Collaborative ecosystem planning processes in the United States: evolution and challenges.

Abstract

Natural resource planning in the United States has witnessed a marked shift toward collaboration in the last thirty years. This shift has been promoted by changes in the perceived legitimacy of agencies as expert decision-makers, a change in the availability of information and the perceived nature of the problems facing managers, and a significant broadening of political power in the U.S. combined with legal tools that gave outside groups access to decision making. The net effect of these changes has been to create a broad set of highly diverse processes that differ in scale, involvement, and level of formality and institutionalization. While hundreds of such collaborative processes are currently underway in the United States, their evolution has been challenging. Agency officials have found it difficult to sort out and play the variety of roles they are called upon to perform in these processes. The attitudes of leaders and line personnel have been problematic. Many environmental groups have been extremely cautious and concerned about the move to collaborative processes. AII have been asked to invest significant time and staffing--scarce resources in a time of fiscal restraint. Few have the skills to adequately lead, or participate in, collaborations. The U.S. experience suggests the need to: build personal and institutional capacity to enable these processes to bear fruit; maintain legal structures that provide incentives to key parties to participate in collaborative planning; and evaluate the progress of these processes, both to adaptively manage them and assess their impact on social relationships and environmental outcomes.

Resume

La planification des ressources naturelles aux Etats-Unis a connu un virage marque vers la cooperation au cours des trente dernieres annees. Ce virage a ete favorise par la modification de la perception de la legitimite des organismes en tant que preneurs de decisions, par une meilleure disponibilite de I'information et une perception differente de la nature des problemes auxquels les gestionnaires doivent faire face, ainsi que par une augmentation importante du pouvoir politique aux Etats-Unis, doublee des outils juridiques qui ont donne aux groupes extedeurs un meilleur acces a la prise de decisions. L'effet final de tels changements a ete de creer une vaste gamme de processus largement diversifies en termes d'echelle, de participation et de niveau de formalite et d'institutionnalisation. Alors que des centaines de ces processus de cooperation sont presentement en vigueur aux Etats-Unis, leur evolution comporte des defis de taille. Les fonctionnaires des organismes ont trouve difficile de comprendre et endosser les differents reles qu'ils sont amenes a jouer dans ces processus. On a demande a tous d'investir temps et effectifs considerables, ressources rares en periode de compression des depenses. Peu d'entre eux ont les habilites de diriger ces efforts cooperatifs ou d'y participer de maniere appropriee. L'experience des Etats-Unis demontre que les elements suivants sont necessaires: developpar les capacites personnelles et institutionnelles pour permettre a ces processus de porter fruit; mettre en place et maintenir des structures juridiques qui constituent pour les groupes cles un encouragement & participar a la planification concertee; et evaluer la progression de ces processus, tant pour en adaptar la gestion que pour determiner leur incidence sur les relations sociales et les resultats environnementaux.

Keywords:

Collaboration, ecosystem management, natural resource planning, dispute resolution, United States environmental planning

Introduction

Natural resource planning in the United States has witnessed a marked shift toward collaboration in the last thirty years. In 1970, public involvement in natural resource management called for establishment of hearings, "review and comment" periods, and other mechanisms for creating unidirectional flows of information from the general public to agency decision-makers. Today, such processes seek the active participation of many organized parties in shared decision-making processes and in implementation partnerships where "co-laboring" accomplishes needed tasks. Two decades ago, the fleld of dispute resolution largely focused on settlement of intensive conflicts through short-duration intervention (Bacow and Wheeler 1988; Bingham 1986). Today, the field is actively moving toward more upstream conflict management work, where processes seek to build long-term relationships and establish the groundwork for collaborative action (Daniels and Walker 2001; Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000). Fifteen years ago, natural resource management focused on management of isolated public land management units, where agency decision-makers relied on technical models to maximize production of a narrow set of goods (Wondolleck 1988). Today, management is moving toward an ecosystem-scale perspective where agency officials collaborate with a range of groups to manage for a broad set of values across a fragmented landscape (Johnson et al. 1999).

