Community-Based Collaboration

Bridging Socio-Ecological Research and Practice

E. Franklin Dukes, Karen E. Firehock, Juliana E. Birkhoff, E. Franklin Dukes, Karen E. Firehock, Juliana E. Birkhoff

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780813938752
• eBook ISBN: 9780813931593
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

The debate over the value of community-based environmental collaboration is one that dominates current discussions of the management of public lands and other resources. In Community-Based Collaboration: Bridging Socio-Ecological Research and Practice, the volume's contributors offer an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of what attracts people to this collaborative mode. The authors address the new institutional roles adopted by community-based collaborators and their interaction with existing governance institutions in order to achieve more holistic solutions to complex environmental challenges.

Contributors:

Heidi L. Ballard, University of California, Davis * Juliana E. Birkhoff, RESOLVE * Charles Curtin, Antioch University * Cecilia Danks, University of Vermont * E. Franklin Dukes, University of Virginia and George Mason University * María Fernández-Giménez, Colorado State University * Karen E. Firehock, University of Virginia * Melanie Hughes McDermott, Rutgers University * William D. Leach, California State University, Sacramento * Margaret Ann Moote, private consultant * Susan L. Senecah, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry * Gregg B. Walker, Oregon State University

1

The Community-Based collaborative Movement in the United States

Karen E. Firehock

This chapter provides a brief description of the community-based collaborative (CBC) movement in the United States. It addresses what collaboration is, what CBCs are, why CBCs emerged in the United States, how they both solve and engender conflict, what CBCs contribute, how outcomes are measured, and what CBCs mean for environmental governance. This chapter thus sets the definitional and historical stage for later chapters in the book dealing with community knowledge, how CBCs can take an adaptive management approach, how they govern, building effective collaboratives, the theory of collaboration, and finally, the promise of collaboration and what the movement means for the future.

It is fair to question why community-based collaboration even matters. Why does the phenomenon warrant the attention of federal agencies, state and local governments, scientists, politicians, environmental and civic groups, and community members? The contributors to this book suggest that CBCs are worthy of attention primarily because they represent a quiet revolution in American environmental governance. They provide a unique forum for addressing complex environmental problems, a forum that is likely to become increasingly important in the future. CBCs may offer the best hope in cases where traditional resource management has failed because they bring together parties with diverse perspectives, knowledge, and interests, and they often include groups that have the capacity to implement solutions.

What Is Community-Based Collaboration?

Many terms have been used to describe the work of collaborative groups. Among them are collaborative stewardship (Burchfield 1998), collaborative environmental management (Randolph and Rich 1998), community-based conservation (Snow 1998, 254), collaborative conservation (Brick 1998), community-based environmental protection (U.S. EPA 1997), and grassroots environmental management (Weber 2000). Cooperative conservation is yet another term applied to these efforts at the 2005 White House Conference, “Faces and Places of Cooperative Conservation.”

Since these descriptions also often include the notion of collaboration, it is worthwhile including a definition of that term. Potapchuck and Polk (1994) propose as a definition a locally based process in which parties who have a stake in the outcome of a problem (stakeholders) come together in a structured forum to engage in joint decision making. Gray (1989) defines collaboration as the joint ownership of decisions and collective responsibility for achieving the jointly agreed-upon objectives.

Some groups, such as the Policy Consensus Initiative (2010), have set standards for collaboration. The Policy Consensus Initiative suggests determining whether a group is truly collaborative based on the existence of the following standards:

• Jointly agreed-upon indicators of success or milestones for measuring progress.

• Mechanisms to monitor whether participants are contributing to meeting the jointly agreed-upon objectives.

• Jointly developed strategies and actions that spell out commitments, taking into account the differences among the participating groups and individuals.

• Contractual agreements or other provisions that describe roles and responsibilities for carrying out jointly agreed-upon objectives.

• Evidence of resource sharing or exchanges.

• Mechanisms for regular exchange of information and feedback about joint progress toward objectives.

