Moving Ethnography into Advocacy: Comparative Case Studies of Environmental and Climate Justice Work in California and Louisiana

In the past two years, a range of organizations in California and Louisiana, including government agencies, public universities, and nonprofits, have responded to environmental and climate injustice in a variety of ways. In this paper, we juxtapose two projects that we have worked on as social science researchers at EcoGovLab, situated at the University of California, Irvine. The first is a project funded by the state of California and managed by a nonprofit to design a high school climate change and environmental justice curriculum in which we have been involved as writers and ethnographers for two and a half years. The second is an engaged ethnographic project focused on how health equity advocates in nonprofits and Louisiana state agencies work together to address the structural drivers of health, including the intersecting social and environmental injustices that produce health inequities. Our goal in this analysis is to show how “successful” environmental and climate justice advocacy in these two divergent social, political, and physical contexts looks very different. For example, our partners in Louisiana do not identify as environmental justice advocates for important strategic reasons. We ask: what are the affordances of the relationships to the state in these differently situated projects? We describe and analyze the tactics we have used in these projects to engage a range of people–in community-based organizations, state agencies, universities, and schools–as environmental justice stakeholders, and how these tactics depend on context. In our curriculum work in California, for example, we see building students’ and teachers’ comfort with the messy and incomplete data of environmental justice work as a key strategy. In sum, our comparative analysis of partnering with state and state-adjacent organizations in California and Louisiana demonstrates how engaged ethnography can inform and contribute to addressing environmental injustice, calling for methodological pluralism in justice work.