Researchers have focused on these real-time experiments, in order to understand the challenges facing them, and the ways that groups have overcome them (Coughlin et al. 1999; Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000). This article describes the forces promoting the evolution of collaborative planning processes in the U.S. and provides several examples of the ran9e of types of processes underway. By all accounts, these processes are challenging, and the article discusses a number of these challenges. To move forward, a robust understanding of collaboration as it emerges on the ground is needed. Collaboration is neither godsend nor evil, as proponents and opponents allege. Rather, it is a necessary but challenging way to foster wise and durable management direction, and empower the people and organizations that need to participate in management.

The Evolution of Collaborative Processes

What accounts for the changing currency of collaboration in natural resource management in the U.S.? First, the top-down technical expertise model where agency experts were to make decisions divorced from the hubbub of political life was increasingly seen as ineffective and unlikely. The Progressive Conservationists first established this model in the U.S. in the early 1900s in order to insulate decision making from the influence of interest-based politics (Hays 1959). An important innovation in its day, this style of decision making resulted in decisions isolated from the range of public values and interests, and ironically often uninformed, due to agency adherence to a limited technical base of knowledge and expertise.

Part of the change in perceived agency legitimacy resulted from expansion of public values in natural resources; a broadening of interests that made technical decision making very difficult. For most decisions, there were no optimal solutions, just options that balanced interests in varying ways. Agencies framed in the first hall of the Twentieth Century found their ability to craft decisions that balanced these interests limited at best. Indeed, the dawning realization that there were no ideal solutions to most problems undercut the fundamental legitimacy of these agencies.

The public gained a broader window into the inner-workings of agency decision making through legal mechanisms such as environmental impact statements and public review processes, and the view was not heartening. Decisions were heavily influenced by organizational culture and norms; a limited ability to formulate technically derived decisions allowed political factors to intervene. For example, Congressional politics heavily influenced U.S. Forest Service management of forests in the Pacific Northwest (Yaffee 1994), and resulted in a situation where production clearly exceeded statutory mandates for sustainability.

Legal tools such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act not only gave groups outside the agencies the information needed to understand the basis for decision making, but enabled them to challenge and stop planned management. Outside interest groups developed parallel scientific information that enabled them to credibly influence decision-making processes, and fight agencies and other groups to a standstill. In many places, a state of conflict-laden impasse emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, producing death threats and slashed tires, and a great deal of frustration and anxiety for all--agencies and communities.

Part of the change in perceived agency legitimacy resulted from the development of norms of governance and scientific knowledge that suggested the need to change management approaches. From Watergate and the Vietnam War through the Reagan and Bush years in the 1980s, the ability of government to act effectively, efficiently, and in a benevolent way was in question. In addition, environmental problems were increasingly viewed as complex and interconnected, requiring information and action from many sources. Development of the fields of conservation biology, landscape ecology, and ecological restoration highlighted the landscape-scale of most resource management problems and required strategies that cut across fragmented land units.

The combined effect of these social and scientific forces was to create a perceived need for a greater set of parties to be involved in regional, or ecosystem-scale planning and management, while simultaneously limiting the credibility and capacity of government institutions to convene these processes. Increased perception of interdependence, and the realization that impasse is not always the best way to pursue interests, fostered involvement of advocacy groups in collaborative processes even as they remained suspicious of the potential to be co-opted and drained by such processes. Many communities have been empowered by these changes, and have created community-scale, multiparty decision-making processes. In some places, these processes have been transforming, and have created social capital and new modes of action. In all places, they have been challenging, requiring agencies and advocates to act in very different ways.

A Variety of Collaborative Styles and Structures

The net effect of these changes has been to create a broad set of highly diverse processes that differ in scale, involvement, and level of formality and institutionalization. Hundreds of such processes are currently underway in the United States (Yaffee et al. 1996; Wondolleck & Yaffee 2000). Some are management partnerships involving two individuals working across a boundary line. Others are truly collaborative decision-making processes, where divergent groups are making choices. Some are formal, some ad hoc. Some are professionally facilitated; participants in the process manage others. What all of these collaborative processes share in common is that they are inclusive, transparent, negotiation-based, consensus-seeking, and focused on problem-solving.

