Obscurity and Opportunity in the Local Regulatory Landscape of Los Angeles' Petroleum Refineries
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In the context of Los Angeles-area petroleum refineries, many regulatory inefficacies—and the difficulty of discerning them—can be traced to the convoluted network of municipalities and local jurisdictions that oversee refineries’ interactions with land, air, and water in this region. This thesis, designed and executed in collaboration with Asian Pacific Environmental Network organizers, surveys and analyzes the networks of local regulation that surround the Los Angeles refineries to understand how local controls may be used to reduce harms done by these industrial sites. Building on public administration and regulatory network scholarship, the study seeks to address established shortcomings in local regulatory efficacy by laying out the policy landscape that governs this regulation. This process included combing municipal and county codes relevant to a set of three case-study refineries to collect local legislation pertinent to petroleum refinery management. The collection was then organized into a database for collaborative policy and schematic analysis. Key findings include a lack of clarity and cooperation on the part of local regulators, highly variable architectures of oversight between individual refineries across municipalities, and a swath of underutilized and undeveloped local policies to be mobilized for environmental justice advocacy.
Source: Stanford Digital Repository
DOI: 10.25740/dy620st8826
Authors: Shing, Pearl H., Sivas, Deborah, Montague, Dena, So, Seng
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6927233821
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