Learning from Bilingual Engagement Practice to Advance Justice in Climate Resilience Planning

Abstract

While there is widespread recognition of the need to incorporate underserved minority communities into planning and design processes for just climate adaptation policies and programs, the dynamics of facilitating bilingual workshops are still significantly under-explored in the literature. This article addresses the strategies, challenges, and lessons learned from conceptualizing, preparing, and facilitating low-budget bilingual workshops for community engagement in green infrastructure (GI) planning in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The two case studies discussed are connected to multi-stakeholder initiatives aimed at involving historically underserved Hispanic communities in GI planning to address environmental justice issues. We first describe strategies to foster participation and exchanges in bilingual participatory workshops, where limited resources made professional interpretation and translation services unfeasible. We then share four lessons learned from these experiences by drawing on the successes and challenges of our approaches, and examining how cultural conceptions about language—our language ideologies—can impact community engagement in bilingual settings. The two case studies make a compelling argument for taking bilingual design and facilitation seriously to advance procedural and recognition justice in climate resilience planning through co-production in multilingual communities.