Trust as Infrastructure
COASTAL RESILIENCE SERIES · ARTICLE 3 OF 5
Daniel Pingaro, MLA · Ocean Conservation & Coastal Resilience
There is a version of community engagement in coastal resilience work that looks like this: a project team completes its technical analysis, develops a preferred design alternative, and then holds a series of public meetings to present the findings and gather input. Comments are recorded, a responses matrix is generated, and the design proceeds. Perhaps there are minor modifications, perhaps not. The box has been checked. The community has been consulted.
This version is common. It is also, in most coastal resilience contexts, functionally inadequate - not because the technical work is poor, but because it misunderstands the strength of community engagement. Engagement is not a project phase that precedes implementation. In coastal resilience work, it is a foundational design condition. And like all foundational conditions, if it fails, the structure above it fails too.
The lesson that keeps proving itself, across years of ocean conservation work and community-based environmental initiatives, is this: trust is not a precondition for coastal resilience work. It is the infrastructure. It has to be earned, built. Trust can be damaged, and its absence will sink a project far more reliably than any technical failure.
The Legitimacy of Skepticism
Frontline coastal communities, many suffering from environmental injustice, coastal industrial infrastructure, or communities whose relationship with government planning agencies is a record of broken promises and displacement have entirely legitimate reasons to be skeptical when a team of professionals arrives with a plan for their shoreline. That skepticism is not a communication problem to be solved with better outreach. It is a rational response to a documented history.
The managed retreat conversation makes this dynamic visible in its most acute form. Managed retreat, the planned, organized relocation of structures and infrastructure away from high-risk coastal zones is, in many contexts, the best technically honest response to what accelerating sea level rise and increased storm intensity will deliver over the next fifty years. The science on this is not ambiguous. But the conversation about managed retreat cannot be separated from the history of who has been asked to move, and under what conditions, and with what compensation and support.
Urban renewal, highway construction, flood control projects, environmental remediation zones - the history of American planning is full of instances in which the burden of relocation fell overwhelmingly on communities with the least political power, while the benefits of the resulting development accrued to others. When a coastal resilience project arrives in a waterfront community with a message about the need to retreat, it inherits that entire history. The technical validity of the recommendation does not neutralize the political and historical weight of the ask. Practitioners who arrive without that awareness don’t just lose the community’s trust. They confirm it was never warranted.
What Co-Design Actually Requires
Genuine co-design, as distinct from community consultation, requires transferring actual decision-making authority, not just the appearance of it. This is harder than it sounds. Design professionals are trained to develop solutions and present them. Community members are accustomed to being presented with solutions and asked to react. Breaking this dynamic requires deliberate structural changes to the engagement process: community advisory roles that are convened before the technical scope is defined, not after. Iterative design sessions in which community members are active participants in generating alternatives, not passive reviewers of completed work.
It also requires compensating community members for their time and doing so in a way that explicitly acknowledges that time as professional expertise. This is not a courtesy. It is a recognition that the knowledge communities bring to coastal resilience work is irreplaceable, and that asking people to contribute it without compensation is its own form of extraction.
That knowledge is not anecdotal. Fishermen who have worked the same estuary for thirty years have detailed observational records of how the shoreline has changed, where the sediment moves, which areas flood first and drain last. Long-term residents of a coastal neighborhood know things about local hydrology that no site survey captures. Indigenous communities in coastal regions often have deep historical knowledge of coastal dynamics that extends far beyond the observational record available to Western science. It is a different form of data that is temporally deep, spatially specific, and embedded in the kinds of lived relationships with a landscape that technical analysis cannot replicate. The most technically robust coastal resilience designs I have seen integrate this knowledge not as a courtesy but as a genuine design input, allowing it to challenge and refine the assumptions embedded in the design engineering models.
The Contradiction We Have to Confront
There is a contradiction at the center of coastal resilience practice that the profession has not adequately confronted. We cannot ask some communities to accept managed retreat while simultaneously permitting luxury development on adjacent shorelines. We cannot frame retreat as a necessary sacrifice for some communities while treating high-end coastal real estate as an asset to be protected at public expense.
The National Flood Insurance Program subsidizes coastal insurance rates for properties that the market would price as uninsurable. Federal disaster relief has repeatedly rebuilds in the same high-risk locations. Coastal armoring projects that protect high-value private property often do so at the cost of biodiversity and accelerated erosion on adjacent unprotected shores. The regulatory and financial architecture of American coastal development has, over decades, socialized the risk of coastal living while privatizing its benefits.
Equitable coastal resilience requires confronting this contradiction, not as a political statement, but as a technical and professional one. A coastal resilience framework that protects the assets with the highest market value and asks the people with the least political power to accept the greatest disruption is not a neutral technical outcome. It is a choice. The landscape architecture profession, which has the training to see coastlines as a whole, ecological, social, temporal entity is poorly positioned to pretend otherwise.
Building trust in coastal resilience work ultimately requires being honest about these contradictions. Communities that have experienced the pattern before will recognize it whether it is named or not. What changes when it is named, when the practitioners are willing to acknowledge the history and grapple with the structural dynamics, is the possibility of a different kind of working relationship. Not a relationship without tension, but one in which the tension is productive rather than corrosive.
That is what genuine coastal resilience looks like at the community scale. Not the management of skepticism. The earning of trust.
NEXT IN THE SERIES
Article 4: The Liminal Zone, what makes the coast a distinct and irreducible design problem, and why its threshold condition is the key to understanding coastal resilience as both a scientific and a cultural challenge.
Daniel Pingaro, MLA
Ocean conservation and coastal resilience executive. Former USEPA, CEO of Sailors for the Sea & Ocean Institute, Executive Director Laguna Beach Community Foundation.
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