Community-Engaged Research for Environmental Justice

Dear Colleagues,

Community-engaged research (CER) advances environmental justice by centering the local knowledge and concerns of frontline communities in the research agenda, creating equitable and mutually beneficial relationships between these communities and professional researchers, and co-producing actionable data that can influence policies and practices. This Special Issue welcomes empirical and conceptual articles on environmental justice that employ any CER approach, including participatory action research, community-based participatory research, citizen science and community science, and Indigenous-led and decolonial research. This research may involve collaborations with community organizations and advocates by academic and other professional researchers, and/or government agencies. We are especially interested in CER that recognizes the intersectional roots of environmental injustices in colonialism, racism, economic exploitation and patriarchy, and that can inform policy and practical responses to urgent issues of environmental justice, including:

• Climate justice, just transitions and debunking false solutions to climate and environmental justice;
• Cumulative impacts of environmental and social harms, including relevant methodologies for measuring and mapping these impacts, modeling climate risk and social vulnerabilities, and conducting scans of current or proposed policies for addressing cumulative impacts;
•  Planning, land use and zoning, such as efforts to counter green gentrification and climate gentrification, develop equitable climate mitigation and resilience plans, etc.;
• Alternative approaches to community economic development, such as social and solidarity economies, buen vivir, degrowth and regenerative economies;
• Food justice and food sovereignty;
• Health equity, such as addressing environmental health threats from pollution, land grabs, occupational hazards and sociospatial exposures to policing, spatial stigma and White spaces;
• Decolonization, such as strategies for Indigenous-led conservation and healthcare, land back, applying traditional ecological knowledge and restorative justice processes;
• Demilitarization and decarceration, including the environmental justice dimensions of immigrant/migration justice, conflict transformation, criminal justice reform and peace with justice;
• Democratizing legal, regulatory and public participation processes to increase the influence of environmental justice communities;
• Transforming government and academia to support and enable environmental justice research, praxis, policy or funding.

Prof. Dr. Chad Raphael
Prof. Dr. Martha Matsuoka
Dr. Ana Baptista
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Social Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• community-engaged research
• participatory research
• citizen science
• community science
• environmental justice
• environmental racism
• climate justice
• decolonization