Evaluating collaborative planning: the British Columbia experience.

Collaborative planning (CP) is emerging as the dominant planning model in environmental management. The essence of CP is to delegate responsibility for planning to multistakeholder groups that engage in face-to-face negotiations to reach consensus agreements. CP is now "institutionalized" as the preferred technique for preparing forestry plans by the U.S. Forest Service and watershed plans by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000; Leach et al. 2002). CP is also used in a wide variety of environmental planning applications in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

Despite its widespread use, CP has not been adequately evaluated to determine its effectiveness and to identify "best practice" guidelines for successful implementation. We have attempted to fill this need for more evaluation of CP in two special volumes of Environments. In a previous volume, Environments 31(2) (Gunton et al. 2003), we reviewed the theory and practice of CP in North America. The purpose of this companion volume is to evaluate the most comprehensive application of CP to date: the preparation of regional land use plans for the Province of British Columbia.

The adoption of CP in British Columbia began in early 1992 after other more traditional planning models had failed to resolve growing conflict between environmentalists and resource extractors over allocation of the provincial Crown land base. The CP approach, termed shared decision making (SDM) by the province, is based on the innovative concept of delegating responsibility for planning to "planning tables" comprised of all relevant stakeholders including government, business, NGOs, and communities. The objective of the planning tables is to prepare regional land use plans by consensus-based negotiation. The proposed plans are then submitted to government for approval.

As of July 2003, nineteen regional land use plans have been completed in British Columbia covering three-quarters of the provincial land base. An additional six plans are currently under development. Plans took approximately four years to complete by planning tables with an average of about twenty to thirty stakeholder representatives. The principal outcome of the regional land use plans was to allocate land to one of the following four zones: protected areas, where no resource extraction is allowed; special management zones, where extra regulations restrict resource extraction to protect important environmental values; general resource extraction, subject to normal regulations; and enhanced resource extraction, where regulations are relaxed to allow for more intensive resource extraction. The plans resulted in a significant change in land use with protected areas doubling from 6% to 13%, general resource-extraction zones decreased from 92% to 68%, while special management zones and enhanced resource-extraction zones each increased from 0% to 16% (Day et al. 2003).

The adoption of this innovative SDM approach to planning and the implementation of these plans did not occur without conflict. The changes in land use policy only developed in response to increasing civil disobedience on the part of environmentalists blocking logging, a growing threat of international boycotts by environmentalists against BC forest products, which threatened the profitability of the industry, and court decisions that gave First Nations increasing legal power to constrain private resource extraction (Gunton 1998). The role of the extractive forestry and mining industries was also declining in the provincial economy relative to new more environmentally depended industries, such as tourism, which wanted more preservationist policies. Consistent with negotiation theory, the shifting balance of power from extractive industries to environmental industries--and threats to the forest industries posed by environmental blockades and boycotts--encouraged the extractive sector to accept significant changes in planning processes and land use allocation. This was reinforced by the development of "no loser" policies such as public funding for forest investment projects to help compensate the forest sector for losses resulting from land use changes (Gunton 1998).

REM Land Use Research Program

British Columbia is the only jurisdiction to date that has implemented CP systematically for a long enough period of time to provide an adequate record for comprehensive evaluation. To take advantage of this opportunity, the School of Resource and Environmental Management (REM) at Simon Fraser University organized a multiyear research project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Government of British Columbia to evaluate the provincial experience.

The research occurred in three major stages. The first phase, conducted between 1989 and 1992, examined various aspects of regional land use planning, including analytical methods for evaluating land use options, new institutional structures for land management, and an evaluation of the British Columbia resource planning system (Gunton and Vertinsky 1990a, 1990b; Gunton 1991; Gunton 1992; Gunton and Duffy 1992; Gunton and Fletcher 1992; Gunton and Flynn 1992; M'Gonigle et al. 1990; M'Gonigle et al. 1992). This research assisted in the development of the new CP approach adopted in British Columbia in early 1992. The second phase of the research program consisted of a preliminary evaluation of a subset of the earlier CP land use plans completed up to 1996 (Cardinal and Day 1996; Duffy et al. 1996; Flynn and Gunton 1996; Wilson et al. 1996; Gunton 1997, 1998; Cantwell and Day 1998; Litke and Day 1998; Penrose et al. 1998; Williams et al. 1998; Williams et al 1998; Duffy et al. 1998; Tamblyn and Day 1999). The third phase of the research, commenced in 2001, involves a comprehensive evaluation of the British Columbia experience by evaluating the process for developing and implementing regional land use plans. This volume of Environments reports on the third phase of research.

Evaluating the Planning Process

The evaluation of the CP process for developing regional plans is based on the following steps. First, an evaluation method was developed, employing 25 evaluative criteria that are based on an integration and extension of key frameworks proposed in the literature (Moore 1996; Cormick et al. 1996; Duffy et al. 1996; Moote et al. 1997; Williams et al. 1998; Innes and Booher 1999; Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000; Todd 2001; Leach et al. 2002). The evaluation is based on both outcome criteria--which measure outcome success--and process criteria--which define desirable features of process management. The second step documented key elements of the CP process in British Columbia. In the third step, a survey instrument was designed and administered to participants in the CP processes to assess the extent to which these processes met the evaluative criteria. Surveys were mailed, or emailed, to 767 of 894 possible participants. Two hundred sixty responses were received and form the basis of this analysis (response rate 35%). The confidence interval for the results of this study is +/- 2.98%, 95% of the time. The final task was to analyze the overall study results and assess implications of the findings for CP theory and practice.

Based on the detailed analysis in Frame et al. (2003), the collaborative planning evaluation findings are summarized for process criteria (Table 1) and outcome criteria (Table 2). The tables illustrate that the CP processes met, or partially met, all 25 evaluative criteria. The key achievement was the ability of CP to reach consensus, or near consensus, agreements in the majority of the nineteen regional land use plans completed. Consensus, or near consensus (consensus minus one), was achieved in fourteen of the fifteen Land and Resource Management planning processes completed. The remaining LRMP process achieved consensus on a majority of plan elements. Four early regional land use planning processes managed by a separate Commission of Resources and the Environment failed to reach such consensus agreements and the government had to prepare the plans itself.

Given the high level of conflict over land use, reaching consensus on a majority of the plans is a remarkable achievement that provides strong evidence of the effectiveness of CP relative to other more traditional planning models. The results also show that CP generated important additional "social capital" benefits such as improved knowledge and better stakeholder relationships that increased the capacity of the communities to manage other issues and to promote regional welfare (Table 2). Based on these results, Gunton and Day (2003), Frame et al. (2003), and Day et al. (2003) developed best practice guidelines for the management of collaborative processes. Frame, Gunton, and Day emphasize, however, that while the adoption of these best practices are important of achieving success, the external environment needs to be suitable for collaboration by ensuring a balance of power between stakeholders that encourages cooperation to achieve individual stakeholder interests.

An important research question in evaluating the CP process is to assess how well a process performed from the perspective of different stakeholder groups. Finnigan, Gunton, and Williams address this question in this volume by evaluating CP from the perspective of civil society stakeholders. These are defined as stakeholders who are not from government and who are not from private for-profit enterprises. Such stakeholders, therefore, have no direct pecuniary interest in resource decisions.