Environmental justice is a major issue today and of interest to citizens, administrators, and sholars of public administration. In this introduction, we review the emergence of environmental justice movement and discuss the development of the field by presenting an overview of the literature and existent research on environmental justice. This research has focused to a large extent on siting issues and on the causes and explanations of environmental equity. In particular, five causes or explanations of environmental injustice fave been emphasized the literature: a) race; b) economic and market factors; c) political and administrative issues; d) attitudinal issues; and e) post- materialism. We review the major pieces of research and evidence in these areas and compare and contrast the explanations of environmental injustice. For the most part we find that there is considerable controversy over the differente explanations and causes of environmental injustice. In the third section of the paper, we high‡igt some of the issues that have not been explored so far and the unfulfilled gaps, in academic research of environmental justice issues. We conclude by presenting a brief synopsis of the article in the symposium

Volume 25

Numbers 2-3