Collaborating for Climate Equity

Researcher–Practitioner Partnerships in the Americas

Vivek Shandas,Dana Hellman

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000631982
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: City Planning & Urban Development

This book explores the capacity of different stakeholders to work together and build urban resilience to climate change through an equity-centered approach to cross-sectoral collaboration.

Urban areas, where the majority of the global population dwells, are particularly vulnerable to a myriad of climate stressors, the effects of which are acutely present in places and to communities that have been largely excluded from decision-making processes. Our need for working and learning together is at a critical threshold, yet at present, the process for and understanding of inter-sectoral collaborations remains a theoretical ideal and falls short of the broad appeal that many have claimed. Collaborating for Climate Equity argues that researcher–practitioner partnerships offer a promising pathway toward ensuring equitable outcomes while building climate resilience. By presenting five case studies from the United States, Chile, and Mexico, each chapter explores the contours of developing robust researcher–practitioner collaborations that endure and span institutional boundaries. The case studies included in the book are augmented by a synthesis that reflects upon the key findings and offers generalizable principles for applying similar approaches to other cities across the globe.

This work contributes to a nascent knowledge base on the real-world challenges and opportunities associated with researcher–practitioner partnerships. It provides guidance to academics and practitioners involved in collaborative research, planning, and policymaking.

1 An introduction to researcher–practitioner partnerships for climate equity

Dana Hellman & Vivek Shandas

DOI: 10.4324/9781003208723-1

Current challenges

Climate change is widely considered as one of the greatest challenges to human survivorship, especially among those who have less access to and control over resources and support. Effects of a warming planet on our social fabric, economic prosperity, ecological stability, and the public’s health have been areas of intensive study for decades. The extant literature largely points to several climate-induced modifiers and mechanisms that affect the lives and livelihoods of urban populations, including altered temperatures, extremes of precipitation (floods and droughts), air pollution, and infectious diseases. Extreme events, such as hurricanes, flooding, droughts, wildfires, and heat waves, are immediate and local ways that people experience climate change, and urban areas are particularly vulnerable to such events, given their location, concentration of people, and increasingly complex and interdependent infrastructures. The mounting fatalities and costs associated with extreme events are not just an indication of failures in built infrastructure, but highlight the inadequacy of institutions, resources, and information systems to prepare for and respond to extremes.

In urban areas, municipal managers, county and city councils, public agencies, and community members increasingly recognize that extant structures and past practices no longer keep urban residents out of harm’s way. The 2021 ‘heat dome’ in the Pacific Northwest was akin to a previous event of almost identical magnitude and duration that struck Chicago 26 years earlier, and yet, the fatalities and infrastructure failures point to the fact that little was learned from earlier events. Other events such as hurricanes and flooding also occur repeatedly in cities around the world, and similar patterns of adaptation inaction underscore the lack of commitment to a coordinated and informed response. With many of the most populous and fast-growing cities worldwide located along coasts, urban climate managers are rapidly exploring solutions to prevent costly and life-threatening impacts of sea level rise that are increasingly evident around the world. Yet others are located in water-scarce regions, such as the North American West, which are subject to extreme drought and heat events (Karl et al., 2009; IPCC, 2012, 2014). Compounding these vulnerabilities is the growth of the world’s urban population, which the United Nations Population Program expects to double in the next generation.

The impacts of climate change are not born equally across urban populations. While urban heat is the most life threatening, floods and sea level rise arguably pose the greatest threat to built infrastructure. Evidence from around the world suggests that those who are below the poverty level, communities of color, immigrant communities, isolated, older adults, and others who have been historically marginalized are most at risk to extreme heat and consistent flooding (Reid et al., 2012; Watts et al., 2018; Voelkel et al., 2018; Chang et al., 2021). The consequences of exposure to these events are worsening, and recent studies suggest that by 2070, upward of three billion people will no longer be able to live in areas where humans have resided for the past 6,000 years (Xu et al., 2020). Even today, as much higher resolution descriptions of extreme events emerge, we observe that marginalized communities have greater exposure and, in terms of finding refuge from urban heat, are also four times as likely to be far from public health agency-sponsored cooling resources or have personal air conditioning systems (Voelkel et al., 2018). Existing studies help to define the concept of climate equity by situating race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status as key factors that disproportionately expose some urban residents to the discriminating effects of extreme events. The lack of adequate resources within these populations to mitigate or adapt to the adverse effects of a changing climate further exemplifies the importance of supporting actions that are centered in historic injustices.

