Just community participation and Border environmental governance: a view from the Border 2020 program

ABSTRACT

Environmental governance in the U.S.- México border region is complex as various jurisdictions intersect from the local, regional, national and transnational scales. Through this complexity, political accountability to border communities can fall through the cracks. In this paper, I explore the processes of community participation in this environmental governance structure, focusing on the Border 2020 program. Based on semi-structured interviews with social movement and government actors that have engaged in the Border 2020 program, I analyze the processes by which community members can participate in the program, and t the outcomes of this participation. I argue that while the Border 2020 program has an explicit goal to include community participation in their work, on the ground, this participation is limited. Moreover, increasing community participation in the Border 2020 program is key to improving the program’s effectiveness and practicing an environmental justice model of governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• Tijuana-San Diego
• Border 2020 program
• procedural justice
• environmental governance
• community participation

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Switzer Foundation graduate fellowship programs for your support of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Carolina Prado is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at San José State University. She has worked at the intersection of community-based research, environmental justice, and border studies for the last seven years. Her current work is using environmental justice mapping indices in the U.S. as a guide to create a spatial analysis of environmental inequality in the border city of Tijuana, México. She is also passionate about food justice and anti-domestic violence work.

ORCID

Carolina Prado http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1488-1286