Community, Roles, and Relationships in Michigan’s Most Challenging Areas of Concern: A Mixed-Methods Case Study Approach

Abstract

The 1987 Amendments to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement designated 43 Areas of Concern (AOC) which prioritized coastal areas throughout the Great Lakes found to have highly degraded environments, due to decades of unbridled industrial progress. While AOCs have historically struggled to make progress due largely to lack of funding, the introduction of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative in 2010 has driven historic progress toward Beneficial Use Impairment removal among many AOCs and eventual ‘delisting’ from the AOC program. While many AOCs are making strides towards delisting, other areas have fallen behind due to substantial contamination, among other complex area-specific factors. We were tasked with investigating three AOCs - the Kalamazoo River, the Rouge River Watershed, and the Saginaw River and Bay - in order to understand the complex narratives embedded in these areas, and offer recommendations to EGLE that could assist with boosting progress. Recognizing that AOC program effectiveness over the long-term is intimately tied to community understanding and support, our objective was to study community engagement and participation within these three AOCs. To address this, we employed a case study approach, consisting of participatory observation research and interview methods, to understand perceptions on relationships, roles, and values, as well as beneficial uses and their respective impairments held by state-level officials, PAC members, and local community members. These data were filtered, sorted, and analyzed using a mixture of inductive and deductive approaches to qualitative data analysis, through the use of the Neighborhood Model (Williams et al. 2018). Through our case studies, we found key themes involving both synergy and discord within roles, relationships, values, and understanding of beneficial uses among state (EGLE), PAC, and community levels of AOC involvement. While our three AOCs of study each possess unique structural and geographic barriers which inhibit the delisting process, we noted profound similarities in barriers to AOC progress; the most prominent involving communication and outreach to the broader community. We found that the communities who live within the neighborhood of AOC waters are largely unaware of the AOC program and its mission to restore their local water resources, due in part to a lack of concerted and organized AOC-specific communication. Through increased AOC-specific outreach, community members will be able to fully realize AOC restoration efforts that provide them benefits to their local water resources, mobilizing their sense of place-based attachment. Given this, our recommendations to EGLE provide suggestions for navigating structural barriers, as well as methods to bolster community outreach within the AOC program.