Community-based participatory research in environmental health: A strategy to promote distributive and procedural justice

The environmental justice movement in the United States and globally has, since its inception, demanded both distributive justice, in how environmental hazards and benefits are dispersed geographically, and procedural justice, including full participation in knowledge production about environment problems and their potential health outcomes. With its commitment to action as an integral part of the research process, and to high level community involvement throughout, community-based participatory research (CPBR) is ideally suited to progressive efforts to study and address environmental justice issues. Indeed, for close to 30 years, CBPR has been in the forefront of some of the most important environmental justice efforts in the U.S. and globally, with many of the most long standing CBPR partnerships in public health located in the environmental justice movement. After briefly describing key principles of CBPR, this presentation will use diverse case studies to illustrate its contributions to both distributive and procedural justice in environmental health. It will emphasize as well how community-led issues selection, “ground truthing” and other community-engaged research methods, as well as local partner involvement in data interpretation, can strengthen both the science and the relevance of the research being undertaken. Case studies also will be used to illustrate how community-academic or health department partnerships have worked in the translation of findings into advocacy for environmental health policy change. Challenges in documenting the “evidence base” for CBPR as a strategy for environmental justice processes and outcomes will be discussed, along with the importance of rigorous evaluation of this work.