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Frontline and marginalized communities often serve as the vanguard for responding to environmental issues, especially given the fact that marginalized communities are so often the first to bear the brunt of environmental impacts (Brehm & Pellow, 2022; Otto et al., 2017). However, communities often rely upon outside or non-governmental funding to address environmental concerns and to build the necessary organizational infrastructure needed (Jenkins et al., 2017; Thompson et al., 2023). As has been well-documented, external money often applies pressures to communities to make their campaigns palatable to donors (Hermansen et al., 2017). However, research on environmental issues often reveals sociopolitical drivers to crises or disparate impacts which may negatively reflect upon hegemonic institutions such as local corporations or government actors. This raises important ethical questions regarding community-based work since social work research may lead to conclusions which local community partners believes put their relationships with donors or community partners at risk. This research therefore investigates how these pressures manifest in environmental campaigns and what the stakes are for researchers working with such communities.
Methods:
Ethnographic research was carried out with a community organization addressing both water scarcity and deforestation in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas Mexico. 20 interviews with social service practitioners, city residents, and environmental activists as well as one year of fieldnotes were produced over the course of length of this study. Interview participants were recruited via purposive sampling. Participants were chosen based on their role in the organization, their experience conducting environmental campaigns, and their long-term residency in the city. Interviews were recorded in-person and were then transcribed. Interviews and fieldnotes were then coded according to a flexible coding analysis on DeDoose, a qualitative analysis software.
Findings:
Analysis reveals that community relationships with major donors and community allies often exerted a censoring pressure on community leaders who were running environmental campaigns. This was most prominent when these relationships were financial, with major donors being regularly defended and supported even when evidence of their misdoings were clear. In environmental campaigns, this also led to outward-facing publications on social media to avoid confrontational or “politicized” rhetoric. Instead,environmental concerns were framed neutrally or actors responsible for environmental harm were omitted from being mentioned. Furthermore, work with communities often posed significant ethical issues for the researcher. Ethnographic data demonstrated the need for research questions to be posed in non-implicating ways and for analysis of environmental harm to be explored as technical issues with community members who were closely aligned with implicated community actors and major corporations.
Conclusion and Implications:
Findings highlight the ways in which community-based research can be implicated by the financial and political ties that communities have to donors and other actors. Even when community actors are aware of the political nature of researchers’ inquiry, anonymizing community sources when publishing results may be necessary in order to ensure communities are still able to access resources. Social work researchers must therefore consider how their publications might impact communities they are working with.