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Contexts and Frameworks for Community Resilience

The Gulf Research Program (GRP) was created in 2013 with $500 million in criminal settlement funds from British Petroleum and TransOcean, the companies who pleaded guilty and were held liable for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The funds are required to be spent over 30 years to “improve understanding of the region’s interconnecting human, environmental, and energy systems and foster…benefit[s] [for] Gulf communities, ecosystems, and the nation” (NASEM, 2017, p. 3).

Health and Community Resilience is one of four program areas identified in GRP’s 2020-2024 strategic plan and is the priority of the GRP’s Gulf Health and Resilience Board (GHRB). The GHRB aims to enhance health, well-being and resilience by working to put science into action for the benefit all who call the Gulf region home. Specifically, GHRB implements program activities through three of GRP’s strategic approaches:

• building partnerships and engaging networks,
• advancing science and understanding, and
• bridging knowledge to action.

The EnCoRe initiative was created in response to a recommendation from a 2019 consensus study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, titled, Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program (NASEM, 2019). That report summarizes “the existing portfolio of resilience measurement efforts…describes how some communities build and measure resilience…and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience in order to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts” (NASEM, 2019, p. 3).

The EnCoRe initiative was created in response to the report recommendation that GRP “should develop a major, coordinated initiative around building or enhancing community resilience in communities across the Gulf Region” (NASEM, 2019, p. 7). Because Alaska shares similar challenges, and has a history of hydrocarbon extraction, communities in Southcentral Alaska are also included as part of the geographic scope of the EnCoRe program. GRP responded to the recommendation by initiating EnCoRe and making its mission to “build the capacity of Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan communities through engagement, education, collaboration, and integration of data and science into decision-making in order to advance

community-based efforts to achieve healthy, resilient, and thriving communities that are equitable and inclusive for all.”¹

EnCoRe’s goals are to

• reduce inequities in health and community resilience;
• advance research and practice in health and community resilience;
• build the capacity of communities for
  • addressing the impacts of climate change and disasters on at-risk populations, and
  • sustaining their disaster and climate resilience efforts.

The EnCoRe initiative aims to achieve these goals by supporting long-term, multiyear, community engagement projects that will partner directly with selected communities across the Gulf states and Alaska. EnCoRe will build and strengthen community capacity at the local level in ways that enable each of its community partners to embark on its own health and community resilience building path independent of EnCoRe and GRP. To advise GRP on the implementation of the EnCoRe initiative, the National Academies established an EnCoRe oversight committee in 2021. The objective of the present study’s committee on Criteria for Community Participation in GRP’s EnCoRe Initiative is to provide recommendations guiding the EnCoRe oversight committee in identifying communities for engagement with the EnCoRe initiative. The charge of the present study is not to recommend how EnCoRe should implement its community engagement program, or to recommend the types of community-engaged partnerships that EnCoRe should undertake. Rather, the charge of the present study is to develop a set of guiding principles and to identify criteria for GRP to utilize in selecting the participating communities for the EnCoRe initiative, and to discuss the potential challenges, opportunities, and key considerations of applying these selection criteria.

In addition to the recommendations in this report, the EnCoRe initiative will utilize two frameworks for examining community challenges and promoting solutions that influence the health and resilience of individuals and communities: the six community capitals of resilience and the social determinants of health.

SIX COMMUNITY CAPITALS OF RESILIENCE

Drawing on existing literature about approaches to community resilience (e.g., Beccari, 2016; Cutter, 2016), the report Building and Measuring Community Resilience (NASEM, 2019) noted that multidimensionality is a defining characteristic of community resilience: “The resilience of a community encompasses all of the resources and assets available in the community. These community dimensions are also referred to as ‘capitals’” (p. 15). The report

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¹ This quote and more information about the EnCoRe initiative is available here: https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/enhancing-community-resilience-encore-oversight-committee/about.

observed that the following six types of community capitals are most often used in the resilience measurement literature: natural (environmental); built (infrastructure); financial (economic); human and cultural; social; and political (institutional or governance). The report recommended that the EnCoRe initiative approach community resilience through these capitals.

SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH

The social determinants of health are the environmental conditions into which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age, which affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.² Conditions (e.g., social, economic, physical) in these various environments and settings (e.g., school, church, workplace, neighborhood) have also been referred to as “place.”³ In addition to the more material attributes of place, the patterns of social engagement and sense of security and well-being are also affected by where people live. Resources that enhance quality of life can have a significant influence on population health outcomes. Examples of these resources include safe and affordable housing, access to education, public safety, availability of healthy foods, local emergency/health services, and environments free of life-threatening toxins. Understanding the relationship between how population groups experience place and the impact of place on health is fundamental to the social determinants of health—including both social and physical determinants (ODPHP, 2020). The committee considered both the community capitals and social determinants of health frameworks during data-gathering sessions. The following section introduces two additional bodies of knowledge that further guided the study process and the committees’ recommendations to the EnCoRe initiative.

FRAMEWORKS FOR UNDERSTANDING AND ADVANCING COMMUNITY RESILIENCE

Two interrelated bodies of knowledge broadly informed the committee’s recommendations and shaped the guiding principles and criteria for EnCoRe community selection. The first is the concept of community resilience, how it is applied, and how the concept and its application have changed over time. The following section on resilience is informed principally by a literature review about recent uses, applications, and metrics of community resilience. One important aspect of the current context is the issue of resilience fatigue: “the exhaustion that comes after a prolonged period of having to stay motivated or

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² More information about the Social Determinants of Health is available at: https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/social-determinants-health.

³ More information is available at: https://wayback.archive-it.org/5774/20220413203948/ https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/social-determinants-of-health.

positive” (Janin, 2022). Several times, experts who spoke with the committee raised the issue of resilience fatigue, and the committee discussed how the EnCoRe initiative can avoid adding to the burden of resilience fatigue when engaging with potential partners.

The second body of knowledge that the committee applied to this study is broadly referred to as participatory action research (PAR). However, the committee decided that the term practice should be included in PAR, and thereby developed the term and acronym participatory action research and practice (PARP) for this study. The inclusion of the term practice underscores the practical applications of PAR and how the PAR approach can be applied beyond pure research projects to include capacity-building projects that may or may not include a research component. Additionally, the inclusion of practice acknowledges that the principles of participatory research can be, and have been, translated into practice in fields such as planning, resource management, and local governance, as further described below. The following sections contain lessons learned and best practices that inform the core criteria and guiding principles that the committee recommends to GRP (Chapter 4).

COMMUNITY RESILIENCE: DEVELOPMENT OF A CONCEPT AND ITS APPLICATION

Finding 2.1: Reimagining Community Resilience

Community resilience, defined as the “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt” (NRC, 2012, p. 1), can remain a useful framework for capacity-building efforts in Gulf and Alaskan communities, such as those with which EnCoRe is planning to engage. At the same time, the ongoing relevance and utility of resilience as an organizing principle will depend on reimagining the concept by incorporating new understanding and experiences, particularly in areas related to equity and sustainability. The committee has identified several important lessons and insights:

• Meet communities where they are. Approaches to building community resilience have sometimes implicitly taken resilience as an expected, attainable end state for all communities. Going forward, resilience efforts will need to better recognize and account for the significant differences among communities along the spectrum of resilience, from preparation through adaptation. Strengthening equitable community resilience requires meeting communities where they are on this spectrum, seeking to support the enhancement of existing resilience capacities, and working to forge new pathways that address the parts of the spectrum most needed and desired by the community.
• Understand the impact of preexisting systemic issues. Resilience efforts need to reflect an understanding that preexisting systemic issues—such as racism, poverty, and other forms of marginalization—can significantly shape the manner and speed with which many communities are able to benefit from resilience-building interventions. Social vulnerabilities that affect the predisaster capacity of communities can create an “equity

• gap” in strengthening resilience capacities. Complementary efforts to address social inequality, power disparities, and unequal resource distribution may be needed alongside efforts more directly focused on vulnerability to hazards.
• Use holistic approaches. Efforts to strengthen community resilience equitably can benefit from incorporating environmental justice perspectives and the expertise of mental health professionals and psychology experts. Such holistic approaches recognize the intersection between climate change and social, economic, and health inequalities, while viewing resilience as a function of infrastructure, agency, self-organization, collaborative governance, social networks, and cultural knowledge.
• Understand and address resilience fatigue. As communities continue to develop and implement resilience programs, some community organizations and activists have become skeptical of the resilience paradigm and how it has been applied to postdisaster settings. An overemphasis on asking people to “be resilient” has produced a feeling of exhaustion from having to stay motivated and positive under challenging contexts in some communities that have been participating in resilience-related efforts. Clear communication among and between programs and communities on topics including roles and responsibilities, as well as metrics used to evaluate baseline resilience, can be helpful in preventing, monitoring, and addressing resilience fatigue at both the individual and community levels where it might arise; it may also aid in designing interventions that tangibly enhance communities’ baseline resilience.

