Stakeholder Collaboration: Organizing for Environmental Justice and Equitable Solutions

In this course you’ll learn about the power of leveraging transdisciplinary (TD) approaches to plan, implement, and govern the co-design of solutions to complex environmental problems impacting environmental justice and public health. First, starting with the TD framework, we can frame and initiate conversations across multiple, geographically dispersed groups and begin to organize a co-designed vision for sustainable outcomes that can be updated and maintained with adaptive governance.

Organizing the group of key stakeholders will require a shared vision. National Park Groups, existing environmental justice organizations, land preservation groups, and grassroots environmental initiatives all share a desire of environmental justice. Whether your topic is environmental protection, climate change, air pollution, landfills, natural resources, pesticides, toxic waste, or the general environmental health of your local communities. That’s why storytelling will be reintroduced from course one in this series to ensure you as a project manager can create compelling visions that are easy to remember, understand, and convey important information about complex topics for positive project outcomes. Storytelling can illustrate the need for fair treatment, regulatory solutions, and addressing the impacts of inequity on communities of color and low-income communities. Then it’ll be time to capture and roadmap the vision, the way we move our current state to the co-designed outcomes creating value at each step along the way. Then establish a decentralized, agile decision-making process to enable its realization, as well as a means of managing input and discoveries across dispersed groups to include areas susceptible to environmental hazards and areas impacted by environmental injustices, with inclusion of low-income, underserved, people of color and working toward environmental quality and sustainability.

Next, using outreach to address environmental justice, we’ll teach management of big events - a series of critical workshops that can bring all interested parties, decision makers, and stakeholders together to create the shared outcome. Through effective tools like collaborative learning we can engage stakeholders with the information they need to help build the shared vision for fair land use and environmental justice. However, collaborating with diverse stakeholders and influencing public engagement is often challenging, especially when addressing as overburdened groups that can have conflicting interests or perspectives on social justice and civil rights for everyone to have a healthy environment. Therefore, we also cover managing conflicts and how to find ways to resolve them in order to move forward with the project.

With solid plans and agreement, there will still be risks to identify, escalate, and manage across the complex stakeholder groups. The environmental justice movement begins with meaningful involvement, a focus on the environmental issues, clear communication, engaging all communities impacted - reducing inequity - and co-designing a vision for sustainable outcomes and environmental health. This course will wrap with a discussion on how to incorporate risk identification and action planning across a complex group to help successful navigate through execution and achieve lasting sustainable change.