Transforming Environmental Advocacy in the Fight to Protect Urban Watersheds: A Case Study of African American-Led Community-Based Groups in Atlanta,GA

Abstract

In the United States, urban water injustice has been structured by decades of racialized urban development, disinvestment, and discrimination, layers of planning and processes producing highly segregated and highly unequal relationships to water, exacerbated by exclusions of people of color from water governance and management. Numerous barriers to diversifying environmental governance and confronting environmental injustice in the United States shape how marginalized communities respond to unjust urban waterscapes. It is vital to understand how marginalized communities address disparate exposures to environmental harm and exclusions from environmental decision-making. This case study examines five African American-led community-based environmental organizations that each work on water governance issues in predominantly Black watersheds of metro Atlanta, Georgia. To better understand how African American-led organizations confront these challenges, this article presents a case study using semi-structured interviews, supplemented by participant observation and archival research, to examine these organizations’ strategies for addressing water injustice, with an additional focus on the tensions between these groups and mainstream, largely white, environmental governance institutions, particularly those forwarding resilience strategies. Our analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted from 2017 to 2019 elucidates perspectives and practices of Atlanta’s African American-led community-based environmental organizations to advance water justice through building community knowledge on water governance practices, forwarding community empowerment using place-based learning strategies, and confronting exclusions. The findings highlight paths toward redefining long-established, racialized environmental governance practices and refuting myths associated with African American involvement in environmental affairs, particularly through the promotion of resourcefulness and asset-based frameworks that reject the deficit models of tokenistic engagement with marginalized communities.