The concept of resilience is rooted in the discipline of ecology and was originally used to describe the ability of an ecosystem to adapt and continue functioning during and after disruption (Holling, 1973). The development of socioecological system theory (Folke, 2006; Gunderson and Holling, 2002) extended Holling’s original use of ecological resilience to social systems to describe socioecological contingency and interconnectedness, including place-based models of describing to which disturbances such systems aim to become resilient (Cutter et al., 2008).

Norris and colleagues (2008) conducted a review of the evolution of resilience thinking and definitions that extend beyond ecological systems to include individual, city, social, physical, and community resilience and hazards research. They found that no single definition of resilience could apply to the diversity of the disciplines utilizing this construct and of the

contexts to which it was being applied. A report from the National Academies, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative (NRC, 2012), defined resilience as “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events,” and observed that “enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses—rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward” (p. 1). The current study adheres to this definition of resilience and underscores the need for a broad suite of predisaster strategies to enhance community resilience, including the use of preexisting social capital and its application throughout the disaster cycle. However, the committee also recognizes that “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt” is an ideal and aspirational vision of community resilience. In reality, different communities will be situated on a spectrum of ability, from preparation to adaptation. Thus, efforts to strengthen equitable community resilience would start by meeting communities where they are on this spectrum, seeking to support the enhancement of existing resilience capacities (e.g., existing social capital), and working to forge new pathways that address the parts of the spectrum most needed and desired by the community.

Recent articles and studies have taken stock of the landscape of community resilience (see Mayer, 2019; Koliou et al., 2018; Tiernan et al., 2018). In a review of the themes in disaster resilience and recovery, and the climate change literature, Tiernan and colleagues (2018) noted an overemphasis on “successful” adaptation in the face of threats as a marker of resilience. This “positive adaptation bias” risks shifting the definition of resilience from “what ‘is’ to what ‘ought to be,’” thus, giving resilience a normative connotation (p. 55). Tiernan and colleagues (2018) stress that, from an objective systems perspective, resilience does not necessarily imply development or enhancement but the ability of the system to persist “within a given set of parameters” (p. 56) (see also Holling, 2001; Middleton and Latty, 2016).

Mayer (2019) notes the mainstream emphasis on defining resilience in reference to hazards and calls out the lack of attention in the broader community resilience literature to how preexisting systemic issues are determining factors in whether a community can pursue resilience-building interventions. Ignoring the social vulnerabilities—preexisting roles of social inequality, power, and unequal resource distribution and access—that shape the predisaster capacity of communities, alongside more mainstream considerations of vulnerability to hazards produces an “equity gap” in the resilience literature (Matin et al., 2018; see also Cote and Nightingale, 2011; Cretney, 2014; Hornborg 2013). The focus on “bouncing back,” without accounting for preexisting inequalities, can imply to communities that the goal of resilience is to return to the status quo, thus trapping communities in a socioeconomic state that is neither just nor equitable (Meerow and Newell, 2019).

Literature on climate justice, a framework that recognizes the intersection between climate change and social, economic, and health inequalities, delivers a more direct critique of resilience thinking (see, e.g., Moulton and Machado, 2019; Porter et al., 2020; Ranganathan and Bratman, 2019). The notion of climate justice applies “matters of ethics and power to the way vulnerability is produced and managed” (Moulton and Machado, 2019, p. 4). Climate justice

supports substantive transformations in environment-society relations that achieve “environmental justice and social justice, rather than facile adjustments in policy” (Moulton and Machado, 2019, p. 4; see also Running, 2015). The promarket vision of “build back better,” a common term in resilience parlance, privileges “design solutions and externally imposed ideas for community cohesion” at the cost of ignoring the structural inequalities and historical inequities that made communities vulnerable to hazards in the first place (Ranganathan and Bratman, 2019, p. 116).

