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While equity in climate adaptation is increasingly recognized, university-based research can inadvertently reinforce inequities. Inequities often arise when research fails to engage communities, overlooks relevant concerns, lacks trust, or misinterprets responses due to insufficient cultural understanding. Mutual aid organizations, inherently community-based, foster resilience and solidarity, addressing unmet needs while building collective trust.
A new article, co-authored by Rutgers researchers and other university colleagues and Philadelphia-based mutual-aid group, Homies Helping Homies, examines how a research partnership can fundamentally reshape climate adaptation research practices by shifting the focus from traditional, top-down academic approaches to equitable, action-oriented, and community-engaged co-production of knowledge.
The article, From Transactional to Transformative: Evolving Research Practices Through Mutual Aid Collaboration, shows that such a transformation prioritizes the needs and expertise of vulnerable communities, making research outcomes more relevant and implementable, according to the study.
It was co-authored by post-doc researcher Manasa Bollempalli in the Department of Human Ecology, along with Rutgers university co-authors Nuzhat Fatema, doctoral student in the Department of Geography; Amy Li, doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology; and Victoria Ramenzoni, associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology; along with Kevin Bass and Anthony Adams, of Homies Helping Homies Research Collective; Yvonne Appiah Dadson, doctoral student, and DeeDee Bennett-Gayle, associate professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, University at Albany; Elizabeth Gilmore, associate professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
The research is part of the work being undertaken by the Household Decision-Making Team at the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH) led by Rutgers. MACH is a consortium of 13 institutions that brings together academics, policymakers, and community leaders to research climate change impacts and develop effective, evidence-based responses in the Philadelphia–New Jersey–New York region and beyond.
Rutgers post-doc researcher Manasa Bollempalli in the Department of Human Ecology.
In the Q&A below, corresponding author and post-doc researcher Manasa Bollempalli shared the goals of the research study and how mutual aid functions not just as community support but as a methodological and ethical framework for equitable, justice-oriented climate research.
Why does this type of research matter?
Climate adaptation research often reinforces inequities by relying on top-down, researcher-defined questions and weak community engagement. Mutual aid organizations, rooted in daily relationships of reciprocity, care, and grassroots action, provide trust-based and culturally grounded access to communities that conventional research struggles to reach. This collaborative approach reveals how marginalized residents experience climate hazards such as heat, flooding, resource scarcity, and water crises in ways that differ dramatically from academic framings.
What are the key findings of this collaborative research?
Mutual aid reshapes research access, trust and relevance: Partnering with HHH provided crucial entry points into low-income and immigrant communities, enabling interviews, participant observation, and relationship-building that traditional outreach failed to produce
Researchers’ positionality and methods transformed: Participation in mutual aid activities required researchers to adopt solidarity-based, non-hierarchical roles, standing in food-distribution lines, packing groceries, helping residents, changing how residents perceived them and how data could be gathered
Community members discuss climate through vernacular risks: Residents rarely used terms like “climate change.” They responded instead to questions about street flooding, disrupting wages, basement water damage, inability to afford cooling, food insecurity, and infrastructure failure. This reframed how researchers designed surveys, interviews, and coding categories.
Deep inequities shape climate preparedness: Residents face constrained decision-making due to poverty, lack of institutional support, and distrust of government. Many just make decisions on the spot during crises due to limited time, resources, and awareness of available aid
Mutual aid is both a resilience system and a research practice: HHH’s horizontal, care-centered model created “transformative spaces” for knowledge co-production, spaces where researchers must confront ethical tensions around power, extraction, and reciprocity.
What new finding did the research unearth?
The paper explicitly argues that mutual aid should be recognized as methodological infrastructure for climate adaptation research. It documents a rare case where community partners influenced research design, recruitment, interview content, data interpretation, and emerging outreach strategies. It reveals structural flaws in academic funding systems that do not support the time, labor, or relational work required for equitable community collaboration.
What are the implications for practice?
For researchers: Center reciprocity, shared decision-making, and context-specific recruitment; Use vernacular risks rather than scientific jargon when engaging marginalized populations; Build reflexivity and positionality work into every research stage.
For policymakers and institutions: Genuine community-based research requires time, resources, and flexible funding structures; Climate programs must incorporate insights from populations who often have the least access to preparedness resources and formal support systems.
For community organizations: Mutual aid groups can serve as critical bridges between frontline communities and research institutions while also shaping policy-relevant knowledge.
