Much has been written about how government agencies struggle with community engagement in climate resilience planning. For example, a 2024 study by the Resilient Coastal Communities Project (RCCP) described the enormous frustration felt by communities involved in planning exercises that fail to meaningfully address, let alone prioritize, local needs and experience.
RCCP, a partnership between the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at the Columbia Climate School and the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, published these findings in a 2024 Geoforum article, to give voice to community perspectives on why planners get community engagement wrong. The article also shared 10 community-based ideas for more effective, collaborative planning practice.
More recently, RCCP decided to look for examples of truly fair and accountable resilience planning featuring consistent and authentic collaboration between stakeholders, strategies for action founded on local wisdom and priorities, and sustained funding for community involvement. RCCP then interviewed 22 community leaders, public officials, nonprofit staffers and academic researchers, ultimately identifying 32 relevant case studies, which are analyzed in a new white paper, Fair and Accountable Adaptation Planning: Five Key Roles for Co-Governance.
Here are three key findings from the paper:
- Shifting from top-down, transactional practice to a “relational” approach that values people and long-term trust-building is essential to reliable, community-centered resilience planning.
- The government agencies, academic researchers, nonprofits and consultants RCCP interviewed supported frontline communities by pushing at the edges of their scopes to deliver the resources local leaders needed to take their rightful places at the planning table, engaging those leaders in meaningful dialogue, and being accountable for ensuring that community goals were centered in planning and research outcomes.
- The shift to relational planning requires stakeholders to stretch beyond customary modes of participation by acting as facilitators, educators, challengers, mediators and mentors in a concerted effort to disrupt traditional processes and center community-level concerns and priorities (see Figure 1, below).
Examples of exceptions to top-down planning identified by RCCP include the Gullah/Geechee Nation’s work to bridge cultural differences in communication between its members and policymakers, scientists and academics, which helped to establish a two-way understanding of community needs and climate risks in coastal South Carolina and Georgia leading to the establishment of resilience plans better attuned to community priorities. However, this and the other 31 examples of fair and accountable resilience planning RCCP analyzed remain rare exceptions to the general rule of top-down planning practice. Far too few community-based organizations have either the resources or the commitment from planners and allies needed for them to meaningfully share leadership in planning and achieve results like those described by RCCP’s interviewees.
Put simply: We all need to recognize and support the facilitators, educators, challengers, mediators and mentors in our midst. Several RCCP interviewees remarked that they hope to more routinely assemble the five identified role-players in their future planning engagements, yet these role-players are all too rarely recognized, funded or supported by other stakeholders. Acknowledging the importance of folks who step up to these roles improves resilience planning, and so researchers, consultants, nonprofits and planners should take every opportunity to step up themselves, by changing funding structures and research protocols, being more accountable to community partners, and going the extra mile to foster lasting and meaningful dialogue. Specific ideas for doing so, derived from RCCP’s fair and accountable spaces research, include:
Planning agencies: Include more funding and higher standards for engaging community role-players in your work planning, training programs, promotional practices and individual project design.
Funders: Understand that the resilience projects you fund can only succeed with effective community participation, and provide the right resources to make it happen. Create project evaluation metrics and fund studies that foster positive outcomes related to these roles.
Universities: Recognize and fund the labor that your faculty, researchers and students do to deepen community relationships and foster fair and accountable policymaking.
Nonprofits: Name, center and celebrate the work your organization does to support community partners. Recognize this work as being absolutely essential to your license to participate in community-based planning.
Consultants: Recognize and use your power to structure projects that generate respect and center not only client priorities, but also the priorities of those living with the impacts of planning interventions.
Helping community partners and organizations act as facilitators, educators, mentors, challengers and mediators can bring much needed change to the outdated, top-down dynamic that continues to hamper resilience planning. Frontline communities have had to brave extractive, unresponsive planning spaces for decades. Agencies, allies and academics must now take a brave stance by doing the challenging work of establishing fair and accountable spaces. The successful outcomes shared by the 22 practitioners and researchers RCCP interviewed last year are strong evidence that such work will be well worth the effort.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.
