environmental science & policy 10 (2007) 150–161

available at www.sciencedirect.com

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envsci

Community knowledge in environmental health science:

co-producing policy expertise

Jason Corburn *
School of International & Public Affairs, 400 Avery Hall, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA

article info abstract

Published on line 2 November 2006 As lay publics demand a greater role in the environmental and health decision-making that
impacts their lives, policy makers are being forced to find new ways of understanding and
Keywords: incorporating the expertise of professionals with the contextual intelligence that commu-
Local knowledge nity residents possess. This paper highlights how co-producing science policy, where
Co-production technical issues are not divorced from their social setting and a plurality of participants
Exposure assessment engage in everything from problem setting to decision-making, can contribute to more
Public health scientifically legitimate and publicly accountable decisions. Through a detailed case study
utilizing participant observation, ethnographic field work, semi-structured interviews, and
reviews of original documents, this paper highlights how residents in a low income, Latino
immigrant neighborhood in New York City organized their knowledge to participate in and
significantly alter a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency exposure assessment. This paper
reveals both the contributions and limits of local knowledge in environmental health
governance and how the co-production framework can contribute to more technically
credible science and democratically accountable policy.
# 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction disparities, are asserting that their lived experience, intimate

In communities around the world, concerned lay publics are
demanding a greater role in the scientific research and
decision-making processes impacting their lives. From acti-
vists questioning the safety of genetic engineering and
biotechnologies more generally to those concerned with
environmental and diseases disparities, lay people are
increasingly wrangling with scientists about issues of truth
and method, exerting policy pressure on them from the
outside and also locating themselves on the ‘‘inside’’ of
research. These activists are challenging not just the political
use and control of science and expertise, but also the content
and processes by which technical knowledge is produced by
claiming to speak credibly as experts in their own right. Lay
people, especially the most disadvantaged populations
experiencing the greatest environmental hazards and health
knowledge of place, chronic disease coping strategies, and
cultural traditions help qualify them as people who know
about things scientific and who can partake in the often
exclusive but powerful discourse of science policy making.
One result is that environmental and public health adminis-
trators are under new pressures to acknowledge, identify,
and take account of community knowledge, and to find
new ways of fusing the expertise of professional practitioners
and scientists with the contextual intelligence – or local
knowledge – that community residents possess (Irwin, 2001).
This paper highlights the cognitive and normative con-
tributions and limitations of community knowledge in science
policy. While neither romanticizing nor essentializing com-
munity knowledge, the paper suggests that the knowledge
used to legitimate science policy ought to be co-produced, or
simultaneously dependent on both natural and social order,

* Tel.: +1 212 854 7148.

E-mail address: Jtc2105@columbia.edu.
1462-9011/$ – see front matter # 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2006.09.004
 environmental science & policy 10 (2007) 150–161
professionals and lay people, state institutions and non-
governmental organizations. I elaborate on the slippery
concept of co-production and how it might be used to inform
practice by highlighting how residents in an immigrant New
York City neighborhood engaged in research and decision-
making to address hazards from subsistence diets of locally
caught fish. Through a detailed case study, I reveal how
professionals from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) and lay community members co-produced the collective
knowledge-base used to legitimate decisions and how com-
munity members confronted power inequities in order to
enter the politically powerful discourse of science policy
making.
In the Greenpoint/Williamsburg (G/W) neighborhood of
Brooklyn, New York, residents are practicing science and
making policy. This largely poor, immigrant neighborhood has
some of the City’s worst health outcomes, including elevated
rates of asthma, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS, low birth weights,
and mental illness, and is also home to the City’s highest
concentrations of environmental pollution (Karpati et al.,
2004). Due in part to the concentration of pollution and illness
in G/W, the EPA selected the neighborhood as the site for the
agency’s first community-based cumulative exposure assess-
ment, a project intended to move the agency away from the
single toxin, cancer-focused, and expert-driven risk assess-
ment model of environmental health governance toward a
model driven by cumulative exposures, multiple determi-
nants of health, and a more democratic process (NRC, 1996;
EPA, 1999, 2001). Drawing from over 7 years as a participant–
observer in community meetings, ethnographic field work,
reviews of original documents, and in-depth interviews with
residents and government actors, I describe how residents of
one Brooklyn neighborhood co-produced science policy
expertise by tapping community knowledge that helped
highlight a hazard previously ignored by the EPA, gather
new data the agency was unable to collect, and link technical
analyses with the social, economic, and cultural context
where it was being performed.1 More specifically, I analyze
how a coalition of community members and activists groups,
led by an organization called the Watchperson Project,
gathered their own quantitative and qualitative information
about subsistence anglers and local vulnerability more
generally. Scaling-up from this case, the paper offers general
recommendations for how the co-production frame offers
insights for new practices, methods, and institutional designs
that can result in more technically legitimate, socially just,
1
All data for these analyses were collected after the research
event took place. Thirty-two interviewees, selected from commu-
nity-based organizations, resident participants, and government
agency personnel, were interviewed using open-ended questions
and asked to reconstruct events. Original documents from agen-
cies and community organizations along with popular media
articles were also reviewed to construct this case study. The case
also incorporated three months of ethnographic fieldwork by the
author in three different community organizations and observa-
tions at over twenty meetings. The research protocol and a parti-
cipant consent form were reviewed and approved by the
Institutional Review Board of Hunter College, City University of
New York.
151
and democratically accountable environmental science
policy.
2. Professional and local knowledge in the
policy sciences
The policy sciences have a long history of questioning the
appropriate reach of professional expertise and whether there
is a role for non-professional knowledge in analyses and
decision-making. One classic formulation, from John Dewey’s
(1954), The Public and Its Problems, asked how increasingly
technocratic political regimes could be more democratic and
engage various publics. The solution for Dewey was a division
of labor where experts analytically identified problems and
citizens set a democratic agenda for addressing them. Dewey
sought to devise methods and conditions of public debate,
discussion, and persuasion where experts and citizens could
integrate their knowledge and understandings (Dewey, 1954).
More recent work in the policy sciences has made the
stronger claim that technocratic knowledge-making is failing
to solve the most pressing social problems and public
administrators ought to rely more heavily on lay knowledge.
