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Collaboration on the move
Use of collaborative processes to address community issues has a long history, harkening back to New England town meetings of the 1800s. What is relatively new — and significantly more contentious and controversial — is collaboration in public land management.
In the last two decades, collaboration has grown exponentially in public lands and resource management. Federal agencies as diverse as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now tout collaboration. President Clinton advocated collaborative partnerships for his reinventing government program and President Bush issued an executive order promoting collaborative conservation. Congress has even encouraged collaboration in recent legislation (Healthy Forests Restoration Act and Stewardship Contracting).
Modern expansion of collaborative resource management was initiated by individuals frustrated with decades of mistrust and conflict over land and resource management. Endangered species were not recovering, forests were unhealthy, rangelands were degraded — and conflict was not serving anyone's interests.
Of course, neither Federal law, nor agency programs and processes, nor committed communities will guarantee sustainable land management. They do not even guarantee a robust collaborative process without controversy. But in some locales, collaborative partnerships have been able to address land management problems and also ease the seemingly intractable social conflict that surrounded them.
Proponents praise collaboration for:
- Creating innovative, locally adapted, solutions to problems,
- Applying a broad range of knowledge and perspectives in problem solving,
- Developing more effective results with buy-in from the local community and more lasting results with incremental progress and implementation,
- Expanding the 'tool box' for resource management, rather than replacing national laws, and
- Enhancing environmental protection when both the environment and sustainable communities are the focus.
In contrast, critics of collaboration argue that locally-formed groups do not represent a full range of interests and the "representative" status of participants creates inherently unenforceable decisions. Critics also decry collaboration as:
- Co-opting or selling out environmental interests,
- Weakening national standards,
- Creating lowest common denominator solutions,
- Protecting the status quo from modern reality, and
- Prolonging unjustifiable subsidies and preferences.
Where the community can get beyond the question of "whether to collaborate" the pertinent questions remain the same — Who sits at the table? Who defines and agrees on proposed resolutions? How do we go about the simplest tasks of organization and building capacity? See the Collaboration Handbook for "how to" detail on collaborative processes.
New Collaborations, New Partnerships
In recent years, more collaborative processes are addressing modern problems that fail to fit easily within jurisdictional boundaries. While none of these problems are "easy", established groups are finding that as they complete their first round of projects — typically those that were the least controversial and the easiest to implement — they now face even more challenging issues. These new issues are also unifying partners in new ways — sometimes collaboratively, sometimes not.
Yes, the small collaborative groups built around "unlikely" bedfellows are still active. These are generally broad-based collaboratives tackling a variety of issues and implementing solutions through agreements at the local BLM field office or Forest Service ranger district level. But there are other types of partnerships as well — partnerships that seek to wield the political power of diverse coalitions to tackle issues as weighty as global climate change.
These interest-based coalitions may be formed for a single purpose with an expiration date attached. They may or may not have the broad base of community participation common in the earliest collaboratives. Large industrial players are also joining partnerships — especially where pressure from powerful environmental groups encourages participation. Some of the solutions developed by these partnerships are based in federal legislation (Coalition for the Valle Vidal), tied to court cases (Texas-based utility TXU), or aimed at national policy changes (United States Climate Action Partnership).
Next Steps for the Clearinghouse
Whether collaborative or power-based, local or national, partnerships and coalitions are working toward their view of better resource management. Many of the bigger players — the large environmental groups, industry representatives, D.C-based agency staff — have access to their own resources. But the smaller groups, local communities, and field-based agency personnel are still struggling for the resources to participate fully in these processes. As the Clearinghouse goes forward — under new management — we will also struggle to understand and anticipate the critical issues for collaboratives and other partnerships and how best to serve you — the participants in managing the lands and resources of the West. As we go forward, we hope to be a forum for your ideas as well as a resource for your projects.
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