Raoul S. Liévanos and co-authors Fraser Shilling and Jonathan K. London published in Environmental Science and Policy
New article by Raoul S. Liévanos and co-authors Fraser Shilling and Jonathan K. London published in a special issue on collaborative governance and adaptive management in California’s Water Program, CALFED, in the international journal, Environmental Science and Policy.
In their article, “Marginalization by Collaboration: Environmental Justice as a Third Party in and beyond CALFED,” Liévanos and his co-authors Fraser Shilling (UC Davis Dept. of Environmental Science and Policy) and Jonathan K. London (UC Davis Dept. of Human and Community Development and Center for Regional Change) provide a critical analysis of the attempt to integrate the actors and principles of the environmental justice movement into one of the world’s largest ever federal-state-regional water governance collaboratives (“CALFED”). They also track some of the dilemmas faced in recent efforts by state governmental interests to renew the commitment to environmental justice in California’s water management programs concerning the state’s San Francisco Bay—Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region (“Bay-Delta”). They draw on a variety of qualitative fieldwork methods and archival research to argue: “[E]nvironmental justice in Bay-Delta planning can be understood as a ‘third party’ with a tenuous seat at the CALFED water management table. As such environmental justice is a useful lens through which to assess the state’s broader commitments and capacities relative to equity as a planning principal and outcome. We interpret the fate of environmental justice within Bay-Delta planning as indicative of the inherent tensions between systems based on increasing market dominance and state legitimation and the values of environmental justice based on distributive, procedural, and cognitive justice…We conclude that by learning from the mistakes of Bay-Delta planning, a positive model of collaborative, environmental justice-based planning for water and ecosystem management is possible” (Shilling, London, and Liévanos 2009:694). Get a copy of the article on Liévanos’s UC Davis sociology webpage.