For example, Lindblom and Cohen (1979) call for elite
professional knowledge to be replaced with ‘‘useable knowl-
edge,’’ which they define as ‘‘knowledge that does not owe its
origin, testing, degree of verification, truth, status, or currency
to distinctive. . . professional techniques, but rather to com-
mon sense, casual empiricism, or thoughtful speculation and
analysis’’ (Lindblom and Cohen, 1979, p. 12). Skocpol, in Civic
Engagement in American Democracy (1999, p. 495), echoes the
concern with technocratic knowledge, skeptically stating that
‘‘today’s professionals see themselves as experts who can best
contribute to national well being by working with other
specialists to tackle complex technical and social problems.’’
Skocpol derides privileged professionals for no longer seeing
their role as ‘‘working closely with and for non-professional
fellow citizens’’ or helping to lead ‘‘locally rooted’’ associa-
tions for public problem solving.
A recent practice in environmental health science that
aims to address the challenges raised by Dewey, Skocpol, and
others is Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR).
Now endorsed by the U.S. National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences as a method for generating technically
legitimate and socially accountable science, CBPR aims to
combine professional techniques with community insights to
define problems and research questions, gather and analyze
data, and direct action and evaluate interventions (O’Fallon
et al., 2003). This method, building from Participatory Action
Research (PAR), aims to make research more democratic,
ensure the poor and people of color are not excluded from
decisions that impact their lives, and incorporate local
knowledge and lived experience into research and action
(Chambers, 1997; Israel et al., 2005). Similar goals are driving
the use of ‘science shops’ in Europe and Australia, where
various publics have participated in policy discourses over
nuclear power, mad cow disease, and genetically modified
organisms (Leydesdorff and Ward, 2005). While these pro-
cesses have increased lay participation in science policy, one
of their noted weaknesses is that they often fail to engage with
152 environmental science & policy 10 (2007) 150–161
how scientific knowledge and notions of expertise emerge in
the first place, become institutionalized, and tend to bound-
out of their cognitive domain other ways of knowing and doing
(Nowotny et al., 2001). Participation alone, then, does not
answer the problem of how to democratize technological
societies; the substance, not just the mechanics, of science
governance must be reframed.
3. The co-production of science policy
expertise
One emerging science policy frame, called co-production,
questions institutionalized notions of expertise from the
outset and hard demarcations between nature and society
(Jasanoff, 2004). The frame of co-production aims to open-up
how authoritative technical knowledge is produced in society
and gets stabilized and institutionalized over time, so that it
becomes a ‘given’ or ‘taken for granted truth’. Co-production
also extends Habermas’ (1975) critical discussion of ‘decision-
ism’, or a model where policy processes are conceptualized as
a series of completely unrelated decisions over issue meaning,
authority and legitimacy, each one of which has no interaction
with any other. Instead, co-production aims to problematize
the origins and substance of the meanings of policy issues,
who was included or left out of generating these meanings,
and builds on constructivist work in the social sciences
highlighting that scientific legitimacy is simultaneously a
social, political and material phenomenon, none of which can
be disentangled from the other (Hacking, 1999). The notion of
co-production also aims to extend analyses within the
interpretive turn in the social sciences, particularly post-
structruralist frameworks, by highlighting the often invisible
role of knowledge, expertise, technical practices and material
objects in shaping, sustaining, subverting or transforming
relations of authority, particularly that of the state (Scott,
1998).
Co-production as used here should not be viewed as a full
fledged theory – claiming law-like consistency and predictive
power – but rather as an idiom, or a way of interpreting and
accounting for complex phenomena so as to avoid the
strategic deletions and omissions of most other approaches
to understanding the role of the public in science policy
(Jasanoff, 2004, p. 3). For example, Hacking (1999) describes
how the American legal and policy processes created new
‘social kinds’ of child abuse and ‘recovery memory’ in
response to specific cultural anxieties of the 1980s and, in
the process, generated ‘objective’ evidence of these phenom-
ena. In another example of co-production, Keller (1985, p. 131)
showed how concepts central to the practice of science, such
as objectivity and disinterestedness, came to be gendered as
masculine through centuries of rhetorical usage and that the
construction of the ‘laws of nature’ have political origins.
Thus, a central aim of the co-productionist framework is to
help clarify how power originates, where it gets lodged, who
wields it, by what means, and with what effect within the
complex network of science policy making (Wynne, 2003).
Co-production can also be understood by contrasting it
with two other, perhaps more dominant, modes of lay-
professional interaction in science policy making, namely the
deficit and complementary models (Brown et al., 2002).
According to the deficit model, professionals view lay people
as not having sufficient knowledge about scientific and
technological problems and needing to be educated in order
to see the world more like professional scientists. The deficit
model also assumes that scientists will agree on the ‘correct’
information that lay people need to know so they understand
technical problems from the professional’s vantage point
(Yearley, 2000). This model perpetuates the notion that
‘science speaks truth to power,’ or the idea that technical
input to policy problems has to be developed independently of
political influences in order to act as a constraint on political
power (Price, 1965).
The complementary model rejects the notion that only
professional knowledge should inform science discourse and
instead invites lay people into the process to raise issues of
‘risk perceptions’ and value questions (Slovic, 1991; Douglas
and Wildavsky, 1982). While lay people offer values and weigh-
in on questions of fairness in the complementary model,
professionals retain autonomy over technical analyses and
policy decisions. Science, in the complementary model, is still
viewed as offering disinterested and apolitical ‘facts’ to policy
processes. The major difference between the deficit and
complementary models is that in the latter lay publics are
given an opportunity to comment on the fairness or relevance
of predetermined facts, not, for instance, on whether or not
the original framing of the issue may appear one way to those in
power and quite another way to the marginal or the excluded
(Schon and Rein, 1994).
Both the deficit and complementary models tend to view
lay or non-professional knowledge with skepticism, noting its
populist, anti-intellectual, majoritarian, and moralistic ten-
dencies (Levitt and Gross, 1994). Populist political movements
are also criticized for ‘get the government off my back’
economic libertarianism, xenophobia and ethnocentric
nationalism (Kazin, 1995). Local knowledge in environmental
and health controversies is characterized by these critics as
parochial and condemned to ‘the neighborhood’ and this
particularism, they say, violates core scientific values of
universality, replicability, and objectivity (Breyer, 1993).
