Eleven Questions to Consider When Beginning a Water Management Project
Developing Equitable Stakeholder Engagement
Developing and engaging with an inclusive stakeholder group increases project benefits, supports long term implementation, and improves equity in water management. However, effectively engaging with stakeholders requires thoughtful commitment. Analyzing the current conditions and engagement processes through these questions can help develop an active and inclusive stakeholder group.
Evaluating the Current Conditions
Engagement needs to be sensitive to the current social and environmental conditions, as well as the history of water and environmental management in the area. This can help to find areas with the greatest need of water management investments and therefore highest potential benefits.
1. What is the history of similar organizations interactions with the community this project will impact?
Environmental challenges and inequities are long term problems. As a result, the context of the historical interactions of stakeholders is important to consider. Communities may be distrustful of engagement depending on past stakeholder interactions. Past action or inaction from stakeholders could have created community trauma(2). Understanding this historical context should shape both how engagement is designed and performed. For example, if local advocates have brought environmental concerns to government attention and not gotten assistance, new efforts could be treated dubiously. Even without the existence of community trauma,there could be other tensions such as historical failures in monitoring.
2. What is the existing resilience of the area?
Resilience can be assessed through the social vulnerability of an area. Social vulnerability is the ability of a community to respond to external disruption such as increases in the cost of living, natural or human caused disasters, or other serious alterations in essential activities. Areas or groups of higher social vulnerability will be more sensitive to changes in water policy. For example, lower income communities are more sensitive to small changes in the cost of water services. Conversely, people with health issues could benefit the most from improvements to the local environment. Regardless, understanding the social vulnerability of the people affected is important when designing the project. The CDC has created a tool that maps social vulnerability in census tracts in the United States ( https://svi.cdc.gov/ ). Additionally, the EPA has created an environmental justice metric incorporating both social vulnerability and nationally available environmental data ( https://www.epa.gov/ejscreen ). These tools can help identify locations in particular need of engagement.
3. Does the project address unequal pollution burdens?
Water pollution burdens do not fall evenly across social groups. Vulnerable communities across the country have had disproportionate impacts from industrial pollution, nuclear testing, and lead contamination(2). There is extensive environmental justice literature on these disproportionate pollution burdens. However, many of these areas have not received full remediation due to high cost and political barriers. Could the water management project assist with these historical or current water pollution issues?
4. What are the unique challenges and interests specific to the community?
Even if a similar project was conducted in a similar area, it’s important not to generalize the concerns of the host community. The US Forest Service conducted a series of focus groups in different cities across the country focusing on including minorities in urban forestry. One important finding of their work was similar communities on paper often had very different concerns and potential benefits, from lack of open space to potential loss of historic resource use(3). Throughout the engagement process, be careful to see the issues specific to the area.
Engagement Processes
Once the initial conditions have been established, engagement processes should be developed so all potential beneficiaries have feedback opportunities.
5. Are we engaging with all of the relevant stakeholders?
Traditional community participation efforts can miss key interest groups. This is reflected by the lack of diversity for environmental commentary opportunities, often comprising of the same group of individuals participating repeatedly(3). However, lack of participation does not imply lack of interest (3,4). Under represented groups have cultural, financial, linguistic, and logistical barriers impeding participation. Consider how the engagement could strategically include and engage with underrepresented stakeholders.
6. Are there sufficient resources allocated for effective stakeholder engagement?
Stakeholder engagement is a crucial component to achieve long term environmental goals. Robust community participation ensures environmental investments will be protected after organizational involvement ends. Specifically, having key community members support the project ensures the community will protect the project’s long term goals(4). However, developing holistic engagement requires financial and time commitments. Budgeting time and resources for engagement from the beginning of the project ensures stakeholder engagement is a central goal(5).
7. Are we engaging people in a way reasonable for them?
Considering the logistical and cultural barriers preventing engagement can help identify ways to improve attendance for hard to reach stakeholders. For example, having outreach only during business hours could prevent employed people and unemployed people without childcare from attending. Additionally, scheduling meetings in unfamiliar community locations could put up cultural barriers. Reaching out to existing organizations on the best time to reach the communities and holding meetings in familiar buildings such as local churches or libraries could improve attendance. Providing services such as childcare, language translation, and transportation can lower additional barriers (3,4).