This chapter adopts the definition of community-based collaboration advanced by the Community-Based Collaboratives Research Consortium (CBCRC) at a conference held in 1999 (Moote et al. 2000). The consortium’s definition of a CBC is as follows: “(1) A group that has been convened voluntarily from within the local community to focus on a resource management issue(s) or planning involving public lands or publicly owned or regulated resources whose management impacts the physical, environmental, and/or economic health of the local community; (2) Was brought together by a shared desire to influence the protection and use of natural resources through recommendations or direct actions that will impact the management of the resource; (3) Has membership that includes a broad array of interests, some of which may be in conflict; and (4) Utilizes a decision-making process that requires participation by local stakeholders” (Moote et al. 2000, 2).

As suggested by this definition, what makes a CBC unique is not simply the sharing of decision making or the monitoring of outcomes but the diversity of the collaborative’s membership. This diversity can aid the collaborative in problem solving. Since CBCs are made up of representatives of diverse stakeholder groups, participants in CBCs often are able to lend unique perspectives to framing problems and solutions. They may include fishers or ranchers, scientists, federal agencies, resource managers, and conservation groups. All of these groups can bring knowledge and experience to managing a resource.

CBCs are also diverse in scope and geography as well as in membership. The following examples demonstrate CBCs’ diversity:

• The Catron County Collaborative in New Mexico found a collaborative solution after years of court gridlock over grazing. Ranchers had been distressed by being blocked from grazing, while environmentalists wished to restore the land. A solution developed collaboratively among the parties allowed a return of some grazing along with land restoration projects, allowing both sides to meet their needs (Smith 1998, 1–20).

• The Applegate Partnership of Oregon achieved collaboration between the community and agencies to better manage public and private lands within a 496,500-acre watershed. Not restricted to acting only within agency-defined land boundaries, the group was able to address stewardship activities on both public and private lands at the watershed scale, where change could be most effective (Firehock 1999).

• The Rockfish River Forum in Nelson County, Virginia, organized to address the impacts of sprawl-patterned development and river sedimentation. The group realized through stakeholder input over the nine months of the project that many other issues not within its original scope could also be addressed by the effort, such as stream habitat restoration, the creation of public access, environmental education, and the construction of a new river park to demonstrate habitat conservation principles (Firehock, personal experience).

• The Northwest Colorado Stewardship, working on a National Environmental Protection Act process on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands and off-highway vehicle uses, brought together multiple participants not simply to argue about the condition of the resource but to monitor its condition and reach a shared understanding of what might be done to manage it (see chapter 3).

Why Did CBCs Emerge in the United States?

The collaborative movement is a uniquely American phenomenon that emerged late in the twentieth century. Although there is no national census of groups engaged in community-based collaboration for environmental protection, most researchers agree that the number is increasing (see chapter 4).

The growth of the CBC movement in the United States can be attributed to several factors: (1) settlement patterns that resulted in a patchwork of public and private land ownership; (2) the evolution of the American property rights movement and anger over restrictions emerging from endangered species rulings and other regulations, especially in the West; (3) the difficulty of managing for multiple objectives by large government bureaucracies across diverse ecological and social environments; (4) traditions of American democratic governance, including the right to participate in decisions that affect shared commons; (5) the inability of command-and-control technologies to solve pollution problems when decision makers and pollution sources are dispersed; and (6) communities’ interest in seeking solutions that recognize community values.

The interwoven patterns of ownership among agencies, tribes, and private landowners in particular are a source of much conflict in the United States. The settlement patterns of the West led to a patchwork quilt of land ownership, with the original residents, Native Americans, relegated to leftover lands or forcibly removed to more remote territories. Many of the 569 federally recognized tribes manage their own lands, each according to its own distinct tribal laws, across thirty-five states. Federal lands include those administered by the National Park Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, the BLM, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, the National Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Energy, the U.S. military, and so on. States also administer their own lands and refuges. This complex land ownership pattern makes it difficult to manage western grasslands, forests, and rivers at a scale large enough to effectively include entire ecosystems. Moreover, in the eastern and Midwestern states, where most land is privately owned, there is just as much, if not more, complexity in managing ecosystems that stretch across multiple land tenures.

CBCs have emerged as one way to address the complex regulatory environment and to overcome the disparate patterns of ownership that add to the difficulty of managing land resources. Groups such as the Malpai Borderlands Group, described in chapter 2, have sought ways to voluntarily collaborate in the management of a vast rangeland ecosystem.

