Subject Area
Civil Engineering, Engineering, General/Other, Public Policy, Sustainability and Development, Urban Planning
Abstract
Infrastructure development has historically exacerbated social inequalities across race, gender, and class, from highway construction displacing communities to unequal transit provision and utility access. While recent federal initiatives like Justice40 and the Reconnecting Communities Program sought to address these harms, critical gaps remain in empirically understanding infrastructure impacts and effectively operationalizing environmental justice (EJ) in practice. This dissertation advances justice-oriented infrastructure development through developing and operationalizing a comprehensive mixed-methods causal impact assessment framework. This research makes five primary contributions. First, through interviews with nineteen state Department of Transportation EJ practitioners across fourteen states, this dissertation examines practitioner experiences in operationalizing federal EJ policy to state-level practice, revealing challenges in data availability, determining disproportionate impacts, and the emergence of collaborative working groups as promising practice. Second, a theoretical review of epistemic, restorative, and reparative justice dimensions provides consistent grounding for their application in infrastructure contexts, integrating these with traditional distributive, recognitional, and procedural justice dimensions into a comprehensive Infrastructure (in)Justice (IJ) Framework with a 6+1D (in)justice typology. Third, a doubly robust quasi-experimental difference-in-differences analysis of property value effects relative to the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in West Dallas, Texas advances causal quantitative (in)justice evaluation through a critical analysis of traditional causal evaluation approaches using the IJ Framework. Fourth, the IJ Framework is operationalized as a causal qualitative tool through a case study of Reconnect South Park’s SR-99 highway project in Seattle, Washington, demonstrating how the framework supports conceptualization of complex social processes across multiple dimensions and scales, maps strategy interdependencies, and enhances project accountability by linking past harms and proposed strategies through causal graphs. Finally, the dissertation develops practitioner guidance for integrating justiceoriented causal mixed-methods to advance traditional infrastructure (in)justice evaluation across the project life cycle. This research responds to urgent calls for evidence-based, causal approaches to transportation equity while providing practitioners with flexible, comprehensive tools for justiceoriented infrastructure development. As political support for EJ fluctuates, this work strengthens theoretical and methodological foundations for advancing infrastructure justice regardless of federal backing.
Degree Date
Spring 5-16-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Advisor
Janille Smith-Colin
Second Advisor
Barbara Minsker
Third Advisor
Kathleen Smits
Fourth Advisor
Meredith Richards
Fifth Advisor
Akihito Kamata
Number of Pages
212
Format
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Yarbrough, Collin R., "Infrastructure Justice: toward mixed methods causal inference in justice-oriented transportation infrastructure development and impact assessment" (2026). Civil and Environmental Engineering Theses and Dissertations. 41.
https://scholar.smu.edu/engineering_civil_etds/41
Included in
Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Civil Engineering Commons, Environmental Policy Commons, Public Policy Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social Justice Commons, Social Statistics Commons, Transportation Commons, Transportation Engineering Commons, Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons, Urban Studies Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons
