Community Capacity Building, Context, and Everyday Environmental Injustices: Rural Community Gardening and Organizational Networks in Central Appalachia

Open Access
- Author:
- Engle, Elyzabeth Whitney
- Graduate Program:
- Rural Sociology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 31, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Cynthia Clare Hinrichs, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Cynthia Clare Hinrichs, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Kathryn Jo Brasier, Committee Member
Carolyn Sachs, Committee Member
Kai Arthur Schafft, Outside Member
Theodore Roberts Alter, Special Member - Keywords:
- Community Development
Rural Sociology
Appalachia
Community Gardening
Community Capacity Building
Environmental Justice
Mixed Methods
Community Capitals Framework
Rural Development
Community Food Security
Organizational Sociology
Interorganizational Collaboration - Abstract:
- In the past century, the progression of industrialization, globalization, neoliberalism, and devolution of government services has contributed to uneven development and growing inequalities in many parts of urban and rural America, the outcomes of which are especially concentrated in the region of Central Appalachia. This region has been noted, studied, and stereotyped for its historical and contemporary conditions of persistent poverty, high rates of unemployment and outmigration, low rates of educational attainment, environmental exploitation, and increasing human health disparities. As some federal development programs and policies have worsened these conditions of uneven development, more place-based initiatives have emerged in response at the grassroots level. Many such initiatives strive to build more localized systems of food production and consumption, which have been endorsed as sources of comprehensive sustainable development in other contexts. However, more recent scholarship has suggested that the impacts of such initiatives may also reproduce the socioeconomic inequalities observed in more conventional food and agricultural systems, especially when research on and beneficial outcomes of these initiatives remain biased toward more privileged populations and communities. Further research is needed to examine how and for whom grassroots, place-based efforts grounded in localized food and agricultural systems contribute to sustainable development in places and for people who are more socioeconomically and environmentally marginalized, such as Central Appalachia and its inhabitants. Working from the interface of rural sociology, environmental sociology, and community development studies, this dissertation research has three main objectives: (1) to understand if and how rural community gardening programs, as place-based, grassroots initiatives, contribute to sustainable community development in a region long affected by the processes and outcomes of uneven development; (2) to document the multiple outcomes of these initiatives and learn how they are distributed among different people and communities; and (3) to evaluate how the processes and outcomes of these initiatives are shaped by the socioeconomic and biophysical context of places. To address gaps in both scholarship and practice relevant to sustainable rural development, the dissertation research was collaboratively designed as a participatory action research project with Grow Appalachia, a regional community food security and community gardening initiative based at Berea College in Kentucky. Grounded in the conceptual framework of community-capacity building and implemented through a mixed methods research design, the study results are captured in three empirical papers. Drawing upon organizational sociology and community development scholarship, the first paper uses interviews and a survey of Grow Appalachia staff to examine how broker organization-led rules structure the practices and experiences of an interorganizational network, leading to particular benefits, but also costs for the overall network and program participants. Using interviews with Grow Appalachia staff and gardening program participants, the second paper illuminates four facets of the everyday environmental injustices experienced via community gardening activities in communities highly impacted by Central Appalachia’s history of natural resource dependency and coal extraction. Finally, the third paper applies the community capitals framework to analyze data from a network-wide survey of rural gardening program participants to examine how county context – socioeconomic and environmental – is associated with seven perceived program outcomes at the community-level. Findings demonstrate that grassroots, place-based development initiatives grounded in localized food systems can lead to a number of positive outcomes across the Central Appalachian region, building individual and organizational capacities that are necessary to then build overall community capacity. However, this research further shows that such initiatives may simultaneously contribute to uneven development and/or exacerbate social and environmental inequalities. The first paper demonstrates that while the broker organization’s rules contributed more to benefits than not in how the community-based organizations and their community food security programs functioned, those rules also generated costs and barriers that reproduced social inequalities compromising the network’s overall impacts on improved community food security and community development. At the more individual level, the second paper demonstrates that the everyday environmental injustices experienced across natural, built, human health, and socioeconomic dimensions in this region constrain program participation and beneficial outcomes, particularly for more disadvantaged households affected by chronic illness, geographic isolation, and environmental hazards. Lastly, at the larger community level, the associations between context and community-level outcomes examined in the third paper demonstrate that people who experience some form of advantage, be it residence in areas of better environmental quality or having higher household income, may be more likely to perceive better community gardening program outcomes, especially across more tangible dimensions like natural and financial-built capitals. Considered together, the uneven outcomes of rural community gardening initiatives were found to be largely driven by organizational resource scarcity, inaccessibility of initiative activities and services, and the environmental and socioeconomic contexts in which they were operating. These results underscore the need for complementary top-down and bottom-up place- based efforts that are context driven, establish and maintain safe and healthy environments, and provide sufficient resources for community-based organizations and leaders to ensure equitable sustainable development processes that enhance the wellbeing of all peoples in all places.