The co-production model aims to respond to these critics
by suggesting that science and technology are not ‘contami-
nated’ by society, but rather embed and are embedded in
‘‘social practices, identities, norms, conventions, discourses,
instruments, and institutions—in short, in all the building
blocks of what we term the social’’ (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 3). Co-
production not only aims to bring the social back into science
policy making, but also to explore how this knowledge is
applied, stabilized and institutionalized over time. Thus, co-
production is not only a reaction to the incompleteness of the
deficit and complementary models, but it is also a critique of
the realist ideology that persistently separates the domains of
nature, facts, objectivity, and reason from those of culture,
values, subjectivity, and emotion in policy and politics more
generally (Latour, 2004).
3.1. Co-production, practice and local knowledge
In practice, co-production might emphasize the contingency of
all expertise and that neither professional nor lay knowledge
 environmental science & policy 10 (2007) 150–161 153

can ultimately put to rest the uncertainty of environmental
health problems. The unknown, unspecified, and indetermi-
nate aspects of science policy remain largely unaccounted for
and often silenced when technocrats claim that an issue is
‘purely technical.’ Co-production emphasizes that knowledge
alone will not fill these gaps, but must be accompanied by new,
more democratic processes and methods of professional-lay
engagement (Epstein, 1996).
In order for this negotiation to happen, the knowledge and
expertise of local people, so often ignored in professional
science, needs to be made concrete and tangible. Yet, defining
local knowledge is far from simple. As this case study will
show, the most useful way to understand local knowledge is to
reveal how it differs in practice from professional ways of
knowing and doing, while not romanticizing the ‘local’ as
always superior to other ways of knowing and doing. In
addition, I seek to avoid reifying and essentializing local
knowledge by suggesting that ‘local’ and ‘professional’ should
never be understood as invariant, monolithic, binary cate-
gories, but rather as useful frames for capturing different
approaches to knowledge production.
While this paper aims to define local knowledge in practice,
I offer a characterization here of ideal-type representations to
orient the reader (Table 1). First, local knowledge is often held
by members of a community that can be both geographically
located and contextual to specific identity-groups. This means
that a ‘knowledge community’ might be a neighborhood and/
or a group with a shared culture, language, religion, norms or
even interests. In contrast, professional knowledge is gen-
erally held by members of a profession, discipline, university,
government agency or industrial association.
Second, local knowledge is often acquired through life
experience and is mediated through cultural tradition.
Practitioners of local knowledge make explicit their reliance
on evidence from time-honored traditions and narratives, and
acknowledge that this knowledge should be easily accessible
and widely shared. Local knowledge rarely conforms to
technical rationality, particularly the need to search for causal
models and rely on universal principles and theories for
getting to the ‘truth’—both standard practices in most
professions (Habermas, 1970).
Credibility is central to all knowledge claims. Since local
knowledge is rarely instrument dependent, its credibility
comes in part from actual sights, smells and tastes, along with
the tactile and emotional experiences encountered in every-
day life and tested through years if not generations of practice
(Briggs, 1995). Yet, community members often make at least
three different claims based on experiential evidence. The first
claim represents a type of local knowledge that gives meaning
to or frames a problem, and in environmental policy this might
mean shifting discourse by asking whether a risk is necessary
rather than if it is acceptable. A second type of claim identifies
or poses a problem, is reflected in statements like ‘‘I’ve seen sick
people,’’ and highlights contextual knowledge that allows
professionals to focus on things they may have missed. A third
claim reflects a type of local knowledge that hypothesizes a
relationship between a hazardous exposure and illness. This claim
is reflected in statements such as: ‘‘I know if dioxin and
mercury are going to come out of an incinerator stack,
somebody’s going to be affected.’’ Too often professionals
assume that local knowledge is only of one kind, dismiss the
other claims, and miss the different contributions local
knowledge can make to problem solving.
A fourth knowledge characteristic explores how claims are
tested, authenticated, and legitimated. Local knowledge is
generally tested in public narratives, community stories, and
other public forums. Professional knowledge is generally
tested through journal peer review, expert advisory boards,
the courts, or the media (Nelkin, 1992). Admittedly, all these
characterizations can fluctuate, particularly when activists
organize to try and stake-out part of the traditional scientists’
terrain—be it in academic journals, the courts or the media.
4. Co-producing environmental health
expertise in Brooklyn
The G/W neighborhood, located in Northwest Brooklyn, has
approximately 160,000 residents, 35.7% of which live below the
poverty line and less than half of the adults over 24 years of age
have a high school diploma or higher level of education (U.S.
Census, 2000). The ethnically diverse neighborhood is
approximately 42% Latino (mostly Puerto Rican and Domin-
ican), 24% Hasidic Jew, 13% African-American, and 10% Polish
and Slavic immigrant (U.S. Census, 2000). The neighborhood is
also one of the City’s most polluted; it has the largest amount
of land devoted to industrial uses among New York City’s 59
community districts, the largest concentration of Toxic

Table 1 – Characterizing local and professional knowledge for environmental science policy
Knowledge production question Local knowledge Professional knowledgea

Who holds it? Members of community—often Members of a profession, university,

identity group/place specific industry, government agency;
sophisticated NGOs
How is it acquired? Experience; cultural tradition Experimental; eidemiologic
What makes evidence credible? Evidence of one’s eyes, lived Highly instrumentally mediated; statistical
experience; not instrument significance; legal standard
dependent
Forums where it is tested? Public narratives; community Peer review; courts; media
stories; courts; media
a
By professional knowledge, I am focusing on regulatory science, which consists of activities aimed at improving existing practices,
techniques and processes to further the task of policy development, including: knowledge production; knowledge synthesis, such as
evaluation, screening and meta-analysis; prediction, such as predicting future risks or costs (Jasanoff, 1990, pp. 76–77).
154 environmental science & policy 10 (2007) 150–161
Release Inventory (TRI) reporting industries in the City, a
sewage treatment plant, over 20 solid waste transfer stations,
a radioactive waste storage facility, 30 facilities which store
extremely hazardous wastes, and 17 petroleum and natural
gas storage facilities (NYC DEP, 1997).
