People need to know! Notification and the regulation of pesticide use near public schools in California

Abstract

This article takes up a recent proposal by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation to regulate pesticide use near public schools with the goal of examining notifications and the public debate over their use. Entailing an exchange of information between growers and schools, notifications provide schools with information about pesticide applications taking place nearby. While the procedural aspects are coherent, the regulatory purpose behind notification and its subsequent effects are considerably less so. I draw on literature related to pesticide drift and the politics of scale in order to discuss the strategic differences between notifications and their better known regulatory counterpart, buffer zones, and to highlight the significance of these differences for public debate over the problem of pesticide drift, and how best to regulate it. I argue that Department of Pesticide Regulation’s proposal presents conflicting imperatives that obfuscate the scale of pesticide drift risk and correspond to disparate sets of actors and prescribed actions. This central contradiction has put stakeholders in the position of being unsure about what notifications can do, and has led them to invoke disparate justifications for and against the proposed requirements. I argue, however, that the on-the-ground effects of notifications are the same, regardless of discursive framing. Intended to function as a protective measure, notifications instead shift the burden of protection on to individual school staff and parents through a neoliberal process of responsibilization. Literature on governmentality and health risk management animates the ways that information dissemination can work as responsibilizing policy. This effect is especially problematic considering the limitations faced by Latinx farmworker communities. As this case shows, the lack of choice in a governmental structure that ostensibly provides more freedom to take action when pesticide drift is imminent is a constraint on poor, minority communities, even while it is considered an increased freedom by others.