Berkes and Ross (2013) offer an integrated approach to addressing the divergent perspectives underlying the construct of community resilience; they weave together existing definitions of community resilience that are rooted in the socioecological systems literature with community resilience constructs drawn from mental health and developmental psychology. According to the literature strand, community resilience is best understood as a system’s concept that is subject to feedback loops, nonlinearity, renewal cycles, disturbance events, and homeostatic demands, among other drivers. In contrast, the psychology strand views resilience as a function of infrastructure, agency, self-organization, collaborative governance, and social networks. This latter approach highlights the importance of identifying and developing community strengths with devoted attention to people–place connections, a position often lost in the existing socioecological literature on resilience.

When adopting an approach designed to capture the community’s capacity for well-being in the face of significant and ongoing adversity, cultural knowledge and identity; local control and collective efficacy; cultural continuity; infrastructure development; and respect for diversity in language, lifestyle, and development emerge as central processes (Kirmayer et al., 2009). Thus, alongside criticisms, there has been increasing recognition of the role of social capital and connectedness, as well as the networks that facilitate resource and information sharing, in developing more resilient processes and outcomes across stakeholder groups, communities, and levels of government (Aida et al., 2013; Kirmayer et al., 2009; Mayer, 2019; Meyer, 2018; NASEM, 2021; Story et al., 2018). Social capital contributes to resilient outcomes in postdisaster settings. However, it is critical to recognize, understand, and respect how social capital developed before and through historical contexts wrought with systemic inequities, such as institutional racism, and how social capital has anchored communities in the presence or absence of climate and environmental hazards. Respectfully incorporating these dimensions of any community are essential to enhancing its resilience.

Recognizing and Addressing Resilience Fatigue

Ultimately, these perspectives and critiques of community resilience call attention to the need to consider questions of “resilience of what to what?” and “resilience for whom?” (Cretney, 2014; Lebel et al., 2006; Meerow and Newell, 2019; Vale, 2014). Clearly, resilience has proved to be a useful organizing paradigm for a range of efforts to strengthen communities, with many governments, private foundations, academic institutions, nonprofit organizations and

communities continuing to develop and implement resilience programs. Still, some community organizations and activists have been skeptical of the resilience paradigm since it emerged and was applied to postdisaster settings, such as Hurricane Katrina (Woods, 2017), despite widespread use of the concept by practitioners and academics. This idiomatic context within which resilience thinking finds itself has resulted in “resilience fatigue” in some communities—the feeling of exhaustion by people and communities that comes after a prolonged period of having to stay motivated and positive under challenging contexts, and from repeated demands to just “be resilient” (Butko, 2020; Janin, 2022; Mowe, 2017). The next section hones in on the development of resilience fatigue and recommends ways to avoid and address it.

The recent rise of the global resilience movement is largely attributed to the Rockefeller Foundation and the launch of the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative in 2013 (Galderisi et al., 2020). Cities participating in the initiative were expected to “improve their performances in the face of a wide range of acute shocks, such as earthquakes, floods or fires, and chronic stresses, such as unemployment, migrations, food and water shortage, etc. rather than preventing or mitigating the loss of assets due to a specific hazard” (Galderisi et al., 2020, p. 3). Concurrently, governments at all levels within the United States (e.g., federal, state, local) have poured and continue to pour massive investments into the “disaster resilience” concept, with unclear outcomes and a lack of tangible accomplishments (GAO, 2019). Following 100RC’s wind-up in 2019, the concept of disaster resilience received heightened scrutiny, including the observation that there is no consistent definition of what disaster resilience is or how it should be implemented in a practical manner (Keenan, 2018). For example, the field of planning, particularly land use planning, includes a range of practical and tangible tools, but contributed very little to the conceptual framework and application within 100RC. As one commentator noted, “Instead of doing the hard work of changing how you do things, disaster resilience allowed for an easy way out for politicians. It allowed them to always say yes to more infrastructure investments, but it never forced them to say no to building in high-risk areas in the first place, such as along the Louisiana coast” (Keenan, 2021, para. 11).

Especially in coastal environments heavily impacted by acute surge flooding and sea level rise, many communities are currently caught within what the sociologist Ian Gray has called the “treadmill of protection” (Gray, 2021), by which increasing levels of government-backed expenditures are used to defend their economic viability, regardless of social, economic, or environmental consequence. Yet, many actions aimed at preventing immediate loss also work to secure incumbent extractive industries, such as offshore oil and gas drilling, which themselves contribute to the very vulnerabilities requiring intervention in the first place. Consequently, frontline communities have experienced systemic breakdowns of social and economic functions and community networks.