The expansion of community interest in environmental governance has also been fueled in part by the impacts of environmental regulations on individual property rights and the reach and power of those regulations. The property rights concern has been driven by controversial environmental decisions emanating from the Endangered Species Act, such as those concerning the snail darter fish in Tennessee, the California gnatcatcher, and the northern and Mexican spotted owls, in which large dam, development, or timber permit projects had to be suspended or altered. These cases and others have increased concern in some sectors about the reach of environmental laws and the powers held by administrators who implement them. These property rights concerns have spurred interest in how decisions are made and how the public is consulted about actions that affect them.

The U.S. Forest Service has faced challenges associated with its administrative mandate of multi-objective management. Although the Forest Service was originally created to secure a sustained timber supply for the country, its mission expanded over time to take into account the multiple values provided by forest resources. The Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 codified the agency’s multiple-use management objectives to explicitly include “outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed and wildlife and fish purposes” (Kenney et al. 1998). The National Forest Management Act of 1976 sought to solve some of the difficulties inherent in managing lands for multiple uses by increasing opportunities for public input, yet the process has proved extremely difficult to implement (ibid.). Adding conflict and complexity to this situation, different U.S. administrations have sought to increase or restrict public participation and access to agency documents through various agency decisions, expanding or contracting participation based on political views of the moment.

In addition to changes in federal management approaches, the demand for more local control has been spurred by the perception that American governance is dominated by a large, centralized bureaucracy, characterized by rigid adherence to rules and regulations and afflicted with hierarchical chains of command that no longer work well. The complex demands of land management require agencies to be flexible and to empower citizens to participate as partners in governance (Osborne and Gaebler 1993).

CBCs represent an innovative form of governance by bringing additional stakeholders into the decision-making process. The question is whether this approach to governance is appropriate to managing lands held in trust by the government for the benefit of the public, whether or not that public resides near the resource in question or is directly affected by resource management decisions. In chapter 5, Walker and Senecah discuss the institutional challenges of collaborative land management.

A third factor contributing to the emergence of CBCs is an interest in reframing environmental issues so that problems are addressed more comprehensively. Participants in a dialogue may not be interested in collaborating if they think that problems have been framed in such a way as to exclude possible outcomes or solutions from the outset. For example, an issue that is highly value-laden may be reframed as technical, implying that only technical data can be used to make a decision and values do not have a place in the discussion. Public interests attempting to introduce values into the discussion may be labeled “irrational” and disempowered (Renn, Thomas, and Wiedemann 1995). Some collaborative groups, therefore, have formed precisely to broaden the scope of a problem and look for solutions that are more holistic. Since CBCs are not necessarily restricted to narrow problem definitions as an agency might be, they are often in a position to expand the scope of the problem solving and address the social and economic aspects of environmental problems. As an example of the broader issue scope possible through CBCs, Charles Curtin in chapter 2 discusses the Downeast Initiative in Maine, a collaborative concerned with the ecological decline of the groundfishery, the diversity of markets that support local fisheries, and the future of family-based businesses.

How Do CBCs Engender Conflict?

A number of concerns have been expressed about the roles of CBCs (Firehock 1999). There is concern that CBCs may exercise an inappropriate level of influence over a public resource, and that they lack the diversity of membership necessary to represent broader public interests. CBCs are sometimes thought to consist of self-appointed representatives who have no real accountability and to exclude members who might not agree with the majority. However, these concerns are not fundamentally different from those that may be expressed about an industry or an environmental group that has a distinct membership and is seeking to influence a land management agency.

The devolution of power from elected and public entities to nonelected local groups who are perceived as not accountable is a long-standing concern for some (see Coggins 1998) but not others. For example, while Weber (2000) acknowledges the issue of devolution inherent in grassroots ecosystem management, he does not share concerns about power and authority devolving to the local level. Indeed, the issue is more complex than a collision between the expertocracy at the federal level desperately clinging to power and local communities seeking to overturn ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Community-Based Collaborative Movement in the United States
• 2 Integrating and Applying Knowledge from Community-Based Collaboratives: Implications for Natural Resource Management
• 3 How CBCs Learn: Ecological Monitoring and Adaptive Management
• 4 Effective Collaboration: Overcoming External Obstacles
• 5 Collaborative Governance: Integrating Institutions, Communities, and People
• 6 Building a Theory of Collaboration
• 7 The Promise of Community-Based Collaboration: Agenda for an Authentic Future
• Notes on Contributors
• Index