Pieces of the Puzzle: Scaling Community-Engaged Research to a Statewide Level

Abstract

Community-engaged research has been pivotal in strengthening the impact of research efforts in policymaking by centering the voices of impacted communities to address environmental issues at the local level. CER at a statewide level presents opportunities to elevate local environmental justice issues to scale, but there are issues with how to do this and stay close to diverse local voices that are so much a part of community-engaged research methods. This article discusses the key components and tensions of scaling community-engaged research to a statewide level, using a 2024 equity assessment of the California Climate Investments jointly conducted by the USC Equity Research Institute and The Greenlining Institute as a case study. We posit that engaging in state-level CER can be challenging but equips researchers and local environmental justice leaders to both inform state-level policy recommendations and build state-level power. Below, we detail our experience of soliciting input from local community stakeholders and document how that led to recommendations around new policy, and more profoundly, about the need to build community power. We conclude with lessons learned and recommendations for future efforts to conduct larger-scale community-engaged research for environmental justice.

1. Introduction

Community engagement ensures that research is accurate and helpful to the communities that it aims to serve (Balazs and Morello-Frosch 2013). Community-engaged research (CER), as a research approach, is ultimately about sharing power; centering the priorities of communities that are most affected by injustice; and fostering long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships between communities and research institutions (Sacha et al. 2013). Due to the level of collaboration and relationship-building necessary to have meaningful community collaboration during the research process, CER tends to be focused at the local level (Bullard 1983; Sadd et al. 2014; Abdelatty et al. 2023). Focusing on the local geographic level allows researchers to dive deeper into specific policy issues and engage with local community-based organizations already connected to residents and their diverse perspectives.

Given that much of the current CER literature focuses on local-scale programs or initiatives, these studies do not typically discuss how to combine local perspectives into a larger and cohesive geographic narrative that illuminates commonalities and differences between communities. However, since environmental hazards that affect one locality permeate community boundaries and are, in fact, regulated at a statewide or federal level, CER researchers could benefit from multiple local-level perspectives in order to further environmental justice. As such, scaling up CER methods could be beneficial to statewide environmental justice (EJ) policy while still respecting the desire of so many environmental justice communities to speak for themselves—including those smaller localities that may not have the resources or advocacy infrastructures to do so at a statewide level.

In our 2024 equity analysis of the California Climate Investments (CCI), we engaged in a state-level CER process in partnership with The Greenlining Institute (Greenlining), a statewide environmental justice organization. The result was a report, A Call to Invest in Community Power: Lessons from 10 Years of California Climate Investments for the State and the Nation, that documented the process and how best to conduct effective community-engaged research at the statewide level (Lim et al. 2024). The report was shared directly to the primary administrator of CCI—the California Air Resources Board (CARB)—who expressed interest in implementing many of our recommendations. We present a case study of this statewide CER effort to analyze how scaling up to the state level uncovers important commonalities between different communities that are useful for statewide policy considerations.

1.1. The California Climate Investments and a Call to Invest in Community Power

With the implementation of AB32 in 2006, the State of California established the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), which is funded by auction proceeds from the state’s cap-and-trade program (California State Legislature 2006). Since 2014, some of these dollars have funded the California Climate Investments (CCI)—a suite of 70 programs meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve environmental, economic, and health outcomes (Office of Governor Gavin Newsom 2024). Subsequent legislation has focused the program to allocate at least 35 percent of CCI funding to disadvantaged and low-income communities (California State Legislature 2016). As of November 2024, $12.8 billion of CCI funding had already been implemented and delivered, with tens of billions more slated to fund future projects through at least 2030 in affordable housing, transportation, clean air incentives, wildfire prevention, land conservation, and more (California Climate Investments 2025). The latest CCI annual report indicates that 73 percent of CCI funding so far has been directed toward underserved or low-income communities, which have been the most directly impacted by environmental pollution—far above the program’s initial goal of 35 percent (California Climate Investments 2025).