Organic, Community-Driven Processes: The Applegate Partnership

Many processes have arisen from the ground-up, triggered by frustration with governmental inaction and fueled by the passions of community members. One such process emerged in the Applegate Valley of southern Oregon and northern California. [For a more detailed discussion of this case, see Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000.] The Applegate Watershed is like many watersheds throughout the American west: a patchwork of private ranches and farms, national forests and rangelands, and state and county lands, containing a rich blend of groups ranging from fifth generation farmers to newcomer spiritualists and environmentalists to timber companies.

The blood pressure of this valley slowly rose during the 1980's as the spotted owl controversy altered management of public lands in the watershed, and the adverse effects of earlier management practices on the valley's public and private resources became apparent. Tempers flared between loggers and local environmentalists and their diverse sets of supporters. It was in this social tinderbox that Jack Shipley, an avid environmentalist, and Jim Neal, a long-time logger, did the unthinkable: they began talking with one another. In the summer of 1992, they began discussing with others in the valley their idea of a "different approach to managing the half-million-acre Applegate watershed." To their surprise they found a receptive, yet cautious, community that shared many desires and interests in common.

Encouraged by this realization, Shipley and Neal organized a meeting in October 1992 with neighbors, representatives from industry, community groups, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and several local environmental organizations to discuss a plan to make the Applegate Watershed a demonstration site for ecologically and financially responsible resource management. This 60-person group elected a nine-person Board of Directors whose nominations were based not on affiliation but, according to Shipley, on a willingness to "work toward solutions, leave partisanship at home, put ecosystem health in front of private agendas, and have the time to participate" in meetings. At their first meeting, the group crafted a vision statement that identified an overarching objective of making "future land management in the Applegate Watershed ecologically credible, aesthetically acceptable, and economically viable."

The partnership is over 10 years old now, but still meets most Tuesday nights. It has implemented or supported numerous on-the-ground projects, including social and ecological assessments, research and monitoring, environmental restoration, outreach, and public education. The partners recently completed a comprehensive fire plan for the watershed, and compiled a GIS system that integrates BLM, Forest Service, and county tax lot information--perhaps the greatest amount of integrated information for a half million-acre area in the entire western U.S. More fundamentally, the partnership's efforts have altered the perspectives of community members about their role and responsibility for the watershed and its resources. There has also been a noticeable change in attitude from some federal land managers believing, as one agency participant put it, they were "experts with a mission to convince," to a feeling of "let's see what we can do together." While the partnership clearly faces challenges on many fronts, it nonetheless has constructed an effective and enduring process for learning about and acting upon resource management problems in the valley.

Agency-Initiated Processes: Planning on Vermont's Green Mountain National Forest

The federal government owns approximately one third of the U.S. land base in a fragmented set of land units, most of which are subject to agency-created planning processes. While few of these processes mandate collaborative planning, a number of creative and entrepreneurial agency employees have experimented with collaborative approaches, sometimes encouraged by community members and agency leaders. In many cases, the results have been heartening. For example, on the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont, District Ranger Michael Schrotz and his colleagues decided that "public involvement" meant more than taking written comments from a faceless constituency, or even fielding questions at a hearing; it meant working side-by-side with local citizens to plan and implement projects that directly affect the forest. One such collaboration occurred in development of a management plan for the 15,000-acre Lye Brook Wilderness Area. [For a more detailed discussion of this case, see Wondolleck and Yaffee 1994.]

In mid-1990, as the deadline for completing the wilderness management plan drew near, employees began talking about how they could possibly get the project completed. Human resources inside the agency were scarce, and they recognized the value of tapping into the expertise of those outside the agency. A core team of both Forest Service and non-Forest Service individuals was put together to develop the plan. This group worked diligently for almost two years, convening public meetings, exploring alternatives, responding to divergent concerns, and finally completing a plan that was acceptable to the core team as well as outside groups. Agency participants concluded that the plan gives the wilderness area the best possible protection and management, and that it would have come out differently had they done it on their own.