Due in part to the hazards they face, residents in this
community have a history of collaborating on environmental
issues. In the early 1990’s, three community based organiza-
tions in the neighborhood, El Puente, the Polish Slavic Center, and
United Jewish Organizations, formed the first multi-ethnic
environmental coalition in Brooklyn, called the Community
Alliance for the Environment (CAFE), in order to stop the
construction of a municipal waste incinerator (Greider, 1993).
The CAFE is an eclectic mix of Latino youth, called the Toxic
Avengers, Hasidic Jewish families, and Polish, Dominican, and
other Caribbean immigrants. The CAFE filed a lawsuit to force
the City to comply with federal Clean Water Act regulations at
the Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant located in the
neighborhood, resulting in a city-funded environmental
benefits program that created a neighborhood watchdog
group called the Watchperson Project (ICLEI, 1993). The CAFE
and the newly formed Watchperson Project joined forced in
1999 to file an environmental justice Title VI Civil Rights
lawsuit against the city claiming that its rules for siting waste
transfer stations unfairly targeted their disproportionately
poor and minority neighborhood (NEJAC, 2000).
Due to the presence of hazards, a lack of health studies,
and the history of local activism, the EPA chose to pilot its
Cumulative Exposure Project (CEP) in Greenpoint/Williams-
burg (Talcott, 1999). The CEP reflected a new governance
approach within EPA aimed at exploring alternatives to
traditional risk assessment that could simultaneously
account for multiple hazards, exposure pathways, and
health outcomes (NRC, 1996; EPA, 2001). The CEP also
attempted to respond to critiques raised by the environ-
mental justice movement that risk assessment processes
regularly excluded the poor and people of color, populations
increasingly asked to bear society’s most dangerous hazards
(IOM, 1999). According to then EPA Administrator Carol
Browner:
We are increasingly able to assess not simply whether a
population is at risk, but how that risk presents itself. In
addition, we are better able in many cases to analyze risks
by considering any unique impacts the risks may elicit due
to the gender, ethnicity, geographic origin, or age of the
affected populations. . . and whether a cumulative expo-
sure to many contaminants, in combination, poses a
greater risk to the public (EPA, 1997).
Drawing from new technical guidance, EPA scientists in the
Office of Policy, Economics and Innovation developed a
research methodology for the Brooklyn-based CEP that
included exposure models assessing health hazards from
food-borne toxins, air toxics, drinking water pollutants, and
lead. The EPA team also partnered with staff from the New
York City Department of Environmental Protection in order to
obtain neighborhood-specific data. At the request of Eva
Hanhardt, Director of the DEP’s community outreach program,
the EPA scheduled a series of community meetings to present
the research protocol they had already developed to local
residents (Handhardt, 2000).
During one of the community meetings, Fred Talcott,
Director of the community study from the EPA, presented the
agency’s research protocol for assessing resident exposures to
air, water, soil, and dietary hazards. According to Talcott, the
dietary analysis was not the primary focus of the assessment,
and the agency was focusing its research efforts on a new, air
toxics dispersion model that estimated cancer risk at the
neighborhood scale (Talcott, 1999). The dietary assessment
was included to show the agency was attentive to ingestion
hazards and intended to complement the study of inhalation
and dermal contact exposure pathways.
During the community meeting, agency scientists
explained that the dietary assessment would combine data
on contaminant concentrations in specific foods with data on
patterns of consumption. Since the agency did not have
neighborhood-specific data on what residents were eating, the
scientists told residents they would use estimates of local food
consumption from the National Health and Nutrition Exam-
ination Survey (NHNES) which calculated an ‘‘average urban
diet’’ for residents living in the Northeastern United States
(EPA, 1999). Contaminants of concern consisted of pesticide
residues and common industrial pollutants found in produce,
meats, and dairy products.
Residents at the meeting reacted to Talcott’s presentation
with questions and disbelief. According to Samara Swanston,
Executive Director of the Watchperson Project, the idea that
the EPA was going to assess cumulative exposures for their
community using the default NHNES assumptions raised
immediate concerns. She noted:
When we heard they were going to assess dietary risks
using some default diet, we all just rolled our eyes. You’ve
got Hasidic Jews here eating only kosher; Poles eating an
Eastern European diet; Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and
Guyanese. You’re gonna tell this community we’ve got an
‘‘average American’’ diet? (Swanston, 2000).
For many residents, the EPA assumption of an ‘‘urban
default diet’’ represented a lack of sensitivity to local culture,
stirred mistrust, and aligned with their experience of
environmental injustice. According to Inez Pasher, a resident
and chair of the environmental committee of the local
community board:
The use of default assumptions really raised skepticism that
the project was not going to do anything more than just
rubber-stamp what community members already knew;
that we are a highly exposed community. It was no different
then the city assuming we wouldn’t mind if one more power
plant or waste transfer station was built in the neighbor-
hood. You know, it might of seemed like a little thing to them
[EPA], but the wrong assumptions about what people eat had
most of us looking at the EPA project as another wasted effort
by government on a study that was going to sit on a shelf
somewhere and not help nobody (Pasher, 2000).
The agency’s engagement with the community raised a
series of concerns for local people. First, the project was
 environmental science & policy 10 (2007) 150–161
presented to community members with crucial decisions
already made, such as what was going to be studied, which
data would be used, and who was going to perform analyses.
The agency also followed a ‘decide–announce–defend’ model,
where professional experts acting alone make key project
decisions, announce these to the public, and defend their
decisions in hearings with a skeptical public (NRC, 1996). Both
the inaccuracy of the scientists’ predictions and their lack of
meaningful engagement with residents were seen as proof of
the fallibility of professional expertise, reinforced suspicions
that universal standards were insensitive to local conditions,
and generated a severe skepticism that any recommendations
emerging from the study would improve the neighborhood
environment. The EPA selected the community because of its
history of activism and ethnic diversity, but failed to under-
stand how these factors ought to change its standard
operating procedures and default assumptions. After the
public meeting, Talcott of the EPA emphasized how surprised
he was that community members reacted with skepticism: ‘‘In
the absence of information on the eating habits of these ethnic
groups, we chose to use the default assumptions. We didn’t
anticipate that this would raise such a red-flag with the
community’’ (Talcott, 1999).
