Abstract As the impacts of climate change increasingly and disproportionately affect indigenous peoples, equitable approaches to regional climate change adaptation must center the voices, needs, and priorities of Indigenous communities. Although the tribal climate change principles identify actionable recommendations to address the unique needs of Indigenous peoples in the contexts of climate change adaptation efforts undertaken at the Federal level in the United States (U.S.), there has yet to be exploration of how such principles might be applied at the regional level. Through semi-structured qualitative interviews with 18 representatives from inter-Tribal organizations and non-Tribal organizations engaged in regional climate adaptation in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, this research sought to describe challenges faced by, and opportunities available to, non-Tribal entities when engaging with Tribes on regional climate adaptation initiatives. All respondents reported high levels of motivation to work with Tribes on climate adaptation and identified several perceived benefits of integrating Tribal partnerships and indigenous ways of knowing into regional climate adaptation initiatives. Respondents underscored the need for strong, trusted relationships that respect the sovereignty and priorities of Tribal nations to guide engagement. However, non-Tribal organizations’ own capacity constraints, perceived Tribal capacity constraints, and institutional cultures rooted in colonialism and structural racism were discussed as obstacles to meaningful engagement. As such, we identify an urgent need to prioritize sustained investments in both Tribal and non-Tribal actors’ partnership capacities and climate change adaptation capabilities to place Indigenous voices and needs at the forefront of regional climate change adaptation planning and implementation.
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Engagement for Life's Sake: Reflections on Partnering and Partnership with Rural Tribal Nations ☆
In this paper, we reflect on our collective experiences engaging with Anishinaabe Tribal Nations in the Great Lakes region to support Tribal sovereignty in decision‐making for food, energy, and water (FEW) systems. In these diverse experiences, we find common lessons. The first set of lessons contributes new empirical knowledge regarding the challenges and opportunities that rural Great Lakes Tribal Nations navigate for enacting sovereignty in decision‐making. Our experiences illustrate that while Tribal Nations benefit from a broad and deep commitment to sovereignty and many cultural strengths, they are often challenged by shortages in administrative capacity; technical support; and embeddedness in economic, socio‐cultural, and institutional dynamics that must be further negotiated for Tribes to enact the sovereignty to which they are inherently (and legally) entitled. Productive partnerships struggle when university partners fail to acknowledge these realities. The second set of lessons addresses the potential for, and challenges of, effective engagement processes. We find that engagement with university professionals is often mismatched with the priorities and needs of Tribal Nations. Effective engagement with Tribal Nations requires practical knowledge, applied assistance, and grounded, genuine relationships; these requirements often run counter to the institutional structures and priorities imposed by universities, federal funding agencies, and student recruitment. These findings, associated with both empirical knowledge and lessons on process, highlight shared insights on formidable barriers to effective engagement. Based on our firsthand experience working with rural Tribal Nations on FEW decision‐making, we share these reflections with particular focus on lessons learned for professionals who engage, or hope to engage, with Tribal Nations in rural settings and offer opportunities to transform engagement processes to better support the immediate, practical needs of rural Tribal Nations.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10486875
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Rural Sociology
- ISSN:
- 0036-0112
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Indigenous communities on reservation lands across the USA continue to demonstrate their leadership in climate resilience through active engagement in co-producing interdisciplinary solutions to adaptation. These initiatives, however, often ask Indigenous peoples to provide knowledge and resources to assist with adaptation efforts beyond their communities, which can limit their capacity to act locally. Trusting their expertise, we utilize a participatory research approach that asks tribal government employees, agriculturalists, researchers, and outreach professionals to prioritize the climate information and data they perceive as necessary to enhance the climate resilience of water resources of Indigenous communities. In doing so, this study provides empirical evidence specific to the climate adaptation needs of Indigenous communities on reservation lands in the arid southwestern USA. Study respondents prioritize climate information and data that serve to assess local climate change impacts, enhance food security, and integrate and protect the traditional knowledge of their communities. In this arid and predominantly rural region, respondents prioritize water quality data as their highest need followed by streamflow and air temperature data. They most frequently access their respective tribal government sources of climate information and data. These results indicate that localized climate data and information are highly prioritized. Future research and action to alleviate information and data gaps should account for the relevance, accessibility, and protection of these resources while prioritizing methods that ensure Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination rather than knowledge extraction.