The planning process accomplished much: it strengthened the agency's relationships with the public and interest groups, generated new support and resources, and provided for effective management of forest resources. The planning process was also successful at educating the public and creating a supportive constituency. "This process has built a lot of respect within the community [for Forest Service activities]," said the project's leader. "People know what we are doing and why. It has helped us develop a good relationship with them."

This project did not end at the planning stage but evolved into a network of people who continue to work with the agency on plan implementation and other projects. The project leader attributes the success of the effort to the support and encouragement of agency leaders, particularly the district ranger. He "realized that this process would take a Iot of time, but his vision was that this was the most appropriate and effective way to approach the task."

Collaboration Encouraged by Explicit Statutory Incentives: The Clark County Nevada Habitat Conservation Plan

Many believe that collaboration occurs when individuals voluntarily choose to work together rather than work through a more traditional, top-down, agency-driven process. In fact, many collaborations result from the inducements and opportunities provided by laws and agency programs. In Clark County, Nevada, a regional land use planning process was triggered by conflicts between land development and the habitat requirements of the desert tortoise. [For a more detailed discussion of this case, see Coughlin et al. 1999.] It was induced by the listing of the tortoise as an endangered species, and enabled by a provision of the federal Endangered Species Act that permits incidental "take" of an endangered or threatened species only if the developer first completes a habitat conservation plan (HCP)--a document that spells out actions that will be taken to protect habitat critical for a listed species. This provision of the Endangered Species Act has provided strong incentive for collaborative development of HCPs across the United States. As of April 2003, 541 HCPs have been approved, covering approximately 38 million acres and protecting more than 525 endangered or threatened species (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2003).

Groups in Clark County are unlikely to have grappled with the need to protect native habitat without the ESA incentive, and were extremely unlikely to have done so in a collaborative process without the ESA-defined HCP provision. Encompassing over 5 million acres, the mountainous Mojave Desert climate of Clark County covers the southern tip of Nevada and five major cities, including Las Vegas (Aengst et al. 1998). The region is one of the fastest growing in the country, slowly changing from an area dominated by ranching and farming communities to that of an expanding metropolitan region with a population of well over one million. The desert tortoise, the Nevada State reptile, is one of many species whose habitat and safety are endangered by this development activity.

In 1989, local environmentalists successfully filed a lawsuit to have the tortoise listed as an endangered species. Ranchers, farmers, and off-highway vehicle enthusiasts perceived the tortoise listing as a threat to their access and use of public land. For environmentalists, it was but a small victory in a fight against land-use patterns linked to ecological harm. For the Southern Nevada Homebuilders Association, the listing meant a sudden halt to unprecedented levels of growth in Clark County. There was pervasive fear that the county's vibrant economy and rural culture was on the verge of collapse if a solution to the species' preservation was not found. Reactions were vicious among embittered Nevada residents. As one observer remarked, southern Nevada had "literally become a cultural war-zone overnight" with the issue "more likely to be solved with a shotgun on the courthouse steps than anywhere else" (Aengst et al. 1998).

Facing this harrowing scenario, Clark County commissioners initiated development of an HCP through a collaborative stakeholder process involving federal and state agencies, ranchers, developers, mining interests, ORV users, and environmentalists. This collaborative process resulted in the development of a 30-year Desert Conservation Plan between 1992 and 1995, and formation of a Multi-species HCP Plan between 1995 and 1998. According to participants in the process, and observers of it, the most remarkable aspect of the Clark County HCP process has been the ability of traditionally adversarial interest groups to successfully create land management policy that meets the interests of all stakeholders. Indeed, user groups and landowners, who once despised the tortoise, now participate regularly in monitoring of habitat protection.

Top-Down, Large-Scale Ecosystem Restoration Planning Processes: CALFED

Triggered by mandates from high-level government officials, several large-scale, multi-jurisdictional planning processes are currently underway, including ecosystem restoration processes in the Florida Everglades and the Chesapeake Bay. Another example is the CALFED-San Francisco Bay Delta Restoration Program in California, a cooperative effort of more than 20 state and federal agencies working with local communities to improve the quality and reliability of California's water supplies and revive the San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem. The San Francisco Bay-Delta system supplies drinking water for more than 22 million Californians, is a source of irrigation for California's $24 billion farm industry, and contains the largest estuary on the west coasts of North and South America (CALFED Bay-Delta Program 1998). The mission of the CALFED Bay-Delta Program is "to develop and implement a long-term comprehensive plan that will restore ecological health and improve water management for beneficial uses of the Bay-Delta System" (CALFED Bay-Delta Program 2003).

