Confronting Environmental Challenges on the US–Mexico Border: Long-Term Community-Based Research and Community Service Learning in a Binational Partnership

Abstract

Recent efforts to increase university involvement in addressing community problems and improving the way such problems are conceptualized and addressed have converged in discussions of community service-learning, community-based research, and community–university partnerships. Yet, the intersections among these approaches have not received much attention. This article addresses this gap by describing a multisectoral, binational partnership established to address significant environmental and environmental health issues on the US–Mexico border that includes academic institutions, and within which students play a key role in helping meet partnership goals while at the same time fulfilling their needs and desires for participating in community-based research and community service-learning. The article examines how the partnership has evolved, highlights 4 educational institutions that have been central to the partnership, and illustrates how community-based research and community service-learning have become key mechanisms for engaging people from within and across communities, over many years, in the partnership.

Keywords:

• Multisectoral partnerships
• binational collaboration
• US–Mexico border
• Ambos Nogales

I acknowledge the members of the Asociación de Reforestación en Ambos Nogales (ARAN), the interns and graduate students from the University of Arizona who have worked with ARAN, and community groups in Nogales for making this work possible, and two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable insights and suggestions.

The projects described in this article were funded through grants from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and the US Environmental Protection Agency, through the Border Environment Cooperation Commission. Additional support has been provided by the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration and the University of Arizona, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Magellan Fund, the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute, and the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, as well as the Friends of the Santa Cruz River, a nonprofit environmental organization formed in 1991 in Santa Cruz County, Arizona to protect and enhance the flow and water quality of the river.