5. Subsistence anglers
During the community meeting, residents also suggested that
a large number of local people were eating and probably
surviving off a diet of fish caught in the East River (Swanston,
2000). This was the first time EPA had heard of this potential
health hazard. According to one EPA official:
When the residents raised the concern about people fishing
out the East River we initially responded by saying, ‘we
understand recreational fishing can pose a health risk, but
we do not think the practice of eating fish is that
widespread.’ But, the residents insisted that fishing was
not a recreational activity but a matter of survival and acted
as a staple of some families’ diet. To be honest, we were in
disbelief and shocked.2
While the EPA was skeptical of the community’s concerns,
in part because residents only had anecdotal evidence about
the extent of local subsistence fish diets, the agency also knew
that if the claims were true they presented a potentially
serious toxic exposure for local people that they knew very
little about.
Throughout the meeting, residents repeatedly asked the
EPA to take their subsistence fishing claims seriously. Some
residents stated that many families were living off a
subsistence diet of East River fish due to poverty and cultural
tradition (Swanston, 2000). A group of Latinos stated that since
many of the anglers were immigrants and non-English
speakers, they would likely be reluctant to speak with outside
researchers, particularly those from the federal government,
about their practices (Penchaszadeh, 2000). The Watchperson
Project encouraged the EPA to incorporate information about
2
EPA official interviewed on condition of anonymity.
155
toxic fish diets into the agency’s study and, in an effort to
assist in this process, the community group offered to help
collect information on local angler practices. The community
group argued that using local residents as field researchers
would be the only way to get accurate information because the
anglers wouldn’t trust outsiders enough to speak honestly
with them about their practices (Swanston, 2000).
Initially, the EPA researchers were reluctant to allow a
community group to gather data for their exposure assess-
ment (Talcott, 1999). Instead, the EPA agreed to partake in a
community-led tour of the piers where locals were fishing. The
tour was a significant event for convincing EPA about the
seriousness of the problem and that community-members
could be trusted to gather credible information. After spending
time with community members and witnessing anglers at the
piers, the EPA agreed to help the Watchperson Project collect
information about the practices of local anglers. According to
Talcott of the EPA:
After the tour and hearing from residents that they were
eating fish from the East River, we felt we had no choice but
to let the community group gather the data. For a number
of reasons, including language, cultural barriers and
potential trust issues, it seemed that local people were
best situated to gather these data. This was one situation
where residents raised an issue we hadn’t considered,
defined the extent of the problem, and provided the data for
analysis (Talcott, 1999).
Working with the EPA, the Watchperson Project developed
a protocol to interview anglers in order to identify approxi-
mately how many people were eating fish from the East River,
the amount and frequency of fish consumption, and the types
of fish anglers and their families were eating (EPA, 1999).
Volunteer community members were trained by the Watch-
person Project staff and epidemiologists from the EPA in
survey techniques and face-to-face interviewing. Community
members spent 3 months interviewing anglers at the India
Street and the North Seventh Street/Kent Street Piers along the
East River, visiting the piers twice a day, eventually observing
and interviewing over 200 anglers. In order to complete the
survey, each angler was asked about their age, race, country of
origin, the number and age of people in their family, and the
species and number of the fish they regularly caught and ate
(EPA, 1999). Since the interviewing was conducted during the
summer, each interview included questions about seasonal
variability and frequency of catches in different seasons.
Finally, interviewers also asked anglers why they ate fish from
the East River, if they knew the fish could be hazardous to their
health, other types of food they fed their families, and where
this food was purchased.
5.1. Angler survey findings
The community-gathered information was divided by age and
ethnicity, and separate categories were created for whites,
Poles, African-Americans and Latinos. The Watchperson
Project survey found that almost all the anglers were Latino
males between the ages of 16 and 60 years old. The family size
of each angler ranged from 3 to 10 persons, and all anglers
156 environmental science & policy 10 (2007) 150–161
interviewed noted that at least one family member was under
the age of 19 (EPA, 1999). The survey revealed that local anglers
were catching between 40 and 75 fish per week, averaging 57
fish per week, and that each family member of an angler was
eating approximately 9.5 fish per week (EPA, 1999).
All the anglers interviewed listed the same four species as
the most frequently consumed fish: blue crab, American eel,
blue fish and striped bass. Most anglers reported that they ate
whatever they caught. Fish samples were gathered, toxicolo-
gical tests performed, and these data were compared with
prior studies of East River fish contamination by the New York
State Department of Environmental Conservation (EPA, 1999).
From these data, the EPA determined that the contaminants of
concern in the locally caught fish included cadmium, mercury,
chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, dioxins, PCBs, arsenic and lead.
The quantitative survey data were given to EPA scientists
who then generated a consumption rate for G/W residents in
grams per day. The community survey data was found to be
consistent with fish consumption rates from other urban areas
where residents relied on subsistence diets of locally caught fish
(Burger and Staine, 1993). Resident exposures were then
calculated based on fish tissue contaminant concentrations
found in actual samples and the consumption rates. Falling
back to the risk assessment model, EPA calculated a life-time
cancer risk for adult subsistence anglers in G/W and found that
the risk exceeded one in 10,000 (1  10 4) for every exposure
scenario (EPA, 1999). Compared with the EPA’s acceptable
cancer risk of one in a million (1  10 6), the risks to subsistence
anglers in G/W were deemed significant, but would have been
missed without the community-generated information.
5.2. Angler narrative findings
In addition to the quantitative data, interview narratives were
captured during the survey process and these stories help give
contextual meanings behind angler practices. For example,
many of the Caribbean-immigrant anglers stated that fishing
and feeding their families with their catch was a practice that
helped them reconnect to home-land cultural traditions. One
angler stated, ‘‘when I fish and eat ‘em, I remember who I am
and where I’m from.’’ Fishing enabled often marginalized
immigrants to reconnect with and revalue a lost identity and,
in a world of great uncertainty, stay connected with something
familiar.
