Planning in the public interest: an evaluation of civil society participation in collaborative land use planning in British Columbia.

On the other hand, the fewer resources that civil society stakeholders have relative to government and corporate stakeholders can undermine their effectiveness in two ways (Gunton and Flynn 1992; Gunton and Day 2003). First, initiation of CP is contingent on all parties being motivated to negotiate in good faith. Those parties with greater power can have higher BATNAs (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) that remove their incentive to participate in good faith in CP. Stronger stakeholders can undermine CP by using delaying tactics or alternative means to meet their objectives if they do not like the outcome. Even if stakeholders that are more powerful are motivated to participate, their superior resources and skills can allow them to dominate the process, bias the outcome, and overwhelm the civil society stakeholders.

Lack of resources and weak organizational structure also contribute to the "two table" problem wherein civil society stakeholders do not have the time and resources to effectively participate simultaneously in both a CP table and their own constituency table, which is necessary to ensure accountability to their members (Gray 1989; Caton Campbell and Floyd 1996). Finally, participation in CP has an opportunity cost that reduces civil society stakeholders' resources for participating in other activities in order to further their interests such as political lobbying, legal challenges, and public education. Overall, CP has potential advantages and disadvantages for these stakeholders that must be carefully weighed to determine effective strategies. These advantages and disadvantages will now be assessed based on the evaluation of land use planning in British Columbia.

Collaborative Planning in B.C.

Land use planning in British Columbia has been dominated by conflict between the goals of environmental protection and resource extraction. Managing land use is considered integral to sustainability (Gunton and Fletcher 1992). For most of B.C.'s recent history, the Ministry of Forests (MOF) solely managed all Crown lands in the province and focused primarily on timber production (Williams et al. 1998; Bryner 1999). Although some attempts were made by the provincial government to include other agencies and the public in land use planning, the MOF dominated processes until the 1990s (Gunton and Fletcher 1992). Growing frustration with being shut out of decisions on the use of public lands led to protests and blockades by environmentalists in old growth forest areas of the province.

In response to environmental conflicts, British Columbia instituted a new CP process to develop resource management plans for the provincial land base with the creation of the Commission for Resources and the Environment (CORE) in 1992. CORE was charged with the responsibility to develop and implement a new CP process for the province and to use this new process--which CORE referred to as shared decision making (SDM)--to develop plans for the four most contentious regions of B.C. Concurrent with CORE's activities was the development of the Land and Resource Management Planning process (LRMP) to develop plans for the remaining regions in B.C. using the same collaborative approach.

The CP process implemented by B.C. is described in detail elsewhere (Day et al. 2003). In short, the process involved delegating responsibility for preparing regional resource and land use plans to stakeholders from government, the private sector, and civil society. These stakeholders engage in face-to-face consensus-based negotiations to reach agreement on a recommended plan that is submitted to the provincial government for approval. To date, four CORE plans and fifteen LRMP plans have been completed covering 73% of the provincial land base. The plans took on average four years to complete. Fourteen of the plans were reached by full consensus or consensus minus one. Six LRMPs are currently underway. The completed plans resulted in significant changes in land use across the province. 'General' and 'enhanced' resource extraction zones decreased from 92% to 68%. Conversely, 'protected areas' increased from approximately 6% to 13% of the provincial land base, and 'special management zones', which provide enhanced environmental protection, increased from 0% to 16% (Day et al. 2003).

Method

The method for evaluating the role of civil society stakeholders in the B.C. collaborative land use planning process is based on an integration of several evaluative frameworks proposed in the literature. These include Cormick et al. (1996), Moote et al. (1997), Innes and Booher (1999), and Wondolleck and Yaffee (2000). Details on the method used for the study can be found in Frame et al. (2002). The steps in the method are as follows:

1. Establish evaluative criteria based on a literature review.

2. Document key elements of the planning process by reviewing all relevant planning documents.

3. Develop and administer a survey of stakeholders to evaluate the process relative to criteria

4. Disaggregate survey results into civil society and noncivil society stakeholders

5. Analyse results

Twenty-five evaluative criteria were synthesized from the following collaborative planning literature: Innes and Booher (1999); Cormick et al. (1996); Moote et al. (1997); Caton Campbell and Floyd (1996); Harter (1997); Menkel-Meadow (1997); Susskind and McMahon (1985); Gray (1989); Williams et al. (1998); Duffy et al. (1996). The two main categories of evaluative criteria are: (1) process and (2) outcome. Fourteen process criteria and eleven outcome criteria were used (Tables 1 and 2). For each criterion, one or more questions were developed to assess the degree to which the criterion was met based on the perceptions of participants obtained through a survey. In total, twenty questions were used to test the eleven outcome criteria and forty-six to test the fourteen process criteria. Questions were designed as statements requesting responses on a four-point scale of agreement or disagreement (strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree), or not applicable. A score for each question was then calculated by applying a weight to the four-point scale responses based on the following ranking: strongly agree = 2, agree = 1, disagree = minus 1, and strongly disagree = minus 2. Where a question was phrased negatively, scores were inverted to ensure comparability of the result with positively worded questions. Averages for all the questions were then calculated for each criterion to produce an overall rating by criterion.

The survey was pretested and then sent by mail or email in the Spring of 2002 to participants in the seventeen Land and Resource Management Planning (LRMP) processes that were conducted between 1995 and 2002 (Frame et al. 2002). Follow-up reminder notices were sent to participants from whom responses had not been received two weeks after the due date for returning the survey. Responses were received from 260 of the 792 participants identified, for a response rate of 32.83%. The confidence interval for the results of the survey were +/-2.98%, 95% of the time.

In order to examine differences in opinions among types of stakeholders in the LRMP processes, the 260 responses were categorized into two groups: Civil society stakeholders and other stakeholders. Civil society stakeholders were defined as nongovernmental stakeholders and noncorporate stakeholders who have no direct pecuniary interest in planning outcomes. For the most part, civil society stakeholders were comprised of those identifying themselves as belonging to conservation and community nongovernment organizations. A comparison of these and other stakeholders is provided in Table 3. Based on this definition, 75 responses were classified as civil society stakeholders and 185 responses as other stakeholders.

Results

Survey results for civil society stakeholders are summarized in Table 4, which records process criteria results and Table 5, which records outcome criteria results. Scores for each criterion were calculated by averaging the numerical scores for each of the statements. If the average score is greater than, or equal to, 0.50, the criterion is considered to have been satisfied; if it is less than or equal to -0.50 it is not satisfied; and, if is between 0.50 and -0.50 the criterion is considered to have been only partially satisfied. Although all fourteen process criteria were met to some degree, the results show that the following five of the fourteen process criteria were only partially met: equal opportunity and resources; accountability; high-quality information; time limits; and, commitment to implementation and monitoring (Table 4).