This collaborative ecosystem restoration and water management process was convened by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and California Governor Pete Wilson in 1994 when it became apparent that state and federal agencies acting independently would not be able to protect threatened and endangered species, maintain water supplies for farmers, and ensure that water quality standards were met for California's growing population. A concerted and coordinated approach was essential. To get it going required a mandate from above.

CALFED is undeniably a huge undertaking rife with political, organizational, and scientific complexity, with high ecological and economic stakes. It will be years before its success can be measured. Regardless, to date the process has fostered several restoration projects and enhanced scientific understanding of the dynamics of the Bay-Delta ecosystem. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of all, the CALFED process has established a productive dialogue among disparate agricultural, environmental, and governmental interests, rather than continuing in the adversarial mode that prevailed in the past. Critical to making progress has been the recognition of interdependence between the competing groups and an explicit and forceful mandate from high-level political officials. Indeed, without this top down mandate, which has been enabled by the buy-in of key political constituencies of these leaders, it is unlikely that progress could be made in a collaborative manner.

Challenges Facing the Effectiveness and Future of Collaboration in the United States

Groups leading and participating in these and other collaborative processes in the U.S. have found designing and managing these processes to be challenging. Some of these challenges result from the attitudes, roles, and resources of key organizations that are involved in the processes. Others are due to the context in which collaboration takes place.

Roles and Attitudes of Agencies

Since collaborative processes have developed partly in response to the problems associated with top-down technical decision making, it should not be surprising that agencies have had difficulty finding an appropriate balance among the wide variety of roles they are called upon to play in these processes. At times they are asked to act as a stakeholder, leader and convener, technical expert, decision maker, and/or facilitator. Each of these roles is difficult; finding the right balance is often very challenging.

Part of the problem is a conflict in styles. Where collaborative planning processes seek to focus on the problems at hand and devise solutions that are often different from the "norm," (including, for example, joint action across organizational boundaries), bureaucratic styles are more likely to emphasize hierarchies, maintenance of organizational mission, and standard operating procedures and control. Agencies are more likely to sea themselves as the regulator and/or decision maker and be confused as to how that role relates to their ability to represent interests in a collaborative process. Viewing themselves as a stakeholder with interests that need to be expressed is not a "normal" perspective for many agencies.

For some agencies involved in collaborative processes, the result has been that they were standoffish in the processes, with the appearance of "keeping their cards close to the vest." Alternatively, some agency staff members have defined success as finding a neutral balance point among the parties involved in a process. Both of these outcomes are problematic. Agency concerns and interests must be represented within the collaborative process in order to guide and bound the decision space. Further, they must provide technical knowledge, and describe and advocate their statutory interests. Their role is not solely to facilitate a balance between the interests at stake, but to contribute to and legitimize the best solutions to public problems as framed by their missions. These solutions are not necessarily defined by any balance point that can be agreed-upon by the parties.

Leadership and Support

Some of the problems associated with agency response to collaborative processes ate a result of leaders who demonstrate inadequate commitment to the process. The worst-case situation is when a field-level agency manager helps craft a process, which through hours of hard work and emotion produces a consensus plan, and is then disavowed by agency leadership. Raising expectations of nongovemmental parties, and using their time and resources and not following through, is a sure way to make a bad situation worse. A lack of agency commitment to collaboratively derived direction has been one of the biggest sources of problems in American collaborative planning.

"Following through" does not mean that the collaborative product automatically binds leaders. Indeed, except in rare cases, statutory authority vests decision making in the agency leaders alone. The best-case norm is for decision-makers to take the outcome of the collaborative product as an input into a formal administrative process that maintains normal opportunities for public review and challenge. If the collaborative process was truly inclusive and representative of critical interests, and agencies fully participated as stakeholders and experts, then the collaborative product should have no problem passing normal administrative procedures. Indeed, some agency leaders understand the great benefit of having support for what becomes an agency decision created through a consensus-building process.

