Reflexive Partnerships for Stakeholder-Driven Community Resilience: Lessons from Flood Mitigation Collaborations in the Midwest

Abstract:

That “context matters” for building community partnerships is broadly acknowledged and often repeated. Yet considering context often stops at simply revising content for different audiences, leaving partnership-building practices and their assumptions unexamined. We should develop more reflexive practices, therefore, to include evaluating the underlying assumptions about stakeholders’ motivations, reasonings, senses of place and personhood in various civic cultural contexts and how those assumptions advance or impede equitable partnerships for the co-production of serviceable science. This presentation will explore how local collaborations arise from different stakeholders and actors’ motivations, as well as how various actors’ expectations for one another align or are in tension with lived experiences within the landscape of stakeholder-driven community resilience initiatives. Using case studies of flood mitigation collaborations in under-engaged communities in the Midwest, I examine approaches for relationship-building among community-facing organizations, civic leaders, scientists, and interested individuals through semi-structured interviews, digital participant observation, and surveys. Preliminary observations demonstrate the need for a more reflexive set of small-scale practices for local collaborations that enable broader dissemination of proven approaches, while also incorporating ways to evaluate assumptions to match process with place to advance equitable, stakeholder-driven collaborations that co-produce serviceable truths and actionable science.