The idea of independently assessing how CCI spending was distributed in the state was first brought to the USC Equity Research Institute (ERI) in 2021 by The Greenlining Institute (Greenlining), a community-engaged policy organization whose mission centers on building economic and environmental resilience among communities of color. Justice40—a federal commitment by the Biden Administration to devote 40 percent of certain climate dollars to disadvantaged communities (The White House 2021)—had just launched, and across the nation, federal stakeholders were trying to figure out how to create a climate investment scheme that would benefit communities long burdened with pollution and shortchanged by previous investments. California’s program—CCI—was being looked to as a model for the nation.

Within California, however, initial conversations with EJ leaders revealed that there were concerns about whether CCI was more show than substance—as described below. Indeed, Greenlining and others were concerned about having this dynamic replicated at a federal level without any real evaluation of whether communities benefited from the program and how they felt about it, particularly because there were many initial concerns that the source of funding was from a program—cap-and-trade—that many EJ organizations had strongly opposed (Méndez 2020). As a result, ERI and Greenlining went beyond CCI self-reporting to examine the investments to date, and in doing so employed CER methods across the state to gather firsthand accounts from diverse stakeholders about their experiences with CCI. While many nuances emerged—as expected when speaking to community members from areas with different dynamics and histories—this process also illuminated many shared experiences that helped build our list of recommendations to different state bodies and administrators affiliated with CCI, more in Section 3.

The quantitative part of our work involved analyzing the CCI database. This was no small task since the database had not been organized with geographic and other equity dimensions; one important part of our work included determining ways to track impact and then communicating this to state officials who were, fortunately, receptive to suggestions for improvement. In this effort, we found that the majority of CCI funding was indeed going towards disadvantaged and low-income communities, which make up CCI’s Priority Populations. Further, most of this funding went towards the types of programs that EJ leaders across the state identify as desirable—programs such as transportation, housing, and more.

However, when we shared this initial distributional data with environmental justice stakeholders, one strong thread that emerged was that they questioned if these dollars were actually making improvements in disadvantaged communities, or if they simply appear to be doing so while actually funding harmful projects (like dairy digesters, for example—which have since been discontinued for CCI funding) or funneling dollars to businesses with the right address but little connection to their communities. These sorts of questions led the way in our qualitative efforts, where we conducted ten case studies of individual CCI programs that represented diverse objectives, addressed distinct environmental issues, and focused on different benefiting populations.

For each case study, we interviewed program administrators and community-based organizations that received funding. These selected programs included:

• Transformative Climate Communities (TCC).
• Community Solar Pilot.
• Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC).
• Forest Health.
• Low Carbon Transit Operations Program (LCTOP).
• Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP).
• Community Air Protection Incentives (AB 617).
• High-Speed Rail.
• Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation (SALC).
• Dairy Digester Research and Development Program (DDRDP).

We also conducted focus groups in three communities around the state to get on-the-ground perspectives on the impacts of CCI on specific places. These community perspectives gave us insight into the relative successes and challenges of CCI, and helped us uncover another common thread: CCI funding was most effective in areas with the most community power—that is, where community organizing and engagement from CCI program development through execution shaped how much these dollars had a felt impact in communities.

The nuanced findings we were able to offer in our research were only possible due to the level of engagement with both statewide program administrators and community-based organizations across the state, offering their experiences and insights. Implementing CER methods by working with community organizations in multiple localities allowed us to see how and where CCI has been successful, and where it can be strengthened. Furthermore, we found that CCI programs themselves were the most promising and impactful when community insights were centered–further reinforcing the importance of and need for community voice in research and programmatic development. For more details on findings and recommendations, see Section 3 below.