Climate models and historical weather data suggest that urban communities will continue to witness increasing frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme heat in the coming decades (NOAA, 2018).

On the basis of a preponderance of evidence, practitioners face critical decisions about what strategies will be most effective for reducing exposure to and impacts from extreme climate-induced events. Arguably, those in the public sector are also responsible for safe-guarding those most vulnerable to the inequitable impacts of climate change. As costs mount, revenues waver, and calls for climate action become increasingly urgent, the need to meet competing demands can seem insurmountable for municipal managers. When evaluating expenditures on climate change versus other municipal program expenditures (e.g., public housing, schools, transit) some studies indicate woefully inadequate support for the extent of adaptation actions needed (Bachner et al., 2019). At the same time, other studies indicate that the longer municipal actions are postponed the greater the overall cost born to society. An alternative that we explore in this book is the ability for ‘multi-solving’ climate issues with other municipal challenges by coordinating across multiple agencies, engaging researchers, and finding opportunities to integrate climate actions into diverse and agenda-driven agency policies.

Through a series of case studies that span the Western hemisphere, this book explores the hypothesis that a coordinated response for immediate climate action requires the coming together of municipal managers and climate researchers. By integrating the emerging science about the distributional effects of climate change along with municipal policy levers for enabling actions, cities and regions can co-produce response plans that aim to ground action in science and center those communities that have the lowest amount of coping capacity. We specifically ask two questions: (1) What lessons can we find about the collaborative process from these case studies, and what findings apply specifically to climate collaborations? (2) How can integrative climate-relevant research conceivably enhance outcomes on the ground when merged with practitioner action?

The collaborative approach

The purpose of this book is not to dive deeply into the theory of collaboration, nor to extoll its perceived virtues. A robust body of literature on collaborative work – from business management to grassroots social action to public health and environmental justice – exists elsewhere, and we are writing this text from the now-common standpoint that collaboration is a promising avenue toward climate equity and resilience. However, for conceptual setup, this section includes key background details on collaborative processes generally, as well as their promise for the field of climate adaptation and resilience. Our subsequent case studies go beyond theory and potential to what we refer to as lived collaboration; that is, the practical manifestation of the foundational concepts discussed in this section. The contents of this book emphasize a particular variety of collaboration, which we argue is worthy of further study: that between climate researchers and practitioners.

An overview of collaboration

Existing literature on collaboration encompasses multiple varieties, including collaboration across sectors, with local communities, between governments, or between researchers and practitioners (AL-Tabbaa et al., 2014; Black et al., 2003; Nyden & Wiewel, 1992; Pavlish & Pharris, 2012; Wagner, 1997). In most cases, the underlying justification for collaboration is that siloed approaches to complex topics do not produce favorable, creative, or effective results (Coaffee & Clarke, 2015). Two (or three or four or ten) heads are better than one, so to speak, as collaborators from different backgrounds can provide unique insights and resources, while also representing potentially marginal experiences. This latter point is particularly meaningful in community-based collaborative research, wherein researchers provide community members a voice and a role in research projects that include or affect them (Harrington et al., 2019). In terms of researcher–practitioner collaboration, the end goal is typically articulated in terms of closing a gap between the two sides; reconciling functionally distinct but potentially compatible perspectives on everything from mathematics education and computer science to healthcare and social work (Bartunek, 2007; Belli, 2010).

Numerous case studies and theoretical investigations over recent decades have yielded a series of best practices and trends around collaborative partnerships. These seem to hold regardless of the industries, subjects, participants, or issues at hand. For example, collaborations work best when trust building is prioritized, allowing for the requisite time and patience; when partners have at least some shared values or goals, even if they differ on how to achieve them and when two-way communication is open and consistent (Ingold & Fischer, 2014; Pertuze et al., 2010; Tschannen-Moran, 2001). We can expect that most, if not all, of these findings will also hold within climate-specific collaborations. Indeed, with calls for urgent climate action, uncertainty around potential impacts and/or risk distributions, and a long history of disinvestment in specific urban neighborhoods, collaborative approaches will be instrumental in integrating resilience rhetoric with the lived experiences of humans facing a warming planet.

