CHAPTER 2
CITIZEN-INITIATED
COLLABORATION
The government, as both actor and institution, played a significant role in shaping the Applegate Partnership and its accomplishments. Yet these roles were anything but straightforward or simple.Viewed from one angle, governmental participants sat at the table as equal players working alongside others to reach agreements and create change. Although central participants, governmental actors were not conveners or directors, as in the case of the Animas River Stakeholder Group (Chapter 7), nor did they primarily provide funding, as in the case of the Ohio Farmland Preservation Planning Program (Chapter 5).The Applegate Partnership made every effort to make federal personnel equal participants. Nevertheless, the governmental institutions of federal land management still dominated the partnership's efforts. Governmental actors were embedded in federal land management agencies that created particular roles and rules for governmental participants. The larger institutions of federal land management were what the partnership at once had to work within and sought to change. A crisis in these institutions created the impetus for the partnership and, at times, impeded its progress even when the group had reached agreement. This chapter examines the challenges governmental actors face when they participate in collaborations that seek to change the governmental institutions in which they are embedded.
FORMATION OF THE APPLEGATE PARTNERSHIP
The Applegate Partnership first came together in 1992 in the Applegate Valley in southwest Oregon. The Applegate Valley is a 500,000-acre watershed in the Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains, one of the most ecologically diverse regions in the American West (Davis et al. 1997). The watershed has steep mountains and narrow valleys, first settled by Europeans looking for gold in the 1850s and 1860s. Before 1900, considerable land in the valley was given to railroad companies and placed in forest reserves. Because of railroad bankruptcy and corruption, Congress reversed the railroad land grant and restored the lands to the public domain in 1916 (Richardson 1980). Today the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service manage 70 percent of the land in the watershed.
Large-scale federal timber harvest began in the late 1960s, and local protests against aerial spraying of herbicides associated with clear-cutting quickly followed. Environmental activism against the federal timber program continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as it did across the Pacific Northwest, while federal agencies increased harvest at the behest of the White House and Congress. With abundant federal timber, forest products processing industries grew in nearby Medford, Grants Pass, and White City. Because of the requirement that the federal government share its timber revenue with county governments, federal timber harvest supplied county governments in this region with half of their revenue, which enabled county governments to provide services with only limited taxation (Moseley 1999; Jackson County Government 1992).
Tensions built through the late 1980s here and across the Pacific Northwest, as environmentalists actively opposed timber sales and forest plans through appeals and litigation. Environmentalists made use of provisions in the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Forest Management Act, and the Endangered Species Act to force the Forest Service and the BLM to document the impacts of intensive forest management and protect populations of vertebrate species such as the spotted owl and marbled murrelet. As environmentalists won battle after battle in court, the federal government's management plans and timber harvest levels were ruled to be in violation of environmental laws. Timber industry proponents countered that environmentalists were threatening the jobs of forest and mill workers. In 1991, the situation grew to crisis proportions. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court enjoined the Forest Service and the BLM to halt all timber harvest in the territory of the northern spotted owl—federal land in the western portions of Oregon, Washington, and northern California—because the Forest Service and the BLM had not developed management plans that would protect the northern spotted owl and other old-growth-dependent species, as required under the Endangered Species Act and the National Forest Management Act (Sher 1993; Yaffee 1994). Public meetings threatened to erupt into violence as frightened forest and mill workers and angry county commissioners confronted protesting environmentalists.
Seeking a way to reduce conflict and manage the forests to restore ecological conditions, Applegate Valley resident Jack Shipley, a longtime environmental activist, began talking with people from neighborhood environmental groups, timber companies, federal land management agencies, and county governments in 1992. After months of shuttle diplomacy, in which Shipley, other residents, and interest group representatives built support for diverse people to come together to develop a new way to manage land in the Applegate Valley, the Applegate Partnership began with a meeting in the fall of that year. By the third meeting, participants had agreed to a vision statement and a structure:
The Applegate Partnership is a community-based project involving industry, conservation groups, natural resource agencies, and residents cooperating to encourage and facilitate the use of natural resource principles that promote ecosystem health and diversity. Through community involvement and education, this Partnership supports management of all land within the watershed in a manner that sustains natural resources and that will, in turn, contribute to economic and community stability within the Applegate Valley. (Applegate Partnership n.d.)
Early meeting participants created a board of nine members and nine alternates to represent a broad cross section of interests and values. The initial board included two federal land managers, two environmentalists, two timber company employees, a community organizer, and a soil and water conservation district employee. Participants in the early meetings picked board members by consensus, choosing people whom they thought would be able to bridge traditional interest group boundaries. Many were experienced social and environmental activists. The partnership did not have any staff, instead relying on the donated time and resources of volunteer participants and their organizations and agencies.
Because of the extreme political tension around them, participants met in unpublicized meetings for five months to get to know each other and develop a sense of what they were trying to accomplish. After these first months, the group went public, opening the partnership to participation by anyone who was interested and to scrutiny by traditional interest groups across the region involved in the spotted owl crisis.
Partnership participants had a strong sense that open participation was key to their efforts, and they worked hard to be inclusive. The partnership held weekly meetings, alternating between day meetings, which were convenient for people whose participation was related to their jobs, and evening meetings, which were more convenient for people who could not leave work to attend a meeting. Although the partnership had a formal board, membership on the board reflected a commitment to participate more than a right to do so. Participation was open, and the group agreed that all who attended a meeting could sit at the table, regardless of who they were, what they believed, or where they lived, as long as they were willing to consider active management on public lands. Like the Darby Partnership (Chapter 3), the Applegate Partnership eschewed procedural rules and formality. There was no board chair, and initially professional facilitators volunteered their time to facilitate the group. Later, facilitation rotated informally among frequent participants.
