Building Cultural Competence in Environmental Studies and Natural Resource Sciences

ABSTRACT

Environmental studies and natural resource sciences frequently engage diverse cultural groups in field practices and research. This article reviews evidence of the usefulness of cultural competence theory and its skill components in nursing, social work, and psychology to demonstrate the importance of analogous training in the environmental sciences. The Northeast Ethics Education Partnership (NEEP) has promoted short courses and workshops for training graduate students and faculty in environmental studies, natural resource sciences, and engineering in cultural competence. In conjunction with this training, NEEP has gathered and reviewed published accounts of environmental field experience with respect to cultural competence that participants found useful. This article describes materials and methods of this training; promotes the need to develop an “environmental cultural competence theory and practice”; identifies barriers to such theoretical development training in graduate schools; and suggests potential solutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen science
• community-based natural resource management
• cultural competence
• environmental justice
• race-specific competence
• research ethics

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the NEEP collaborators for their assistance with this article: David A. Sonnenfeld, PhD, SUNY-ESF; Phil Brown, PhD, Northeastern University; and Linda Silka, PhD, University of Maine.

Notes

¹Now “Environmental Justice Partnerships in Communication.”