Attempts to resolve environmental challenges facing communities can often benefit from action-oriented public deliberation. Many complex environmental issues have multiple potential resolutions, and some have become politicized, with strong opinions across the board. But what makes environmentally-focused deliberations in a community most effective, and most likely to lead to locally-guided action? Answers to this question are evolving and are informed by ongoing research and practice.

From the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) network come three examples of community-engaged research that provide helpful insights. First, Dr. Beth Corrie, faculty member at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and Scholar in Residence at Georgia Interfaith Power and Light has been exploring best practices for supporting church youth groups in leading intergenerational deliberations about climate action in their congregations. In Florida, Mandy Sunshine Baily, M.S., worked with communities across the state to conduct deliberations concerning land use and water quality challenges alongside the University of Florida and the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University’s partner program called Community Voices, Informed Choices (CIVIC). Finally, a multi-state team of researchers including Dr. Robert Richards at University of Arkansas; and Dr. Laura Bray, Dr. Justin Reedy and Dr. Sharon Hausam at the University of Oklahoma investigated how deliberation might help communities identify how their valued cultural practices were being impacted by climate change. Interviews conducted with members of these three research teams suggest some key elements of effective environmentally focused action-oriented deliberation and engagement processes:

• Center community members’ lived experiences
• Chart a path to action
• Build up local leadership

These insights point to the importance of considering deliberative forums in their full community context. Read more in the full post below.

Center community members’ lived experiences

As environmental issues go, climate change is one that is especially politically charged, and it is also one that impacts many aspects of community life. The multi-state research team discussed above sought to take a community-centered approach to understanding how climate change impacts “cultural resources” such as cultural practices and traditions in historically under-served communities in the South. They also wanted to understand the role that deliberative forums might play in helping communities identify and protect those cultural resources.

Centering lived experience helped the team – and their participants – identify often overlooked cultural resources like locally important rituals, such as exchanging food and getting together outdoors with neighbors, and how these have shifted with the changing climate. This kind of validation of participants’ own experiences as valuable knowledge is a crucial element of effective deliberation, as was observed by Mandy Sunshine Baily from the Florida-based research team. As part of Community Voices Informed Choices (CIVIC) Baily’s team used public deliberation as a way to help gain insights on land use and water quality challenges in the state. Baily described an “intimidating wall” in which people considering attending a deliberative forum “often think they need to have X, Y, Z knowledge before they can even enter.” This perceived wall serves as a barrier pre-selecting who feels welcome to attend, and who among those who do show up feels comfortable contributing their thoughts.

Centering participants’ lived experience also entails adapting to unforeseen community needs and circumstances. The multi-state climate change research team noticed that in a community they partnered with in Arkansas, the idea of “cultural resources” was new to many of the community leaders. So, rather than moving ahead with public deliberation, they decided that “dialogic methods would be better suited to that kind of conversation where people are in the sensemaking stage, making sense of the phenomenon,” according to Dr. Richards. So, the team adjusted their efforts to better meet the community’s needs at that moment.

Chart a path to action

Being responsive to community needs and circumstances means recognizing where deliberation fits into existing structures and processes of change, and being intentional about goals and anticipated outcomes of deliberative forums. In Georgia, Dr. Beth Corrie, in collaboration with Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, has been partnering with church youth groups to engage youth in leading intergenerational deliberations in their congregations about climate action. Corrie reflected on a recent deliberative forum she and the youth from one congregation held during the project’s pilot. “I think the forum went great,” she said. She observed that the youth were really engaged, the adults really listened to the youth, and people who entered the forum with strong opinions left with their opinions challenged in a constructive and productive way. But, she said, “there was not already a plan in place for how the decision-making structure of their church could take that information and implement it.” As many denominations have well-established processes and channels through which decisions must be made – either at the congregation level or higher up, the lack of a pre-established plan for plugging the outcome of a deliberative forum into such decision-making channels can mean action becomes stalled.

Corrie and her team are already using this insight to inform their approach with their next congregation. “So when we’re trying to set up the meetings, we were very intentional about making sure the senior pastor or priest was part of the conversation” and willing to consider implementing the outcomes of the deliberative forum. “…We said to the youth pastors when we met with them, ‘We don’t want to have a forum if you don’t think that the leadership of the church is going to honor anything that comes out of that forum. And so if you don’t think that’s going to work, but you want to do something with your youth, then we’ll just do a forum with the youth around things that can be done within their power, within the power of your youth group.’” This approach focuses the considerable amount of energy and time required for a successful deliberative process on a level of decision-making at which action is more likely to be feasible.

Build Up Local Leadership

Across all three research teams, the importance of supporting and partnering with local leaders was evident. In Corrie’s project, leadership among the congregation’s youth heavily shaped the design of the intergenerational deliberative forum, and its success was in turn empowering to the youth leaders. Likewise, the multi-state climate change research team emphasized co-equal partnership at every step with community leaders who served as advisors and liaisons. For example, a leader of the Rural Community Alliance in one of the team’s partner communities in Arkansas identified times and places that would be most convenient for many people in their community to attend a deliberative forum. Similarly, Dr. Richards from the research team described how, in the planning stages of discussions in Arkansas “I sat down with…the executive director of Rural Community Alliance, and together we spent a couple hours in her office going over the questions and rewriting them to make them more accessible to our community members. And so we didn’t talk about deliberation and dialogue; instead we talked about conversations and we talked about discussions because that language was more accessible.” Local leaders who know their communities well can help make deliberations more relevant, inclusive and effective.

Local leadership can also help practitioners bridge chasms of trust and engage with a wider range of participants. Mandy Sunshine Baily discussed how CIVIC’s UF-FAMU team found crucial partners in leaders and institutions with deep and strong ties to the Black community. Due to the region’s history of slavery and stark racial inequalities and injustices, distrust existed among the Black community of institutions like the University of Florida. On the other hand, many in the community had personal or family ties to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), a historically Black institution, and leaders connected with FAMU supported the research team’s efforts to recruit participants from the Black community to the deliberative forums, expanding the forums’ inclusivity and perceived legitimacy.

Key Take-Aways

Taken together these insights demonstrate how deliberation-for-action works best when it is an integrated part of an entire process of community engagement, framed by and responsive to the needs of a community and centering community leadership and experiences. Determining where and how deliberation fits best in each specific community context may be an important role of facilitators of deliberation-for-action processes.

For more on the researchers whose work is described here, check out the following links:

Mandy Sunshine Baily https://eepro.naaee.org/community/people/mandy-sunshine-baily and the CIVIC initiative https://programs.ifas.ufl.edu/civic/
Laura Bray https://www.ou.edu/cas/casr/people/researchers/laura-bray
Beth Corrie https://gipl.org/beth-corrie
Sharon Hausam https://southcentralclimate.org/about-us/people/
Justin Reedy https://www.ou.edu/cas/comm/about/people/faculty/justin-reedy
Robert Richards https://clintonschool.uasys.edu/about/people/faculty/robert-c-richards-jr/