Our Team.

We are undergraduate, graduate, and professional students and faculty from Duke University Bass Connections. The Bass Connections program constructs interdisciplinary teams from across Duke’s schools to tackle complex societal and cultural challenges.

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In August 2022, our team set out to study the impacts of swine concentrated agricultural feed operations (CAFOs) in Eastern North Carolina on neighboring communities. However, following guidance from our community advisory board composed of North Carolina environmental justice leaders, we pivoted our focus. Our research investigates the inequitable and disempowering stakeholder processes that defined the development of the 2022 North Carolina Carbon Plan. Our community advisory board expressed that the unjust and uncomprehensive stakeholder processes resulted in a similarly inequitable carbon plan that will exacerbate current conditions. Further, these stakeholder processes set an inadequate precedent for engaging with and implementing community feedback for the ensuing cycles of the Carbon Plan every two years. 

Our team’s study of the Carbon Plan stakeholder processes have yielded two sets of insights. First, we have produced a report documenting the fundamentally flawed stakeholder process associated with the Plan’s development and eventual approval by the North Carolina Utilities Commission. We will post our report here once it is complete. 

Second, in order to empower community members participating in these processes in the future, and support facilitators in creating more empowering stakeholder processes, we have drafted a Stakeholder Participation Bill of Rights, built with the principles and ideals established by a wide range of sources from environmental justice leaders, organizers, and policymakers. This Bill of Rights guides the criteria of our Stakeholder Participation Scorecard, with which stakeholders and prospective facilitators can assess the degree to which a given process is truly inclusive, equitable, effective, and just.