When it rains, it pours: integration of equity in flood risk management in Boulder County, Colorado

Flooding disproportionately impacts underserved and marginalized communities. Institutional means of addressing environmental injustice related to such events remain inadequate in the United States of America. Professionals involved in community engagement and risk management contend with these challenges nonetheless, drawing on their personal ideas about equity rather than formal guidance to do so. This study uses qualitative methods to explore how local, county, and region-level government professionals in Boulder County, Colorado, understand and engage with equity in flood risk management. Professionals in this study primarily used three approaches to equity, focusing on: access needs, traditionally and present-day overlooked groups, and the duty of a government employee to serve the whole community. While other scholars have productively categorized such ideas and practices in relation to theories of equity, we turn instead to notions of efficacious practice through design principles developed in disability studies. Doing so, we offer a model for understanding practical approaches to equity, and their related logics, that professionals use. For example, this approach allows us to highlight the use of targeted consideration with appeals to universalism, purposeful work against obscuring commonly overlooked groups, and ideas that connect serving the whole community to targeting the most underserved and engage critically with the implications of such notions. Our results suggest the analytic utility of disability studies design principles for nuanced understanding of how professionals engage in the work of building, evaluating, enacting, and justifying their approaches to equitable flood risk management in the context of ongoing institutional failures to institutionalize substantive formal environmental justice measures.