Interview narratives also provided a window into how
locals understood and rationalized their practices. As one
Latino angler stated:
Mira, we ain’t stupid. We know this river isn’t the cleanest.
It’s probably polluted. I mean, I wouldn’t swim in here or
nothin’. But this cove over here, it’s pretty clean. . . and, the
fish we catch come in from the Atlantic, they don’t feed in
here. So, they don’t got no chemicals in them. . . we don’t
know anyone whose gotten sick from eating what we catch
here. . . I was taught how to recognize a bad one [fish]; you
look for lesions, make sure it is the right color and if it
smells funny, we throw it back. . . we clean and cook ‘em
real good too. That’s the best way to make them safe. If I
thought there was a problem, I wouldn’t be feeding these
fish to my kids, right? I know a clean catch.
This interview highlights both the complexity and limita-
tions of using only local knowledge in science policy. For
instance, the angler suggests that some fish might be
contaminated (‘‘the river isn’t the cleanest’’), but rationalized
his actions by believing that the fish he caught and ate were
safe (‘‘this cove is clean;’’ ‘‘the fish we catch come in from the
Atlantic’’). The interview also highlights that local fishermen
think they know how to ‘‘recognize a bad one’’ through visual
inspection and by smell and that it is possible to make
potentially dangerous fish safer through cleaning and cooking.
While the interview reinforces that cultural identity, norms,
conventions, and practices can not be divorced from assess-
ments of hazardous exposures, it also highlights the danger of
romanticizing local knowledge as always in harmony with
natural and human systems and superior to other ways of
knowing (Agarwal, 1995).
6. The social construction of the risk
environment
Interview narratives also highlighted how macro social
structures influence exposure to toxins. For instance, many
of the interviewees described their diets of East River fish as
one of many practices aimed at coping with poverty and
neighborhood gentrification. As one angler noted: ‘‘A good
catch out here every week can mean the difference between
making my rent or puttin’ my family on the street. As soon as
those yuppies moved into our building the rent doubled.’’
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, close to 23% of neighbor-
hood residents were unemployed and, in the largely Latino
Southside of Williamsburg, over half the families were
receiving public assistance. Median rents increased 62%
between 1990 and 2000, while the percentage of Latinos
(Hispanic, non-white) decreased during the same period by
12% (U.S. Census, 2000).
In addition to high housing costs, many anglers mentioned
that the lack of affordable food alternatives was another
reason they ate East River fish. Interviewees noted that many
of the local ‘bodegas’ that tended to provide food stuffs for the
Latino population did not accept food stamps or vouchers
from the supplemental nutritional program for women,
infants and children (WIC). A 2004 study by the not-for-
profit, Center for an Urban Future in New York City, found that
in the Latino Southside of Williamsburg, there are only four
supermarkets serving over 70,000 people (McMillan and
Woodward, 2004). These findings are consistent with other
studies suggesting that low income and minority neighbor-
hoods lack affordable and quality grocery stores (Zenk et al.,
2005).
Finally, interviews with immigrant anglers revealed that
fishing was a practice that kept them tied into networks of
friends and family that were crucial for their survival in New
York. One angler described how fishing connected him to basic
needs:
The guys who fish down here [the river], we got each other’s
back. Know what I mean? When I first got here, this one
brotha helped my family get free health insurance from the
state, told me about the churches offering free meals, and
 environmental science & policy 10 (2007) 150–161
even hooked me up with a construction job for a few weeks.
This is the first place I come if my family needs somethin’.
While the immigration experience can often be associated
with a series of social disruptions for individuals and families,
fishing was one practice these Brooklyn immigrants used to
stay connected to protective community networks.
The angler narratives help reinforce the notion that when
local people weigh-in on science-policy issues, they are not
just concerned with questions of truth and method, but
perhaps more fundamentally question the meanings of
problems and whether science is the proper frame of reference
at all. With the imposition of a risk assessment model on local
people, the EPA presumed that issue meaning and local
identities were not problematic and the ‘real’ challenge was
getting the ‘right data.’ As these narratives suggest, the policy-
framing questions of ‘what are the issues’ and ‘what kind of
knowledge is in principle salient’ were initially non-negotiable
or closed by the EPA, but these questions were fundamental to
how local people understood the hazards they faced. The co-
productionist framework helps highlight how this case is
about more than the exclusion of legitimate actors, but also
about commitments to prediction, control of issue definition,
and the definitions of science policy. Reflecting on their work,
Swanston of the Watchperson Project, noted:
Our data on who was fishing and how much they ate was
important because it changed the inputs into EPA’s
assessment, but the stories of local people, their struggles
to feed their families, and the barriers that exist in this
neighborhood for making healthy choices, showed them
[EPA] that this was more than just an environmental
problem. I think we showed that you can’t separate issues
of poverty, immigration, culture, discrimination, and
segregation from environmental risk in our world (Swan-
ston, 2000).
7. Co-creating policy solutions
The work of activists not only influenced the assessment, but
also policy solutions. As the angler survey findings were
shared among community organizations, a consensus
emerged that traditional regulatory responses, such as fishing
advisories, education campaigns, and fishing bans, were
unlikely to be effective (Swanston, 2000). During a meeting
with the EPA discussing what to do with the survey findings,
Samara Swanston of the Watchperson Project proclaimed:
‘‘You can’t tell people to just stop fishing! This totally ignores
who they are, their culture, and what they need to do to
survive in this city.’’ A coalition of community-based
organizations and regulatory agencies was formed to develop
interventions more aligned with the economic, political and
social contexts of daily life in the neighborhood.
The New York State Department of Environmental Con-
servation, the local chapter of the Sierra Club, and three
community based organizations, Neighbors Against Garbage,
The Greenpoint Waterfront Association for Parks and Plan-
ning, and The Friends of the India Street Pier, joined the
Watchperson Project and EPA to jointly develop a set of
157
interventions. The coalition began by organizing a waterfront
festival where, through theater, dance and street-art, educa-
tional materials about the hazards of eating locally caught fish
were distributed to anglers and their families in English and
Spanish. The groups also partnered to clean-up a vacant lot to
create the neighborhood’s second community garden so that
local people could begin to grow their own food.