Collaborating for climate equity

An emerging body of evidence suggests that climate-induced events are discriminating and take a disproportionately heavy toll on historically marginalized communities and neighborhoods. As we encounter ever-increasing scale, intensity, and frequency of climate-induced events, we recognize that our public policies and institutional norms are failing us by exacerbating exposure to those who have limited access to coping resources. While the fields of environmental justice and social equity point to a long history of disproportionate exposure to environmental insults for Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color (BIPOC), the field of climate justice has become an increasingly important aspect of the emerging literature on collaborations, due in part to the explicit and necessary integration of biophysical and social sciences. A common feature of recent collaborative climate partnerships is the ability to advance aspects of climate resilience with and center those who may not be able to cope with the climate crisis. Whether at the global scale with the recognition about the imbalance of who is emitting the greatest amount of greenhouse gases and those hit hardest by a changing climate, or at the neighborhood scale in terms of who is experiencing the most acute impacts, the need to integrate climate equity is one of the grand challenges facing our society.

Building resilience

Building climate collaborations that focus on equity is a relatively recent phenomenon, as is the creation of researcher–practitioner collaborations for climate resilience (Campos et al., 2016; Colven & Thomson, 2018; Dey et al., 2020; Lynn, 2000; Preston et al., 2015; Wine et al., 2017). In recent years, several publications on specifically urban climate mitigation or adaptation have stated the appeal of a collaborative approach (Caughman, 2020; Hahn et al., 2020; Kern & Alber, 2009; Nagel et al., 2019). The popularity of this approach reflects what we have previously established: climate change is a challenging issue, which cannot be solved by a singular actor, discipline, or institution. Climate action not only needs sound scientific data (both environmental and social) but also depends on the implementation power of practitioners who make plans and manage programs. It is expensive and interdisciplinary, necessitating a pool of resources and expertise. Furthermore, climate equity and environmental justice require that climate researchers and practitioners alike engage with vulnerable and frontline communities and do so with recognition that some of these communities endure intergenerational trauma as a result of past research and planning practices. While researcher–practitioner collaboration is not a guarantee of community- or equity-based research, it does set the stage for such an approach. Our case studies reflect that practitioners can serve as the link between interested researchers and climate-affected populations, and some degree of community engagement regularly accompanies this kind of collaborative work. It is clear why collaboration is held up as an ideal, frequently prescribed in literature and practice and supported by theory. What remains unclear is the extent to which climate collaborations can be practically successful and why.

Notes on collaboration for this book

For the purposes of this book, we define both researchers and practitioners as encompassing a broad range of possible professional roles. Researchers are those involved in the assessment, evaluation, and characterization of climate-induced phenomena that are particular to an urban region. Many of our contributing researcher co-authors work as professors, conduct university-sponsored research projects, and are also affiliated with research laboratories within their institutions. Although the majority of researchers featured in this book are affiliated with universities, collaborators fitting this description may span other sectors. The same holds true for practitioners, who do not necessarily hail only from public agencies though again, many of those in this volume are affiliated with municipalities. The practitioner classification encompasses any individual and/or organization actively engaging in policies, plans, and/or programs directly related to local climate action. Some practitioners may have regulatory involvement, while others (e.g., non-profits, informal networks) may be directly engaging with community members and may not be providing regulatory oversight.

As noted, this book is not about promoting researcher–practitioner collaboration as a strategy for climate adaptation and resilience building; it is already widely accepted as such. Instead, we hope to bring attention to the fact that little is known – or at least, little has been written – about the dynamics of lived collaboration in the context of climate change. Unlike more straightforward targets of collaboration (e.g., business management), climate change is an immensely complex issue, touching multiple aspects...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 An introduction to researcher–practitioner partnerships for climate equity
• 2 Designing urban greenspace from the grassroots up: The ‘barrio innovation’ approach
• 3 Envisioning future scenarios to manage pluvial flooding in social-ecological-technological systems
• 4 Co-evolution of resilience initiatives toward a resilience collaboration
• 5 Operational guidelines for the identification of green infrastructure in a semiarid city
• 6 Community science for the (climate) win: An equity-based framework for understanding and acting on extreme urban heat
• 7 Conclusion: Common themes, lessons learned, and next steps