Considering the Equity Lens
Water management yields multiple benefits, but the equity of these benefits depends on allocation. Many benefits will improve equity, but equity is not itself a benefit. Instead, equity is a lens all steps and benefits should be evaluated through. Equity can be considered to be the just distribution of benefits and trade-offs among stakeholders. In actualizing a project, it’s important to consistently consider equity implications. These questions cover some foundational components of equity, but should be supplemented by robust community engagement.
8. Does the benefit analysis erase costs to specific communities?
Environmental benefits are often calculated on a large scale, leading to aggregated cost benefit trade offs. For example, while cap-and-trade systems improve air quality in general, air quality in some areas could be degraded without correcting for inequity. In this example, aggregating air quality benefits could erase local air quality costs without disaggregating data. Consider the distribution of these costs and benefits in as fine a scale as possible.
9. What are the historical and spatial resource allocations?
Understanding how past environmental projects have allocated resources is important for evaluating if current project allocations are equitable. Seemingly minor local costs could be magnified by past burdens. Especially if past environmental cost benefit analysis has only been measured in aggregate, examining historical allocations through disaggregation can determine if a group is consistently receiving costs or benefits.The same group should not have to continuously bear the direct costs of indirect benefits. Performing this analysis spatially can help examine who is affected outside of the direct project area. 6 Does the water management project solve a problem locally but exacerbate one somewhere else?
10. How does the project affect displacement?
Displacement of vulnerable communities can be a consequence of environmental improvements(1,7). If the proposed change will affect current housing, cost of living or the character of the neighborhood, displacement of vulnerable people could occur. Making the project conform with current populations and increase the community’s self determination can mitigate these impacts (7,8).
11. How could water affordability be affected?
Water prices have increased substantially in the United States, creating a crisis of affordability. 9 This crisis is disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities. For example, in Boston, racial minorities were found to have significantly higher water shut offs rates(10). Race had a stronger correlation with water service disruptions than income. Considering affordability during the development of water investments can ease cost burdens through reducing overall water costs or creating a consumer assistance program for low income households.
References
- Lopez, P., Schwartz, R., Schildt, C. & DeFalco, T. Understanding Gentrification and Displacement: The Path to Equitable Development. (2019).
- Falkenburger, E., Arena, O. & Wolin, J. Trauma-Informed Community Building and Engagement . 1–18 https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/98296/trauma-informed_community_building_a nd_engagement.pdf (2018).
- McDonough, M., Russell, K., Burban, L. & Nancarrow, L. Dialogue on Diversity Broadening the voices in urban and community forestry. 1–115 (2006).
- Newman, A. Inclusive Urban Ecological Restoration in Toronto, Canada. in Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration (eds. Egan, D., Hjerpe, E. E. & Abrams, J.) 63–75 (Island Press/Center for Resource Economics, 2011). doi:10.5822/978-1-61091-039-2_5.
- Polonsky, H., Cohen-Cline, H. & Wolf, K. Green Infrastructure & Health Guide . (2018).
- Urban Physical Environments and Health Inequalities: A Scoping Review of Interventions . 1–89 (2012).
- Wolch, J. R., Byrne, J. & Newell, J. P. Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities ‘just green enough’. Landsc. Urban Plan. 125, 234–244 (2014).
- Curran, W. & Hamilton, T. Just green enough: contesting environmental gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Local Environ. 21, 1–2 (2012).
- Jones, P. A. & Moulton, A. THE INVISIBLE CRISIS: 1–64 (2016).
- Foltz-Diaz, K., Kelleher-Calnan, P. & Moodliar, S. The Color of Water: A Report on the Human Right to Water in the City of Boston . (2014).
Madeline E. Gorchels
Master of Environmental Science & Management
My research interests include water resource management, environmental equity and data science.