The Impact of Public Deliberation and Identity-Based Storytelling on Civic Empowerment among Latinx Communities on Environmental Issues

ABSTRACT

Environmental issues already disproportionately impact communities of color in the U.S., where there is a long and well-established history of environmental racism. Despite efforts to diversify voices in deliberation, engaging marginalized populations remains a key challenge. Drawing from environmental communication, civic empowerment, and social identity literatures, this study conducted a field experiment within an environmental deliberative event among Latinx communities. We examined (1) to what extent deliberation affects process – and outcome-based empowerment, and (2) the impact of factual vs. storytelling deliberative material on empowerment. Our findings show that deliberation increased process-based, but not outcome-based, empowerment on environmental issues. We also found that participants exposed to storytelling had a larger increase in empowerment compared to those exposed to factual materials during the deliberation day. Implications for designing culturally responsive deliberations for environmental communication are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Public deliberation
• civic empowerment
• identity storytelling
• Latinx community
• climate change

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our NGO partner Wisconsin EcoLatinos for helping co-host this event and for guiding us about how to design the deliberation material that is accessible to the community members. We would like to thank Gavin Luther from UniverCity Alliance, Brenda González from South Madison Partnership, and Dominique Brossard from Department of Life Sciences Communication at UW-Madison for providing guidance for this project. We would also like to thank our community members, the facilitators, and notetakers who made the event possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term Latinx has gained traction within academic circles as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino/a. While Latinx has been praised for including marginalized communities and inviting conversation about gender, critics believe the term alienates Spanish-speaking individuals from conversations (de Onís, 2017). Only around 3% of Latinx individuals use the term (Noe-Bustamante et al., 2020). We emphasize that use of Latinx does not deny the existence of Latino/Latina (Coy et al., 2017). We use Latinx to remain inclusive of those who may not feel included in traditional self-identifiers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative: [Grant Number: MSN266625].