Watershed planning can lead to policy innovation and action toward environmental protection. However, groups often suffer from low engagement with communities that experience disparate impacts from flooding and water pollution. This can limit the capacity of watershed efforts to dismantle pernicious forms of social inequality. As a result, the benefits of environmental changes often flow to more empowered residents, short-changing the power of watershed-based planning as a tool to transform ecological, economic, and social relationships. The objectives of this paper are to assess whether the worldview of watershed planning actors are sufficiently attuned to local patterns of social vulnerability and whether locally significant patterns of social vulnerability can be adequately differentiated using conventional data sources. Drawing from 35 in-depth interviews with watershed planners and community stakeholders in the Milwaukee River Basin (WI, USA), we identify five unique definitions of social vulnerability. Watershed planners in our sample articulate a narrower range of social vulnerability definitions than other participants. All five definitions emphasize spatial and demographic characteristics consistent with existing ways of measuring social vulnerability. However, existing measures do not adequately differentiate among the spatio-temporal dynamics used to distinguish definitions. In response, we develop two new social vulnerability measures. The combination of interviews and demographic analyses in this study provides an assessment technique that can help watershed planners (a) understand the limits of their own conceptualization of social vulnerability and (b) acknowledge the importance of place-based vulnerabilities that may otherwise be obscured. We conclude by discussing how our methods can be a useful tool for identifying opportunities to disrupt social vulnerability in a watershed by evaluating how issue frames, outreach messages, and engagement tactics. The approach allows watershed planners to shift their own culture in order to consider socially vulnerable populations comprehensively.

In North America, Great Lakes Areas of Concern (AOCs) were established to remediate aquatic pollution in 1987 as part of a binational agreement between the United State of America and Canada. Although the action preceded formal environmental injustice acknowledgment, the AOC program's effort to remediate legacy pollutants includes language with the potential to accomplish core goals of EJ: democratizing decision-making and reducing disproportionate environmental burden. Yet, in AOCs, discussions of public engagement regarding AOC work tend to define participation institutionally (i.e., the state, market, and civil society) rather than by racial or socioeconomic inclusivity. Understanding how AOC governance processes consider representation of, and benefit to communities negotiating remediation decisions from positions of systemic disadvantage requires addressing the relationship between ecosystem-centered governance modes and environmental justice. In this study, interviews with governance actors reveal that concern for EJ issues wield different forms of authority as ecosystem-centered governance and environmental justice couple, decouple, and uncouple. Changes in coupling correspond with shifts in ecosystem-centric governance mode, but coupling does not rely on any one particular governance arrangement. Instead, coupling relies on leadership practices and conceptions of fairness that are EJ-responsive and present EJ as indistinct from ecosystem goals and targets. Our findings reinforce the assertion that ecosystem-centered governance can be reimagined to better facilitate EJ even without changes in financial and regulatory constraints. We conclude by proposing empirical measures that advance EGM-EJ qualitative scholarship and practical advice about how to cultivate EJ-responsive leadership in ecosystem-centered governance arrangements.