Agency leaders also demonstrate commitment to a collaborative process by supporting it with resources and momentum. Sometimes that means modifying agency operating procedures to allow key staff to participate in a collaborative process. For example, collaboration largely takes the form of continuing relationships established on the ground among different interests. Personnel transfers, a practice common within large resource management agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, can unravel these relationships. In many of the case situations we follow, collaborative processes were working well until a key agency participant was transferred and not replaced. Agency leaders need to understand that collaborative partnerships happen through interpersonal relationships, and that successful collaborations are motivated in part by the presence of energetic, committed individuals. These relationships take time and effort to build, maintain, and manage through transitions.

Skills, Resources, and Time

Finding time to participate in these processes has been increasingly challenging. At the same time that collaborative processes have been developing, agency workforces have been downsizing, and the trend lines are not good. Approximately 40 percent of the U.S. Forest Service employees can retire in the next five years, and planned federal budgets do not anticipate full replacements. Many agency field offices have seen considerable reductions in staff, yet agency missions have not been reduced. When faced with a work overload and limited staff, most organizations retrench to core tasks, a tendency that does not bode well for collaborative processes, even if one argues that collaboration will be cost-effective in the long run by lowering conflict and improving working relationships.

It is ironic. One of the reasons collaboration and partnerships are needed is to deal with resource shortages; working across boundary lines can access critical resources. Yet, it takes some level of resources to access others, and this basic level of outreach is threatened in the current fiscal climate.

Resource issues are not just a matter of personnel time; they clearly are also an issue of skill sets, and this is true not just in agencies, but in many of the parties involved in collaborative planning. Effective collaboration requires significant interpersonal skills, win-win problem-solving, collaborative learning, thinking "out of the box," and the like. Yet many technical experts who populate agencies have not been selected for, or trained in, these skills. Many of the advocates who populate nongovernmental organizations are good at winning in adversarial decision-making processes, but terrible at engaging in collaborative problem-solving processes. And many community groups have neither the interpersonal skill set nor the technical knowledge to be effective. All need training in order to carry out the process of collaborative planning processes, yet few have access to training resources.

Roles and Attitudes of Nongovernmental Groups

The reaction of nongovernmental groups to the development of collaborative processes has been mixed, depending on their perception of how well they will do in those processes. For some local groups, collaborative processes have been a valuable entree point into decisions that affect them. For some industry or commodity-oriented groups, such processes feel a lot like the kind of negotiation processes that are common in the ways they do business.

The reaction from environmental organizations, particularly at the regional or national levels, has been more negative. For example, Michael McCloskey, chairman of the Sierra Club published a critical review of collaboration entitled "The Skeptic: Collaboration has its Limits." He warned of the potential for "lowest common denominator" outcomes arising from unrepresentative and unbridled collaborative processes that ignored scientific and legal realities (McCloskey 1996). Legal scholar George Coggins similarly criticized collaborative approaches to resource management, arguing that they represent the illegal devolution of administrative authorities from Congressionally designated agencies to unelected groups (Coggins 1998).

It is the case that many national groups are not as well organized at the local or watershed level; they fear the lengthy deliberations associated with much collaboration and question the capacity of local groups to be effective at advocating broader perspectives. Since many collaborative processes do not set direction or policy for other situations--they explicitly focus on the situation at hand--some groups feel that participation has limited effect, since there ate no precedents created to influence other management areas. Others may well benefit from a state of conflict: either because it is easier to raise funding when faced with a crisis, or because festering conflict has the potential to cause greater change.

Incentives to Participate

The U.S. experience with collaborative planning highlights the importance of incentives that encourage groups to come to the table, in particular the legal and political context in which collaboration takes place. Perception of a shared problem, or opportunity to gain, may be enough to promote the interaction that leads to collaboration. More often, such collaborations result from long periods of conflict and crisis combined ultimately with one or more charismatic and energetic individuals who move others into a different decision-making mode. This situation was the case in the Applegate Partnership.