The community coalition also partnered with the Pratt
Institute Center for Community and Environmental Develop-
ment (PICCED), to map how the neighborhood’s zoning made
it difficult for supermarkets to locate in the neighborhood. As
part of this effort, the community coalition engaged local
residents in a community-wide land use planning process that
developed recommendations for rezoning the neighborhood
to encourage the development of new supermarkets, afford-
able housing, and park space (Perris and Chait, 1998). In 2005,
the rezoning plan was approved by the New York City Council
and included the City’s first-ever inclusionary zoning ordi-
nance, which specified that any new housing development
had to include a certain percentage of affordable units for low
and moderate income families (NYC DCP, 2005).
The community coalition lobbied city, state, and federal
environmental protection and public health agencies
demanding that they increase monitoring of G/W firms
dumping waste into the East River and a tributary, Newtown
Creek—a heavily polluted waterway that forms the northern
boundary of the neighborhood (Ketas, 2001). The coalition
framed the health threats to subsistence anglers as an
overlooked environmental justice issue that was potentially
exacerbated by lax enforcement of local water pollution
regulations (Swanston, 2000). The Watchperson Project and
Riverkeeper, a water pollution watchdog group, teamed-up with
the EPA to monitor effluent from local polluters. In May of
2005, after over 5 years of the monitoring partnership, a
concrete manufacturer was found guilty of illegally dischar-
ging concrete slurry into Newtown Creek and another lawsuit
was filed to force Exxon/Mobil to account for health problems
residents believe are associated with the company’s 17 million
gallon oil spill sitting underneath the neighborhood (Con-
fessore, 2005; EPA, 2005).
8. Re-characterizing community knowledge
This case study helps situate the conceptual framework of
local knowledge (Table 1). The process highlighted that policy-
relevant information is held by community members and if
ignored a potentially lethal hazard might be missed. Too often
in environmental health science a lack of data leads to the
assumption of a lack of harm. Community knowledge does not
replace professional science nor devalue scientific knowledge
itself, but rather can ‘‘re-value forms of knowledge that
professional science has excluded’’ (Cozzens and Woodhouse,
1995, p. 538).
This case study suggests that professionals should not a
priori define what counts as the ‘community.’ Local knowledge
in this case came from members of a geographically defined
neighborhood, different immigrant communities, and a
community of practitioners, specifically anglers. The case
also demonstrates that local knowledge can offer insights
158 environmental science & policy 10 (2007) 150–161
about places and populations that take history and biography
into account, aspects that professional science routinely
ignores. Community members revealed that the history of
their place and individual biographies – from immigrant
experiences to strategies for coping with poverty – matter for
understanding environmental policy issues. However, under-
standing local knowledge also means embracing intersection-
ality and anti-essentialism—or the notions that no person has a
single, easily stated, unitary identity and that no absolute
‘truth’ exists from any one perspective (Haraway, 1991).
Community knowledge also emerged from life experiences
and time-honored cultural traditions. While some community
knowledge was quantified into the professional risk model,
the narratives did not conform to technical rationality.
Importantly, as the interview about catching clean fish
suggests, community knowledge can be as fallible as profes-
sional science, and must be tested through public dialogue,
verified by other community members, and continually
measured by the extent to which it matches lived experiences.
The case also illustrates that community knowledge can
rectify the tendency toward reductionism in science and extend
the knowledge-base used for decision-making. For instance,
community residents pointed-out where scientists were relying
on an insupportable degree of aggregation, such as the EPA
assumption of an ‘urban default diet.’ Community scientists
can highlight an epistemological flaw when professional
models ‘wash-out’ particularities within the community, such
as the heterogeneity of the Brooklyn population, and the social
and material aspects of exposure and vulnerability.
Community knowledge can also improve scientific assess-
ments by re-valuing information that was ruled out by
professionals as ‘a way of living’ or matters of individual
choice. For example, diets consisting of locally caught fish were
not something the EPA considered and it was not until the
Watchperson Project took agency representatives on a tour of
the neighborhood that the scientists treated fishing as more
than a lifestyle issue. By revealing how high housing costs and
land use planning influenced dietary practices, community
members highlighted how macro social structures impact the
everyday ‘risk’ decisions of the poor. When challenging
professional models in this way, Brooklyn activists were not
merely saying ‘you have to give weight to me and my
experience’ as a narrative voice, but rather ‘your professional
model of how I’m going to react (my body or my community) to
this exposure is flawed because you are not taking a holistic
enough look at how I move through the world.’
Beyond its cognitive contributions, community knowledge
can also make normative contributions to environmental
science and policy. One such contribution is towards
enhanced procedural democracy, which occurs when pre-
viously marginalized and silenced voices are included in
research and decision-making, especially in a world where
expertise tends to exclude people. By explicitly recognizing
community-expertise, science policy making can provide the
opportunity for communities to speak back to the often
hegemonic power of scientific expertise and ensure that
problems are defined, analyzed, and addressed in ways that
reflect actual lived experiences. Issues of research transpar-
ency, trust, ownership and self-determination continue to
concern community groups, especially the poor and people of
color who have either been ignored by researchers or, when
asked to participate as subjects, are often abandoned in the
end by researchers intent on analyzing results only for their
own advancement and not for community improvement
(Collin and Collin, 1998). By including local knowledge in
environmental science, community members are more likely
to ‘see themselves’ in science, thus finding it more acceptable,
potentially saving time and money in policy making. Local
knowledge can also raise previously ignored distributive
justice questions, forcing science to examine who is at risk,
not just whether a particular level of risk is acceptable.
9. Co-producing science policy
This paper has argued that the science for environmental
policy can benefit from the co-production framework, but
clearly this will not happen easily. Professionals remain
skeptical of local knowledge and will almost always find it
easier to defer to the politically powerful knowledge of private
interest groups or other professional scientists (Gaventa,
1993). Since lay people face significant entry barriers into
science policy, this case suggests they will need to challenge
the power of elites by (a) building coalitions, (b) linking local
insights with meta-policy frames, and (c) employing inter-
mediaries or boundary spanners.