This tempest of conditions fosters an environment by which some frontline communities have been consistently engaged in “resilience-building” exercises by agents of government, nongovernmental institutions, and academia, sometimes without tangible benefit to those communities or a clear articulation of how communal quality of life may improve across any

particular time horizon. Therefore, in many cases, when frontline and often beleaguered communities are asked to engage in vague “resilience” activities, they are also being asked, by implication, to expand or enhance their own capacity to withstand or recover from shocks and stressors—without being offered help in addressing the root causes of those shocks and stressors. Thus, resilience fatigue can be defined as the communal “exhaustion people experience from attempting to act motivated, inspired, and positive” (Butko, 2020, para. 3). In other words, resilience fatigue can occur when people are asked to thoughtfully engage in community-oriented resilience-building endeavors—even if those endeavors are well-intentioned—when the outcomes of the exercise are not clearly enumerated to the community itself, and those outcomes do not clearly resonate for community members as likely to enhance quality of life.

Much remains to be learned about resilience fatigue as a phenomenon and its implications for addressing the needs of specific communities and community members. For example, it is possible that smaller communities, communities that face preexisting systemic challenges (e.g., racism and poverty), and communities experiencing persistent health and environmental threats are more susceptible to resilience fatigue. EnCoRe can add value by taking approaches in community selection and engagement that reflect a holistic understanding of community strengths and vulnerabilities, and by developing a better grasp of resilience fatigue and how it can be prevented, monitored, and addressed over time.

Measuring and Communicating Resilience

As a consequence of the dual effects of “positive adaptation bias” and “resilience fatigue,” it is crucial that efforts intended to boost resilience first define and clearly communicate metrics under which communities delineate their baseline resilience. Effective communication of metrics also includes communication of the roles and responsibilities of community leaders, local governments, and other stakeholders prior to adverse events or disasters. Conflict over roles and responsibilities can negatively impact response and recovery efforts. Interventions must be evaluated based on their likelihood to tangibly enhance a community’s baseline resilience. The collaborative development of metrics by all impacted people should be prioritized to build mutual trust and understanding between practitioners and stakeholders alike, empowering citizens and enhancing decision-making processes (Cox and Hamlen, 2015). Communication among stakeholder groups, including community members and decision makers, allows individuals and groups to share local understandings of what resilience means to them (White et al., 2014) and can lead to collaborative processes that can facilitate the establishment of social networks that enhance community resilience (Frankenberger et al., 2013).

The report Building and Measuring Community Resilience (NASEM, 2019), which recommended that GRP establish the EnCoRe initiative, also recommends utilizing community participation and engagement from the outset of resilience building and measurement efforts. One approach to developing resilience metrics may entail working with communities to break down the concept of resilience into constituent parts, revealing a first-level set of categories from

which a collaborative development of specific resilience metrics may emanate. Based on the definition of resilience cited above, this first-level set of categories could measure a community’s ability to (1) prepare, (2) plan for, (3) absorb, (4) recover from, and (5) adapt to a variety of adverse events that may occur cumulatively or unfold sequentially across time (NRC, 2012).

It is also important to appreciate the distinction between resilience as it is understood and experienced by individual community members and the collective capacity of communities to respond to adverse events. In the case of individuals, resilience is affected by factors such as their physical health and well-being, their ability to develop significant and meaningful relationships with other community members, and their sense of control over their lives and circumstances. Community resilience is affected by general structural, social, and economic circumstances, as well as the responsiveness of community leaders, local governments, and stakeholder organizations prior to, during, and after an adverse event. Both individual and community resilience depend on the implementation of effective policies and practices before adverse events.

By applying this framework, more granular outputs, outcomes, and metrics for success can then be developed in concert with a targeted community. Based on this literature and these examples, the committee considered several guiding principles for its core recommendations to EnCoRe (Chapter 4) that could help alleviate or avoid adding to resilience fatigue in the communities with which it engages. Efforts to engage and communicate with communities in ways without adding to resilience fatigue will include the following practices:

• Clearly enumerate how the engagement is likely to benefit individual community members and the community as a group.
• Consistently acknowledge and respect the historical resilience in place, including:
  • the “rooted practices of care and healing from historical trauma that residents already practice” (Ranganathan and Bratman, 2019, p. 116), and
  • the “chronic adversities and structural inequities that lead to historical trauma through multiple generations” (Mowe, 2017, para. 1).
• Recognize the current, “baseline” resilience present in frontline communities and clearly outline how to build upon that baseline.
• Communicate transparently that relationships with frontline communities are mutually beneficial, rather than extractive, and clearly outline what both partners intend to gain from the relationship (e.g., development and use of materials; accounts and findings for internal and external knowledge-building and use, including for publication), as well as what the engagement intends to facilitate or provide to the community.

