Community engagement has been broadly defined as involving communities in decision-making and in the planning, design, governance, and delivery of services. Community engagement initiatives that focus more on health interventions and less on a community are often grounded in a specific theory employed by researchers to understand the ways in which people develop, think or act. Examples of theories that motivated intervention design include social learning, social cognitive, social-ecological, coalition, diffusion of innovation, social network or behavioral theory (Brunton, et al., 2017).The need to promote improved human-environment interactions through stewardship is ever-pressing, which applies to terrestrial, marine, aquatic, and aerial environments in both rural and urban environments. The term environmental stewardship has been used to refer to such diverse actions as creating protected areas, replanting trees, limiting harvests, reducing harmful activities or pollution, creating community gardens, restoring degraded areas, or purchasing more sustainable products. It is applied to describe strict environmental conservation actions, active restoration activities and or the sustainable use and management of resources. Stewardship actions can also be taken at diverse scales, from local to global efforts, and in both rural and urban contexts (Nathan, Bennett & Edward 2018).Examples of the principles and strategies of environmental stewardship used in community engagement to build sustainable communities are:Ensuring representativeness – One of the challenges is how to ensure that those community members whose voices are heard are representative of the community; Ensuring equity – Communities are diverse, and particular care needs to be taken to ensure that the less powerful voices and groups are engaged and not marginalized; Establishing community views – One can seek to establish community views by summing the separate opinions of individual community members; Asking too much of community members – In seeking to involve community members in decision-making and partnerships there is a danger of asking too much of them, causing stress and exhaustion (O’Mara-Eves, Brunton & Thomas 2015).Low-income, minority, and tribal communities face an array of challenges. Many continue to deal with the types of disproportionate environmental concerns and lack of access to decision-making that sparked the environmental justice movement decades ago. Others, whose neighborhoods have been cleared of contaminated sites and are attracting new development, are confronting rising costs of living and displacement. The benefits of community engagement has been advocated as a potentially useful strategy to reduce health inequalities (O’Mara-Eves, Brunton & Thomas 2015).ReferencesBrunton, G., Thomas, J., O’Mara-Eves, A., Jamal, F., Oliver, S., & Kavanagh, J. (2017). Narratives of community engagement: a systematic review-derived conceptual framework for public health interventions. BMC public health, 17(1), 944.Nathan, J., Bennett, T. S. & Edward H. A. (2018). Environmental stewardship: A conceptual review and analytical framework. Environmental Management, 61(4): 597–614.O’Mara-Eves, A., Brunton, G. & Thomas, J. (2015). The effectiveness of community engagement in public health interventions for disadvantaged groups: a meta-analysis. BMC Public Health, 15: 129.