1.2. Community Engaged Research (CER), Briefly

CER itself is an umbrella term that encompasses many different research practices, including community-based participatory research (which works directly with community members themselves in the collection, interpretation, and dissemination of data, instead of community organizations as our study did), citizen science, and action research. These types of research practices share a broad intention of involving community organizations and leaders in the research process (Raphael and Matsuoka 2024). Research by Bullard, United Church of Christ, and other pioneers of the modern environmental justice movement have helped to shift Western paradigms of environmental justice research in recent decades from conducting research on communities to institutionalizing CER practices with communities, responding directly to community concerns about the siting of waste facilities in communities of color (Bullard 1983; Commission for Racial Justice 1987; Raphael and Matsuoka 2024). These early works demonstrated the mutual benefit of community engagement in EJ research to both academics and community members, and researchers soon began engaging communities directly in their work—a practice which continues today through various CER methodologies (Raphael and Matsuoka 2024).

Given the broad nature of CER as a field, community engagement can occur at different stages of the research process and with varying degrees of community participation, from consultation at the end of the process to full community empowerment in decision-making throughout the research process (Luger et al. 2020). Effective CER has been found to not only prioritize respect for the communities at the heart of the research but also help develop a sense of community self-determination that corrects the histories of extraction that have often resulted from research (Mikesell et al. 2013). Community partners can also utilize research efforts to their own benefit by obtaining better data for their own organizational goals, and to change institutional narratives on the validity of community knowledge (London et al. 2022). However, CER itself is often hampered by vague definitions of what constitutes meaningful “engagement,” which can offer little in actually benefiting the community (Bertram and Bullock 2023).

In addition to meaningfully involving the community throughout the research effort, CER must also carefully consider context. Some key contextual factors that researchers consider are the community’s capacity to engage in the research, power dynamics between researchers and community partners, and the historical (often harmful) relationships between the two entities (London et al. 2020a; London et al. 2022; Eder et al. 2023). As a result, CER can result in a mutually beneficial partnership and process that happens with communities, instead of communities being subjects of research by academics (Raphael and Matsuoka 2024). This relationship, in turn, improves the research itself by increasing the applicability and accuracy of research to local contexts, building trust and relationships for future research efforts, and helping to distribute the results through existing community networks (Luger et al. 2020; Balazs and Morello-Frosch 2013). However, CER can also reinforce existing inequities and mistrust between communities and researchers if these partnerships are not carefully navigated with trust-building at their core (London et al. 2022; Bertram and Bullock 2023). Operating within entrenched constraints of academia, such as funding timelines, pressures to write for an academic audience to get published, and university administrative structures, can also strain the relationship between researchers and community collaborators (McKenna and Main 2013; Eder et al. 2023).

The value of using CER methods in environmental justice for both researchers and communities is clear. The existing literature, however, spends less time considering the differences that occur when the geographic scale of CER efforts is expanded. From Bullard’s work at the start of the modern environmental justice research movement, CER has often focused on the local level—studying specific environmental hazards and their disproportionate impacts on surrounding communities, engaging those communities in the effort, and then advocating with them for local policy change to remove or mitigate that hazard (e.g., Bullard 1983). This success continues today with CER studies that link polluting facilities to increased risk of airborne health hazards or survey community members on potential policy solutions to localized extreme heat (e.g., Sadd et al. 2014; Abdelatty et al. 2023).

Conducting community-engaged research efforts at a low geographic scale makes intuitive sense—community engagement itself necessitates working on the ground at the local level. However, that also confines the scale of community perspectives to the local level and can limit the scale of policy interventions to a smaller jurisdiction. However, environmental hazards often cross jurisdictional lines and are usually regulated at a statewide or federal level. We posit that research efforts with a broader geographic scale could greatly benefit from utilizing CER methods. Indeed, a growing number of studies, in addition to our own work on CCI, have sought to engage a wide range of communities to improve and advocate for programs at a statewide level (e.g., London et al. 2020b; Karpman et al. 2024; London et al. 2025). As such, we offer our experiences of employing CER at a state level in California during our assessment of the CCI program.