Given the challenges associated with keeping the community and their priorities at the center of resilience-building efforts, this report proposes an approach the authoring committee

calls participatory action research and practice (PARP). This approach, its roots, and its guiding principles are described in the following section.

Participatory Action Research and Practice: A Proposed Central Principle for the EnCoRe Initiative

Finding 2.2: Using Participatory Approaches to Strengthen Community Engagement and Sustainable Capacity Building

The value of participatory approaches to community engagement. Participatory approaches to applied research in which those most directly impacted by the research become active participants in the process are increasingly being utilized across a range of domains. This trend comes in response to accumulating experience from research efforts in areas such as planning, agriculture, and public health, as well as greater appreciation of the needs and rights of community members themselves.

Key elements of participatory action research. Although there is no one set of rules or procedures for participatory research approaches, key elements of the approach are relevant to working with the Gulf and Alaskan communities that might participate in the EnCoRe initiative. These elements include (1) a focus on cocreation and codesign at the initial phase so that projects are not being imposed in a top-down manner; (2) using an iterative process of action and reflection to develop effective solutions during the implementation phase; (3) prioritizing the long-term sustainability of programs and solutions; and (4) proactive efforts by researchers and other outside technical experts to engage with community members in order to understand and learn from their lived experiences, narratives, stories, and other information.

The importance of participatory approaches in developing metrics. A previous National Academies report recommends utilizing community participation and engagement from the outset of resilience building and measurement efforts (NASEM, 2019).

Participatory research is an approach to applied research in which the people most directly impacted by the research become active participants in the process. The goal of this approach is to make the research more directly applicable to real-world problems. Participatory research has roots in action research, which has an explicit goal of social change that is informed and driven by those most affected by the problem at hand (Greenwood and Levin, 2007). This approach is used in fields such as agriculture and rural livelihood research (Beebe, 2001; Biggs, 1989), public health (Minkler and Wallerstein, 2008), and planning (Innes and Booher, 2004), all of which can inform EnCoRe’s approach.

Continuum of Engagement

There is a continuum of engaged forms of scholarship—all of which can be effective in providing communities with useful information and resources. Based on his observations of farmers’ participation in agricultural research, Biggs (1989) described four modes of engagement: contractual, consultative, collaborative, and collegial. The four modes become progressively more participatory as one moves from contractual through collegial. Biggs’ model has been expanded upon more recently (see, e.g., Meadow et al., 2015), notably by the addition of an Indigenous mode of research (David-Chavez and Gavin, 2018; see Figure 2-1). Given EnCoRe’s mission of pursuing a long-term, multi-year, community engagement project that will partner directly with select communities across the Gulf states and Alaska, the focus here is on the collaborative and collegial end of the engagement continuum, including Indigenous research approaches, in which community needs, expertise, and knowledge are central to the research and related on-the-ground actions. The committee refers to this end of the engagement spectrum collectively as participatory research and practice (PARP). Because EnCoRe will fund more than just research projects, we include participatory practice in our definition and demonstrate below how the principles of participatory research can, and have been, translated into practice in fields such as planning, resource management, and governance, and how this approach can lead to more equitable and sustainable partnerships.

At its core, participatory research involves the active engagement of diverse stakeholders as partners in the research process (Cvitanovic et al., 2019; Fluehr-Lobban, 2008). As a principle of research and practice, participatory approaches ultimately speak to the underlying reasons for conducting research and pursuing projects. Cornwall and Jewkes (1995) note that “the key element of participatory research lies not in methods but in the attitudes of researchers, which in turn determine how, by and for whom research is conceptualized and conducted” (pp. 1667-1668). We can extrapolate this research-focused definition to include the ways in which any community-based project is scoped and conducted.

Background and Applications of Participatory Research

Participatory research approaches have a long history in the social sciences, where they emerged as a direct response to a history of exclusion and “othering” of minoritized communities and voices (Greenwood and Levin, 2007). As mentioned above, an early form of participatory research is action research (Lewin, 1946; Tax, 1958), which has as an explicit goal of social change that is informed and driven by those most affected by the problem at hand.

