Poisoning the well: How procedural injustice amplifies opposition to environmental policy in rural America.

Environmental politics research increasingly considers how to build support for environmental policy among segments of the public that have historically opposed it. Missing from this growing literature is a robust discussion of procedural concerns, or how perceived inequalities in the processes used to craft and administer environmental policies can undermine support for them despite careful messaging strategies and/or policy designs. We bridge research on environmental justice, collaborative natural resource management, and rural politics to specifically articulate how procedural injustice deepens rural resentment and, consequently, amplifies rural communities’ resistance to environmental policy. We provide evidence of these dynamics using survey data of over 10,000 rural Americans. Our analyses show that rural Americans who perceive environmental policymaking as unjust are more likely to express high levels of rural resentment and, in turn, are more likely to oppose proposals to strengthen environmental protection.