2. Materials and Methods

Scaling CER

The extent to which community is involved in community-engaged research varies widely, but generally, CER scholars enlist a common set of practices to facilitate a reciprocal relationship between researchers and communities, including:

• Building trust and long-term relationships—to encourage a truly reciprocal effort, community members must trust researchers and this requires thought, collaboration, and time beyond the confines and timeline of the research.
• Creating shared governance systems—communities involved should have the power to help make decisions within the research project at all stages of the work from design and data collection to analysis and dissemination.
• Mitigating risks to the community—researchers should consider how the research will impact the community as a whole and keep from creating or reinforcing harms.
• Ensuring capacity-building opportunities—the research effort should help build skills among researchers and communities that can be used beyond a single project (e.g., Isler and Corbie-Smith 2012).

Our collaborative research effort with Greenlining incorporated these common practices. We utilized our combined history of trust and long-term relationships with both community partners and state agencies to bridge the gap between CCI stakeholders and relied upon CBO recommendations on who else to bring into the fold of our research. We involved community in each stage of the research, from initial design to final report edits. Our utmost goal was to positively benefit communities in our research, and to not create or worsen existing harms (and we called for CCI programs to do the same). Through our data sharing efforts, we helped community partners have the tools to continue improving with CCI in their own communities.

While critical to the success of our collaborative statewide research, these actions alone—focused at the organization-to-organization level—were not sufficient to scale our work beyond the local level. In order to elevate local knowledge—full of nuance and specificity—into a state-level analysis, we needed to take additional actions specifically geared towards making our report applicable across a broader geography. These expanded methods included:

• Sampling case study communities and programs for a diversity of geographies, environmental experiences, and other factors that could be somewhat representative of a statewide experience.
• Tailoring our methodology in different communities by relying on the guidance of trusted local EJ organizations on how to conduct focus groups and with whom.
• Unifying local experiences into shared statewide narratives about the program.

While CCI operates largely on the statewide level—administered by agencies like the California Air Resources Board—its impact happens at the local level. We wanted to know in our study, then, the extent to which communities themselves are actually being impacted by CCI funding. To achieve this, we conducted a series of interviews and focus groups with local and statewide stakeholders to author ten programmatic case studies and three location-specific case studies in conjunction with Greenlining and local environmental justice organizations.

3. Results

3.1. Sampling Communities and Programs at the Local Level for a Statewide Narrative

Through our research process for the CCI report, we utilized three core practices to scale CER to a statewide level: sampling communities and programs to be representative of broader statewide experiences, tailoring our statewide methodology to community-specific conditions, and finding a balance in specificity and scale to combine local-level perspectives into statewide narratives.

With our combined resources, the ERI and Greenlining team conducted focus groups in three communities and analyzed ten CCI case study programs—the results of which we would share with community partners for their feedback and ultimately use to assess the on-the-ground equity impacts of CCI throughout the state. It was crucially important, then, that we sampled focus group communities and case study programs that could be somewhat representative of broader experiences throughout the state. In each case study, we utilized CER methodologies at a local level while aiming to scale up our findings to a broader statewide scale.

We utilized various factors for selecting our three focus group communities, including demographics, geographic coverage of urban and rural locations in distinct regions, whether each location included Disadvantaged Communities as designated by CalEnviroScreen 4.0, the amount and type of CCI investments in each community, how many cap-and-trade facilities were sited in each place, what the major industries in each place were, whether they had received other forms of climate investment from other programs, and whether ERI or Greenlining had previous working relationships with organizations in the region. While community partners were not directly involved in the final selection, these factors were all named as important considerations in our previous meetings with EJ stakeholders, and helped to ensure that we were working in places with diverse environmental factors and experiences with CCI. Based on these factors, we selected three communities:

• Oxnard—home to a large number of Indigenous migrants who are affected by a Superfund site, coastal environmental concerns, and offshore oil drilling. Our team had worked with organizations like Central Coastal Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) in the past. Between 2013 and November 2022, Oxnard received over $36 million of funding from 19 different CCI programs—mostly for sustainable housing and transit.
• The Eastern Coachella Valley—an overwhelmingly Latino rural desert region in southeastern California that has long been perceived as being overlooked by policymakers and grantmakers, despite being the site of numerous air pollution issues. Our team had previously worked with local advocacy organizations like Alianza Coachella Valley. Between 2013 and November 2022, the Eastern Coachella Valley received nearly $65 million of funding from 22 different CCI programs—mostly for air protection, sustainable housing, and urban greening.
• Richmond—an urban frontline community in the San Francisco Bay Area that is the site of numerous oil facilities, and which has a long history of environmental justice power-building amongst Black and Asian American communities. Our team had existing relationships with local EJ organizations like the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. Between 2013 and November 2022, Richmond received over $39 million of funding from 23 different CCI programs—mostly for air protection, urban greening, and sustainable housing.

The process in selecting the ten case study programs under the CCI umbrella followed a similar protocol—seeking to get a diversity of communities served, funding amounts, levels of community engagement in the program, and environmental issues addressed. Through these metrics, we selected the following programs to study: Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities, Community Air Protection Incentives, Community Solar Pilot, Dairy Digester Research and Development Program, Forest Health, High-Speed Rail, Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project, Low Carbon Transit Operations Program, Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation, and Transformative Climate Communities. For more detailed information on each program, see Appendix A.

By sampling communities and programs at the local level for a collective statewide analysis, we gained a more representative sample of communities that we could use as proxies for broadly similar places across the state. This also ensured that we were hearing a variety of experiences through our work—across geographies, demographics, programs, and funding levels.

3.2. Tailoring Methodology Across Communities and Programs

After this selection process, the team tailored our methodology across different focus group communities and case study programs by relying on the guidance of trusted local community-based EJ organizations to guide us in local contexts and nuances that differ from other places in California. In and of itself, relying on partner community-based organizations (CBOs) for local contexts is not an innovation in CER—but in our case, expanding the geography and having many different approaches to community engagement is more novel within the literature. We also relied on anchor organizations with whom we already had working relationships in each community to facilitate conversations and trust with individuals and organizations with whom we had not worked before.

For the community focus groups, we started by contacting an organization in each region that we had worked closely with previously. We shared with them about the project and asked if they might be interested in partnering to bring local voices to the table to discuss CCI. Their support opened more doors by starting from a base of community trust and helped us to understand the local landscape before going into the field. Similarly, for the ten program case studies, we worked with administering agencies to brainstorm the key grantee organizations of each program and sought to include at least one organization from either the California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) or the California Environmental Justice Coalition (CEJC) in our program interviews.

For both the community focus groups and program case studies, each local partner organization then provided insights on how to conduct outreach and how to frame our questions to be reflective of local contexts. This necessitated flexibility in our base methodology. In some cases, we directly contacted each individual, inviting them to the focus group or interview, while in others, it was preferred that the partner organization or administering agency conduct the initial contact. In some cases, we limited participants to strictly those invited, while in other places we allowed participants to invite others whom they believed could contribute to the conversation. Our base interview protocol was also adjusted for each of the three community case studies so that we asked questions about specific environmental hazards and specific CCI-funded programs that existed in that community. Through these conversations, we began to understand community perspectives on CCI, the effects of each case study program on community power, and the actual felt impact of CCI dollars in each location. Through our flexibility to tailor our approach to best connect with each community at a local level, we were able to gain these local-level insights for each community that could then be pieced together into a broader statewide narrative.

3.3. Unifying Local Experiences into a Statewide Narrative

Our central goal throughout the process was to uncover and unify shared local experiences into statewide narratives about the program. The key factors in achieving this goal were to validate common themes and to balance scale with specificity. Validating and generalizing community-level themes at a statewide level strikes at the heart of the struggle of scaling CER in a way that allows for staying true to local concerns. In order to strike this balance, we assessed each of our ten sample programs for equity based on a set of ten Equitable Climate Investment Principles (ECIPs), which were crafted through an iterative process in consultation with partner EJ organizations (see Appendix A). The primary intention of these principles was to assess if and how CCI investments are achieving equitable outcomes. Another benefit of analysis through our ECIPs—coupled with direct local engagement with community stakeholders—was that it allowed us to identify how and where stakeholders in multiple geographies and programs shared common experiences, even as different places were affected by different programs according to their specific environmental conditions and hazards. It was these shared experiences that illuminated overarching themes that we could then assemble into a statewide narrative.

