Resilience Justice and Community-Based Green and Blue Infrastructure

Abstract

The environmental conditions of Black and Brown neighborhoods manifest systemic injustices that replicate and reinforce the marginalization, oppression, and persistent and multi-faceted vulnerabilities of these communities. Particularly, low-income communities of color have inequitably less and worse green and blue infrastructure, such as parks and green spaces, trees, and restored waterways. These conditions make marginalized communities disproportionately more vulnerable to disturbances and changes, such as climate change, health crises, pollution releases, disasters, economic shocks, and social and political upheaval. Even when governments or private actors invest in more or better green and blue infrastructure in marginalized communities, the result is green gentrification and displacement, due to the intersection of systems of racism, inequality, and vulnerability. Resilience justice is a new way of thinking about the justice of community resilience/vulnerability and the resilience of marginalized and oppressed communities. Resilience justice goes beyond specific harms and threats addressed by environmental, disaster, and climate justice concepts; it instead focuses on community adaptive capacities and vulnerabilities to shocks and changes. This article describes the conceptual foundations and framework of resilience justice developed by the University of Louisville Resilience Justice Project, as well as the results of the Project’s many empirical studies. The creation of co-governance systems of shared power between government and low-income communities of color is proposed as a set of institutional reforms that focus on building community capacities, power, resources, and inclusion – not mere participation – in governance. The article then explores issues in the design of co-governance systems and the features of co-governance that are necessary to advance resilience justice among low-income communities of color.

Keywords: resilience justice, green & blue infrastructure, environmental racism, systemic inequality, co-governance, community resilience, governance reform, climate change, capacity-building, empowerment, inclusion