Participatory research approaches are used in several health and science fields. Agricultural research, for example, uses rapid rural appraisal and other participatory methods in

development and extension work (Beebe, 2001; Biggs, 1989). Public health practitioners rely on community-based participatory research and practice, particularly in communities that have been underserved by health practitioners (Minkler and Wallerstein, 2008; Wallerstein and Duran, 2008). Participatory research approaches are a newer addition to the biophysical sciences and are to some extent driven by climate change adaptation and other environmental research in which the links between biophysical and social processes and impacts make the integration of bio-socioecological systems crucial (Lemos and Morehouse, 2005; Meadow et al., 2015; Pohl et al., 2017; van Buuren et al., 2014). In climate science work, the term coproduction of knowledge is now often used to denote a participatory research process; this term originated from the collaborative governance framework and was used to describe the ways in which citizens and government entities create society together (Ostrom, 1996).

Participatory approaches have been long used in planning, natural resource management, and policy making. Jane Jacobs revolutionized the field of planning from a top-down rational planning model to a bottom-up participatory approach by fighting to save the urban neighborhood Greenwich Village from urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s and with the 1961 publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Another early example of both critique and construction of public participation methods is Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation, which proposed a typology of participation levels noting that only the top three rungs of the ladder (partnership, delegated power, and citizen control) represent true citizen power (Arnstein, 1969). Community planners have advocated for the use of participatory approaches, particularly multiway interactions between citizens and decision makers, to ensure that new developments, infrastructure, and policies meet community members’ needs and create better overall outcomes (Innes and Booher, 2004; Margerum, 2002; Meyer et al., 2018).

Similarly, in community development work, public participation is considered particularly important. For example, in order to solve societal problems, Homan (2008) describes engaging both the action community—those positioned to perform an action to address the problem, such as advocacy groups; academics; or those with power, including governmental entities and elected officials—and the benefit community—those directly impacted by a problem and who have the necessary information about the problem, its source, solutions, and potential effect (see also Schwarz, 2003). Specifically, this approach values the consent given to the action community by the benefit community, and focuses explicitly on the intention and attitude of the action community. The complementary approach of benefit and action communities working together moves toward a collegial mode of engagement (see Figure 2-1).

Community-based natural resource management and community-based adaptation are related (but distinct) approaches that center communities within decisions and actions about resource management and climate change adaptation (Dumaru, 2010). In both cases, practitioners note that when “communities’ priorities, needs, knowledge, and capacities” are central to the effort, communities are empowered to act in ways that make them safer and healthier in the long term (Reid and Schipper, 2014, p. 7). Additionally, federal agencies are increasingly adopting participatory approaches—for example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Collaboration and Public Participation Center of Expertise (CPCX), and the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which supports communities through capability and capacity building and provides technical assistance during the application process.¹

UTILIZING PARP IN PROGRAM FUNDING, DESIGN, AND IMPLEMENTATION

As is clear from the myriad uses of participatory processes, no one definition or set of rules exist. However, some commonalities and core principles can be distilled from the aforementioned scholarship that can help guide scholars, practitioners, and funders to keep community at the forefront (Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, 2019) when developing and executing community-based projects and programs. In this section, we rely on work by Grant and colleagues (2008) and Van Zandt and colleagues (2020) to suggest how PARP can be enacted throughout the course of a research or community-development project. The summary below is followed by a visual reference (Table 2-1) that captures the core components of this framework.

During the earliest phase of a project, the design phase, project staff and participants can focus on cocreation and codesign so that projects are not being imposed in a top-down, or outside-in, manner, and instead represent the community’s needs as identified by the community itself. A particular role for funders and proposal reviewers is to look for clear evidence that community interests are being centered in the project design, such as a record of ongoing relationships between any outside researchers and community representatives and/or a track record of community-centered work in other locations. A project proposal that centers community interests and priorities will exhibit a clear representation of community perspectives. The proposal will be flexible so that, if community contexts shift (i.e., community participants need to adjust roles or immediate issues require community members’ time and energy), project coordinators can respond and adapt.