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This NSF Advanced Technological Education (ATE) research and development project aims to design and test a Backtracking Technique for understanding the pathways students take through college and into careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and career and technical education (CTE), with the focus of this project on information technology (IT). The project gathers data about current and former students who started in the same cohort, includes institutional research data (e.g., grades, demographics, course-taking) and merges these data with employment data from surveys and lived experiences obtained from interviews. These data are analyzed to identify potential pathways and critical junctions that may lead to student success or other outcomes. The research team is led by a doctoral granting institution and a community college, and includes four additional community colleges that collectively serve rural and urban student populations. In this paper we share the potential of the Backtracking Technique to generate contextualized career pathway data for institutions and create visualizations that can aid in institutional decision-making through a study pilot. The pilot is an initial effort to test the project’s aims of integrating institutional data with phenomenological data to model student progression through post-secondary STEM programs. The analysis will identify and verify influencers that support or hinder student success. Quantitative data analyses will consist of descriptive and comparative methods, which will be verified and informed by open coding and thematic analysis of the qualitative data. We share how the systematic investigation of institutional and phenomenological data used in the Backtracking Technique has the potential to: (1) generate practical knowledge about academic/career pathways in information technology for use by stakeholders; (2) identify and examine relationships among these pathways, students experiences, and psychosocial factors; and (3) add to the analytical methods available to institutional research professionals to document, investigate, and visualize student pathway information using data dashboards. This ATE project has great potential to transform the technician preparation for the advanced technology fields that drive the nation's economy.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Scholars bridging the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and energy research in social sciences (ERSS) offer a rich and integrated conceptualization of how energy systems are imbued in social systems, including cultures, social structures, institutions, and social relations of power. Yet as fields of study, STS and ERSS are dominated by approaches to understanding nature, culture, and relationships among them with origins in western European Enlightenment thinking. In this article, we argue that the language of “imaginaries” provides an understanding of culturally organized normative commitments but may obscure attention to what are actually diverse and sometimes incommensurable yet legitimate plural ontologies. Tribal Nations, Indigenous communities, and other non-Western worldviews are not simply imagined; they offer different teachings regarding the relational and embedded realities governing relations among human and more-than-human beings across time and space. The field of STS has a rich history of exploring ontological controversies and provides insight into understanding diverse and competing perspectives in science and technology, yet without articulating the connection between this conceptual terrain and the lived realities of socio-technological system entrenchment or change. ERSS recognizes participation, energy system democratization, and even co-production as components of a just energy transition, while most typically thinking about participation as a methodology or research approach rather than as requiring consideration and even wholesale reconceptualization of ontological foundations. To advance convergent, transdisciplinary social science research in socio technological transitions requires grappling with plural ontologies regarding the reality of relations in the world. Here, we explore diverse ontologies shaping the realities of energy systems through the lens of Tribal Nations in the Great Lakes region in the United States. Ontologies that recognize reciprocal relationships among human and more-than-human beings as well as the sovereignty of these beings and their collective kinships suggest fundamentally different priorities for energy systems transitions. Moving beyond the language of imagination to recognize that cultures can involve diverse and sometimes incommensurable pluralistic ontologies is essential for developing inclusive and just frameworks for socio-technological system transitions.more » « less
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Abstract Large energy infrastructure is often socially and environmentally disruptive, even as it provides services that people have come to depend on. Residents of areas affected by energy development often note both negative and positive impacts. This reflects the multicategory nature of socioenvironmental outcomes and emphasizes the importance of careful, community-oriented decision making about major infrastructural transitions for processes like decarbonization. Quantitative tools like life cycle assessment (LCA) seek to collect and report comprehensive impact data, but even when successful, their value for decision support is limited by a lack of mechanisms to systematically engage with values-driven tradeoffs across noncommensurable categories. Sensitivity analyses designed to help decision makers and interested parties make sense of data are common in LCA and similar tools, but values are rarely explicitly addressed. This lack of attention to values—arguably the most meaningful set of decision inputs in such tools—can lead to overreliance on single issue (e.g. climate change impact) or proxy (e.g. monetized cost) outputs that reduce the value of holistic evaluations. This research presents results from preregistered hypotheses for a survey of residents of energy-producing communities in the United States (US) and Australia, with the goal of with the goal of uncovering energy transition-relevant priorities by collecting empirical, quantitative data on people’s priorities for outcomes aligned with LCA. The survey was designed to identify diverse value systems, with the goal of making it easier for users to identify and consider value conflicts, potentially highlighting needs for further data collection, system redesign, or additional engagement. Notably, results reveal remarkably consistent priority patterns across communities and subgroups, suggesting that the common LCA practice of equal prioritization might be masking decision-relevant information. Although this effort was designed specifically to support research on energy transitions, future work could easily be extended more broadly.
