan
era with what might be called a ‘‘kindlier, gentler’’ neoliberal project.
Although Clinton’s famous Executive Order No. 12898 (‘‘Federal Actions to
Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income
Populations’’) is by no means a statement of neoliberal doctrine (Clinton
1994), it nonetheless lays the groundwork for an approach to addressing environmental justice which was compatible with what Peck and Tickell
(2002) have called ‘‘roll-out’’ neoliberalism.