Throughout a project, the principles of PARP play out through finding community-focused solutions to community concerns. An important part of keeping the focus on effective solutions is using an iterative process of action and reflection in which, before they take action, project team members and community members propose and plan actions based on a combination of research and experience; they then observe and reflect upon the results in order to improve subsequent actions and achieve the desired solutions. This process is often called the action research cycle (Reason and Bradbury, 2008) and is mirrored by the adaptive management process in natural resource management (Lee, 1993). The key to successful action research is to demonstrate respect for community knowledge and expertise and to incorporate that expertise into the action–reflection cycle. For projects involving both community members and outside

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¹ For information on CPCX, see https://www.iwr.usace.army.mil/About/Technical-Centers/CPCX-Collaboration-Public-Participation/ (accessed August 29, 2022); for more information on BRIC, see https://www.fema.gov/grants/mitigation/building-resilient-infrastructure-communities (accessed February 15, 2023).

technical experts or other entities, it is important that the outside entities strive to provide and present technical information in ways that are accessible and useful to the community participants so that all participants are fully engaged in the research, action, and reflection processes.

PARP prioritizes the long-term sustainability of programs and solutions, as successful programs should outlast specific projects. There are two ways to support the long-term sustainability of community-based programs: (1) build community capacity to manage program activities, incorporating capacity building from the outset; and (2) build the community’s capacity to identify and access resources that are available to sustain program funding after the initial project ends. This entails actively guiding the community through the identification and access of resources—and building the capacity of community members to do this on their own.

The research team or other outside technical experts can build trust and enhance their own effectiveness by engaging with community members proactively to understand and learn from their lived experiences, narratives, stories, or other information. One increasingly common way to demonstrate respect for local knowledge is to include local experts as authors on reports or academic publications resulting from a project. While this approach can help move community knowledge into scientific discussions, researchers should guard against overburdening community partners with expectations for additional work or presume that the benefits of a scientific publication are the same for community members as for professional researchers (i.e., professional credit).

For all communities, but particularly when working with Indigenous communities, outside technical experts must handle all forms of community knowledge and data ethically, and adhere to any local data management and sharing requirements. If local data management and sharing agreements do not exist, outside partners should adhere to the CARE principles for Indigenous data governance: Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics (Carrroll et al., 2020).² Overall, data management plans should explicitly address how local knowledge will be protected and how newly derived datasets will be shared with, and explained to, the community.

The adoption of a PARP approach implies that attention is being paid to the equitable sharing of resources and benefits during each phase of a project: proposal and design, process and execution, outcomes, and sustainability. Funders and reviewers can pay particular attention to this principle during the proposal phase of the project by looking for evidence of direct benefits to communities, such as through stipends for participation in activities or knowledge-sharing and travel, among other commitments, and by ensuring that outside researchers or technical experts are not the only recipients of project funds. Utilizing a PARP approach ensures that project outcomes are designed to benefit the community and address their needs; and project activities are designed to provide community benefits, such as through cultural activities or other

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² The CARE principles are “a guide for data producers, stewards, and publishers to affirm Indigenous rights to self-determination through CARE Full data practices that will ultimately address complex issues related to privacy, future use, and collective interests, and increase the value of data for reuse” (Carroll et al., 2020, p. 8).

opportunities for direct community engagement. Project staff can identify ways to amplify community stories through media or other venues in ways that support community goals and growth. Outside experts can identify ways to use their expertise to support community goals beyond direct project activities, such as by offering technical expertise for community grant writing and providing additional technical expertise to further other community activities—for example, by contributing curriculum for education programs, designing a website for a community group, or providing additional research to shed light on community questions or history (Lomawaima, 2000).

Finally, PARP principles include considering the sustainability of projects and relationships after the formal funding cycle ends. Sustainability in a PARP approach implies the incorporation of capacity-building opportunities for community members so that project and postproject activities or programs can be managed by community members (with compensation, as appropriate). To achieve this, projects would include a postproject action plan that identifies specific tasks and next steps, responsible parties, time frames, and potential funding to utilize during and after the conclusion of the project funds. Funders and reviewers can look for evidence of sustainable networks and relationships that may be available for furthering the work once project funds are depleted. A particular role for funders in PARP efforts is to provide mechanisms for project extensions and renewals to ensure successful activities can continue. Table 2-1 summarizes key aspects of the PARP approach.

TABLE 2-1 Utilizing a Participatory Action Research and Practice (PARP) Approach

SOURCE: Generated by the study committee, based on Carroll et al., 2020; Grant et al., 2008, and Van Zandt et al., 2020.