The political power of community knowledge comes, in part,
when residents enter the terrain of professionals and challenge
conventional ways of framing problems, employing methods,
and using knowledge in decision-making. Since local people are
generally at a disadvantage in processes that judge scientific
credibility, they must often first organize social movements to
both gather their information and attempt to make these
insights influential with professionals. Social movements not
only act as organizers of local environmental health knowledge,
but they can give public voice to private suffering and gain the
attention of elected officials and other policy professionals.
Civic coalitions organized into social movements can influence
professionals by changing the terms of political discourse (i.e.,
civil rights movement), establishing a permanent place on the
political agenda for issues (i.e., feminism raising awareness of
gender relations), organizing alternative policy-oriented delib-
erative forums (i.e., the environmental justice networks), and
creating the fear of political instability and so drawing forth
governmental response. In this case, the Watchperson Project
organized a coalition of community residents to perform the
survey and coordinated another coalition of community groups
to apply local insights to new policies.
A second political condition that can make community
knowledge influential with professionals is the linking of
neighborhood issues to national and global social change
movements. In this case, the Watchperson Project linked the
EPA project to larger policy discussions about risk assessment,
environmental justice, and the living conditions of urban
immigrants. They also managed to challenge the EPA’s
framing of dietary risks as place-neutral, linking the study
to a growing epidemiological research agenda recognizing the
place-based or neighborhood effects on health (Kawachi and
Berkman, 2003; Macintyre et al., 1993). Scaling-up local issues
to more broad policy frames is often predicated on the
 environmental science & policy 10 (2007) 150–161
existence of a well-organized local coalition. One example of
this dynamic is how grassroots anti-toxics activists linked-up
with civil rights activists to create the national environmental
justice movement.
However, in order for local coalitions to successfully link-
up with and attach-onto national and global social move-
ments, community members often need to explore allegiances
with organizations that may not be in their traditional
networks. In Granovetter’s (1973) classic work, weak ties were
more important than strong ties among groups because when
organizations are tightly coupled and interact frequently,
ideas and information are re-circulated through the network.
However, when organizations with ‘weak ties’ (organizations
having few over-lapping interests and infrequent contact)
interact, a greater possibility for new information to be passed
between groups exists. The different ethnic and interest
groups that came together in Brooklyn helped strengthen
‘weak-ties’ and form a broad-based coalition that was able to
link local knowledge with wider struggles for social justice.
A third political condition that makes community knowl-
edge successful in science policy is the presence of inter-
mediaries—an institution or agent who can champion and
translate local information into professional terms. Inter-
mediaries, also called boundary spanners, can be profes-
sionals themselves or effective local people affiliated with a
respected institution. The Watchperson Project and their
Director, Samara Swanston, a Caribbean-American lawyer,
were intermediaries that successfully organized local exper-
tise and framed this knowledge in a way that resonated with
professionals. Scientists and policy administrators often need
‘‘translators’’ when working in communities, particularly
immigrant and culturally distinct communities, because the
value of local knowledge to professional work may not be
obvious at first glance. Importantly, intermediaries do not
speak for local people, but instead work to increase the
‘standing’ of what they know in professional settings.
10. Recasting environmental science and
expertise in policy making
As this study has shown, the co-production framework does
more than just highlight the importance of community
knowledge in policy making, but also raises core questions
about science-policy and democratic governance. Co-produc-
tion can fundamentally open up previously taken-for-granted
aspects of scientific autonomy and objectivity used to under-
write legitimate political decisions. As the Brooklyn activists
revealed, co-production might also offer a framework for a
new science policy paradigm that can meet new demands for
social accountability and public transparency. For instance,
the 1998 passage of the Shelby Amendment in the U.S. Congress,
which mandates public access to all scientific research
generated by public funds,3 can be interpreted as one response
3 4
Public Law 105–277 (1998). The Office of Management and
Budget narrowed the scope of the law to apply not to all publicly
funded research, but only to research actually relied upon in
policy-making. However, the interpretation of the amendment
remains unresolved.
159
to the loss of confidence in previously autonomous policy-
relevant scientific endeavors. Similarly, in Canada, Britain,
and India, government and public concern with the ethical
implications of genetic and nano-technologies has prompted
experiments with diverse forms of public involvement in
science policy, such as citizen juries, consensus conferences,
and referenda.4 The implication is that governments and lay
publics are no longer content with the unchecked autonomy of
the professional scientific community, and the raising of new
science policy questions is stimulating innovations in demo-
cratic governance–not calls for more objective science.
Yet, participatory opportunities may not by themselves
ensure that science policy is representative and democratic.
As this case has shown, lay publics need to expend social
capital and time to organize coalitions, share information, and
gather what they learn into a coherent message. Unorganized
communities may be at a disadvantage, as will be well-
organized communities whose participation may occur too
late in decision-making process to offer alternatives to
dominant or default options. In addition, some participatory
processes may be too ad hoc or issue-specific to have a
sustained influence over science policy. Importantly,
increased participation and transparency in science policy,
whether by lay publics or other professionals, might exacer-
bate rather than quell controversy and paralyze decision-
making. More critical and sustained analyses are needed to
address these and other challenges to how co-production
might work in practice.
Despite these challenges, community knowledge did play a
central role in the co-production process in Brooklyn, helping
to extend, reshape, and contextualize professional science.
Clearly, more work needs to be done to further articulate how
to practically manage such public processes in a policy
environment where hundreds of decisions are made every
year, where science increasingly happens in corporations that
have little if any public accountability, and where the financial
and social costs of lay participation in science policy far exceed
those incurred by professionals. Co-production is no panacea.
As an emerging idea, co-production offers a policy frame for
developing polycentric, interactive, and multi-party processes
of knowledge-making within institutions that have worked for
decades to keep professional ‘expert’ knowledge away from
the vagaries of populism and politics. As the Brooklyn activists
have shown, co-producing expertise offers hope for more
reflexive science policy that is open to the possibility of
unforeseen consequences, makes explicit the normative that
lurks within the technical, and acknowledges from the start
the need for plural viewpoints and collective learning.
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Jason Corburn is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of
Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the School of Inter-
national and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He has held
positions as the Co-Director of the Center for Occupational and
Environmental Health at Hunter College, City University of New
York, and as a Senior Planner with the New York City Department
of Environmental Protection. His most recent book is entitled,
Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice
(MIT Press, 2005).