ABSTRACT
The focus on ‘community’ as the unit of impact and recent efforts to improve community involvement in many environmental policies calls for an understanding of community features that frame and are affected by environmental risk decisions. This is especially important when differences in how environmental regulators, industrial entities and community members frame risks result in significant conflicts that delay necessary mitigation actions. The theoretical approaches suggest a community’s external networks play an important role in determining how much control a community has in local decisions. Sociological theory offers some insights about what community attributes may frame and be affected by environmental risk decision-making processes. Identifying community attributes, like shared history, that remain salient across contexts will provide particularly useful guidelines about what social features frame community-level decision-making processes in a universal way. Community theorists propose that symbols and physical structures help produce and reproduce community social boundaries and the identities associated with them.