One key theme highlighted how deeper community engagement improves the felt impact of programs—and how a lack of engagement and trust-building with community makes it so programs go unnoticed, at best, or exclusionary, at worst. Below are representatives from community-based organizations and a local community foundation emphasizing this issue in relation to different CCI programs across three different geographies within the state:

“It doesn’t make sense to make sure that the way that the food is being planted is the best when the workers, the people working the land, are not being taken into consideration…how are these things being done, but not including farmworkers?”

—Interviewee discussing CCI’s lack of engagement with farmworkers in Eastern Coachella Valley

“I didn’t know that that was actually happening, in part because the impact is not there.”

—Interviewee discussing Low Carbon Transportation projects in Richmond

“There have been a number of efforts around station design to invite in residents, neighbors, et cetera. I feel like the sequence has never been really clear like, okay, maybe we’ll go to this meeting but is this project really happening? There’s such a cloud of suspicion and doubt over high speed rail in the Central Valley, for instance, where people are skeptical anyway. It’s a hard environment for even well-planned, well-intended outreach efforts.”

—Interviewee discussing High Speed Rail projects in Fresno

Another key theme underscores the difficulty that organizations with the strongest ties to community members are often stretched thin—and due to their size, capacity, or competing priorities—experience immense difficulty trying to access complex grants.

“When we think about equity, it’s partially defined around accessibility: do communities have access to TCC? As TCC Staff, this question becomes a driving force of the program. Our guidelines define Disadvantaged Communities and we are constantly trying to improve and expand accessibility beyond that definition. After consultation with community organizations, TCC expanded program guidelines to include disadvantaged rural and Tribal communities as lead applicants. Even with this recent update, program staff are continuously identifying ways to improve and expand accessibility, reflected in our updates to our guidelines.”

—Interviewee discussing Transformative Climate Communities

These themes and more were so commonly expressed by stakeholders across different programs that we felt confident that they could apply to other places and programs with which we were not able to engage.

By unifying local experiences into a statewide narrative on the impact of CCI, we were able to advocate for improvements to a statewide program in a way that responded to specific community insights that were shared across geographies—and hopefully, that benefits communities across California. More specifically, employing CER methods in this effort led to a host of policy recommendations for the California state legislature, including:

• Prohibit the use of GGRF funds for fossil fuel infrastructure and other harmful transition strategies.
• Create a community oversight committee to oversee implementation of funds.
• Create a new and flexible funding source exclusively for EJ communities, Disadvantaged Unincorporated Communities (DUCs), and Tribal communities to address community-identified needs.

For a full list of recommendations to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (now defunct at the time of writing this article), the California Legislature, the California Air Resources Board, and philanthropy, see the full report.

While our series of recommendations was geared mostly toward actions that could benefit the entire state—and relied heavily upon the similarities we uncovered between different communities—we also recognized the importance of nuance among our selected communities and programs. To this end, we included full case studies for all three sample communities and all ten sample CCI programs in the full report. Each community case study included an overview of CCI activities in the community and the unique strengths and shortcomings of CCI in each place. Each program case study utilized the ECIPs to assess their equity performance and included insights from selected recipients and implementers of each program at the local level. The unique circumstances and contexts of each community are important in reminding us that no policy or program can be a “one size fits all” solution, but utilizing CER methods at a statewide level can provide policymakers and other stakeholders with direction on what to prioritize on a program-wide level, while keeping the ability to make local adjustments as necessary.

4. Discussion

Despite the relative success of our study in conducting CER at a statewide level, there were limitations and areas for future consideration within our efforts.