But in many of the collaborations underway in the United States, a specific program or law provided the incentive that encouraged groups to come to the table, as was the case with CALFED and the Everglades Restoration. The federal Endangered Species Act has provided the impetus for many resource-planning processes. It did this by establishing a fairly absolute mandate to protect species that, in turn, empowers regulators and advocates. Often, the fear of regulatory action has been enough to trigger collaborative action so that communities, firms, or agencies did not lose control by having the more extreme provisions of the act enforced. In other cases, impending regulatory standards, such as those regulating air emissions from wood stoves, changed the incentives of the regulated parties. Working together might produce a better outcome, either because it is less stringent or, more likely, better able to be implemented.

While some view collaboration as a totally voluntary and cooperative act, that perspective often misses an important point. People act collaboratively largely as a strategy for achieving their own interests, including an interest in a creative and durable solution. As a result, they evaluate their interest in collaborating through the incentives that they face as a result of current conditions and the legal and political context in which they are acting. New collaborative planning processes must consider this broader context. Laws and political realities bound the set of possible actions of the collaborative process and encourage participation, in part by making it less desirable for key groups to stay away from the table.

Measuring Success

There is growing pressure in the U.S. to evaluate the success of collaborative resource management processes in terms of specific improvements in the state of ecological or social systems. Federal agencies are required to evaluate environmental outcomes in order to meet the provisions of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993. Similarly, community-based collaborations are seeking ways to credibly evaluate their accomplishments in order to satisfy the charitable foundations that often underwrite their efforts, and respond to criticisms leveled by some environmental groups. This form of outcome-oriented assessment is clearly challenging, but necessary, in order to understand whether collaborative processes are ultimately more effective than other modes of social decision making.

Rarely has this focus on environmental outcomes been the perspective of those tasked to assess progress in a collaborative process. For those operating from a dispute resolution perspective, success is usually defined in terms of settlement. If a well-designed process produces agreement among the involved parties, then that agreement by definition must be effective. Hence, the process was deemed a success. For those looking at longer term conflict management and collaborative resource management processes, success is often defined in terms of process improvements: better communication, stronger relationships, lower levels of nonproductive conflict, and the like. Increasingly, process improvements are being proven to be precursors to environmental improvements (Yaffee 2002). But just measuring process improvements is inadequate, because they do not tell us whether underlying problems are being solved, and social or ecological conditions are being improved.

Conclusion

Over the past ten to fifteen years in the United States, there has been a significant increase in the use of collaborative approaches to resource planning and management. While collaboration has been codified or mandated in only a few large-scale ecosystem restoration cases, it is nonetheless now seen as ah option to be considered by resource managers and communities. Many challenges remain in adapting agency procedures to accommodate, rather than constrain, these processes, building capacity within agencies and communities, and finding ways to credibly measure the achievements of collaborative approaches.

Learning from the on-the-ground experience with collaborative processes is continuing to inform practitioners so that they can craft better processes and management strategies. Indeed, there is an evolving and rich literature on factors that facilitate the success of collaborative processes (Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000). The alternatives to collaboration--top-down, fragmented regulatory structures, and legislative and judicial decision-making processes that pick winners and losers--are increasingly recognized as problematic. Response to these traditional processes has led to the push for collaboration. Ultimately, we must understand what works and what does not, and craft hybrid processes that employ the most productive characteristics of traditional structures while incorporating the significant benefits of collaborative processes.

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Author Biographies

Steven L. Yaffee is the Theodore Roosevelt Professor of Ecosystem Management and Professor of Natural Resource and Environmental Policy at the University of Michigan. He is the author or co-author of the Island Press books, Making Collaboration Work, The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl, and Ecosystem Management in the United States. His doctorate is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He can be reached at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, at the University of Michigan, 430 E. University, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1115.

Julia M. Wondolleck is Associate Professor of Natural Resource Conflict Management at the University of Michigan. She is the author or coauthor of Making Collaboration Work, Public Lands Conflict and Resolution, and Environmental Disputes. Her PhD is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she was a member of the Committee of Scientists that advised the U.S. Department of Agriculture on a new collaborative approach to national forest planning. She can be reached at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, at the University of Michigan, 430 E. University, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1115.