Environmental Justice through Community-Policy Participatory Partnerships

Abstract

Geographical information systems (GIS) are often used to design environmental justice (EJ) policy interventions. Leveraging GIS and other graphics, overburdened EJ communities can learn from maps that geographically link environmental burden (EB) and social disparity (SD) data. Visually representing EB and SD data concretizes the unjust distributions of environmental and broader inequitable societal policies. These maps can be used to efficaciously assess EJ disparities created by such policies through exploring socioeconomic characteristics with local communities. Given the great variation in how GIS EJ applications measure and visualize EB and SD, we present a community-based participatory design (CBPD) lens to collaboratively work across overburdened communities and support making EJ data accessible to all stakeholders. Our location proximity approach is a powerful way to assess overburdened EJ communities because it relies on user-predefined boundaries, and it doesn’t use a single fixed unit of reference to prioritize areas of intervention. Moreover, most areal unit applications use ordinal measures, such as percentiles, and multidimensional indexes, which are intelligible to understand by many residents. Leveraging a community-based participatory design methodology, we present our novel Proximity to Hazards Dashboard (PHD) that includes data on asphalt plants and industrial corridors, hazards often missing from state-level dashboards but very relevant for city policymaking, as well as more traditionally used environmental hazard sources. The use of the tool by policymakers and community members suggests that EJ categorization should focus less on procedural benchmarks and more on systemic change for policy impacts in ways that sustain the participatory nature of our approach.