Regarding the practice of bringing community-level perspectives to broader programs and policies, it is important to consider how to navigate relationships with partners to ensure that the process is beneficial to their overall work. Participating in research efforts can impose a resource drain on community partners—participating in interviews and focus groups takes valuable time that could otherwise be spent on direct advocacy efforts or applying for important funding opportunities like CCI. Participating in research could also jeopardize working and funding relationships between grant recipients and administering agencies, especially if said research is critical of the programs providing community partners with important operating funds. One key example of this in our study was Tribal Nations—who have fewer resources to dedicate to outside funding, and a historically more tenuous relationship with state agencies—participating in the Forest Health program with CAL FIRE. Although the program has benefitted some Tribal Nations by increasing their ability to utilize fire for ecological and cultural purposes, other Tribal Nations remain more skeptical of the program’s impact on their sovereignty. In each case, we relied on our relationships of trust with both community and state agencies to ensure that we were utilizing valuable community time and resources in a way that did not negatively impact their working relationships with funding agencies.

In our work, we needed to thread the needle in terms of honoring twin community objectives to support CCI (so that funding would continue to flow) and to critique the program (so that less-than-ideal flows of funding could be addressed)—all while being committed to accuracy and rigor in our research. This was challenging at the scale of a statewide program, because undue critiques could affect communities across the state instead of being localized to a particular community. To both ensure accuracy and minimize potential risks to communities, we engaged in iterative edits and data sharing with the community organizations that we partnered with throughout the process.

Another limitation is that this research effort only applies CER within one state—California. California has a long history of EJ community leadership, and thus a strong statewide EJ ecosystem that research efforts can collaborate with to scale up CER. This may not be the case for other geographies with fewer existing EJ resources; however, applying CER to multiple experiences may have all the more impact in states where there are fewer existing ways for individual communities to gain their own funding or environmental resources. Future CER efforts must, however, contend with and adjust to a state’s own unique history, politics, resources, and advocacy infrastructures, and thus may require more planning and development of trusted relationships. Confining our research effort also means that our findings may not necessarily be applicable everywhere, as they are reflective of communities within California—but we anticipate that our general practices can be used to refine future CER studies to reflect the specific needs and nuances of other study geographies. Similarly, there are important nuances between places and programs within California—a balance we looked to strike by acknowledging both commonalities and differences in community experiences with CCI. Future studies could investigate how CCI has impacted communities that we were not able to collaborate with in our research.

5. Conclusions

Scaling up community-engaged research to interrogate state-level policy questions can be inherently difficult to achieve without losing fidelity in terms of community voice. Through our experience of conducting a community-engaged equity analysis on the California Climate Investments, we aimed to build trust, balance scale and specificity, and bring community-level perspectives to programs that operate on much grander geographic scales. The above lessons and limitations can act as an (imperfect) guide on ways to consider expanding the possibilities of community-engaged research in future efforts—efforts that will be critical in ensuring that research remains relevant, rigorous, and useful for communities themselves.

Indeed, ensuring the utility and rigor of research is of critical importance now more than ever. The federal Justice40 program, which was seeking to learn lessons from California’s CCI program, has been discontinued by the second Trump administration (Environmental and Energy Law Program, Harvard Law School 2025), along with a host of other environmental justice and general research funding to universities and community organizations alike. Without federal funding support, it is incumbent upon researchers and communities to continue to advance environmental justice by working together in partnership and solidarity to directly respond to community needs and to use research, data, and community experiences to advocate for more just policy.

In places like California, where state funding streams dedicated to EJ still exist, it is imperative for researchers to stay committed to traditional and innovative CER strategies that ensure that the research is accurate and able to advance policy change within EJ communities. At the same time, in our current era of unreliable federal funding streams, it is important for researchers to make limited funding applicable and useful for many communities by scaling up CER efforts beyond the local level. Much can be done to maintain the tenets and spirit of CER, even as work is synthesized across locations. We hope that this article will spur other researchers who are considering scaling up their CER efforts to reflect on their practices and further refine our own offerings to the field.