Board members and other regular participants represented particular perspectives more than they represented specific organizations or interest-based constituencies (Moseley and KenCairn 2001). Although there was some organizational and interest group representation, the partnership encouraged participants to represent perspectives rather than take positions. The group believed that a key to innovation was bringing people and ideas together in new ways, and members described a philosophy of “leaving positions at the door and bringing only values and interests.” Rather than negotiate from extremes toward the middle, the group tried to focus on problem solving and collectively identifying alternatives. Because many participants, especially community residents, did not formally represent others, discussions were often preliminary, and then participants would use social and professional networks to test ideas, identify areas of improvement, and garner support outside the meetings.
In addition to weekly meetings, partnership participants went on frequent field trips. They visited potential project areas and sought examples of management activities from which they might learn. The group found that walking together in the woods helped them discover common ground. Members discovered that they could agree on particular actions on the ground (for example, particular trees to be cut or specific roads to be repaired) more readily than on principles while sitting in a meeting room.
Through meetings and field trips, participants sought to develop a new way to manage the lands of the Applegate Valley. They created management processes that were open, inclusive, and transparent, and included a diversity of participants early in planning and decision-making processes. They sought ways to restore and maintain ecological processes and ensure that the by-products of these efforts would provide maximum ecological benefit.
With these goals in mind, the partnership used the meetings and field trips to develop specific projects that moved them toward more comprehensive land management. They saw early projects as experiments in which they could try new techniques and discover what worked and what did not. They sought to combine local knowledge and values with the technical expertise of the Forest Service and the BLM. One such early project was known as Partnership One. To come to an agreement about which treatments to use, participants visited the project area together and marked trees to be cut or left. The marks were shifted around as ideas changed about how the forest should be managed. Through a series of field trips and meetings, the group reached agreement for this first experiment.
Over time, through the meetings, collaborations, and outreach to community residents who were not active participants, Applegate Partnership participants and other community residents developed social capital—collaborative norms, habits, and skills and social networks—to move beyond federal land management to address collaboratively a wide variety of issues, ranging from private land restoration to county-level land-use planning to agricultural and small-business development. Applegate Valley residents replicated the approach of bringing together diverse people to reach agreement about issues that had heretofore been decided upon by forces beyond their community—or neglected entirely. They were able to do this in part by building dense networks of friendship and acquaintanceship among participants, informal community leaders, and formal political and administrative leaders (Moseley 1999).
GOVERNMENT AS INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPANT
At partnership meetings or on field trips, perhaps the most obvious role of government was that of participant. Federal land management personnel participated in the partnership from the beginning. Even before the first meeting, the partnership founders spoke with government personnel informally to get input about what a collaborative effort might look like and should seek to accomplish. Forest Service and BLM staff initially served as partnership board members, and after the Clinton administration required that they resign from the board because of concerns over the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), they continued to participate actively in meetings and field trips. Some personnel attended meetings regularly; others attended only meetings or field trips related to projects on which they were working. Several more supported the partnership through their work by prioritizing projects that met partnership objectives, even though their meeting attendance was rare.
In early meetings, government employees worked along with other participants to define both the geographic scale and substantive scope of the collaboration. They also provided valuable human resources, such as familiarity with federal land management rules and requirements, knowledge of legal and administrative processes, and technical and scientific expertise. A couple of frequent governmental participants altered their career paths to participate actively in the partnership, providing dedicated time and skills. Another government employee occasionally provided his skills as a trained facilitator along with several other nongovernmental facilitators.
As actors, they did not bring financial resources in cash. They did, however, contribute significant amounts of time. In addition, they made in-kind contributions, such as making meeting space available and providing access to a photocopier to duplicate meeting minutes.
The Applegate Partnership created its own decision-making procedures and coordination mechanisms. Participants, including Forest Service and BLM personnel, designed the group to be egalitarian and democratic, to ensure that all people would have an equal voice. Decision making was by informal consensus. Theoretically, a formal vote of board members could occur as a last resort, but this never happened. On the rare occasion when the partnership considered making a group formal recommendation to a federal land management agency, agency personnel did not participate in the decision-making process.
The group also avoided formal symbols of leaders and followers, such as board or committee chairs. Much of the language and self-image of the group emphasized the notion of equality of participation, such as the group's motto, “Practice trust, them is us.” Similarly, participants often talked about all coming together to work through a problem and find a solution. The problems to be solved were concerns not only of industry or environmentalists, but also of agency personnel.
Informal, broad leadership developed in the group, with different people taking on different types of group maintenance roles. One or two people typically made grand suggestions that stimulated innovation; others were skilled at turning these ideas into something workable. Another was good at smoothing ruffled feathers, and others excelled at holding alliances together. Partnership regulars, including government personnel, adopted these roles based on their personal skills and inclinations.
In such a culture, federal government personnel were, in many respects, participants like any others, be they community residents, industry executives, or environmentalists. People from all of these perspectives attended meetings, shared in facilitation, and contributed the time and resources that they or their organizations could bring to bear. As with other participants, the federal officials came to the table with different concerns, levels of commitment, and skills that reflected their varied personalities and life and professional experiences.
GOVERNMENT AS ACTORS EMBEDDED IN INSTITUTIONS
The group made every effort to establish federal land managers as equal players. At the same time, however, federal land managers had formal decision-making authority over federal lands, which they could not legally delegate to the group. The district rangers and other decision makers could listen to people's opinions and recommendations, but decisions over federal land management remained formally in their hands. In addition, the Forest Service and the BLM had strong Progressivist cultures in which trained federal staff were assumed to be experts, possessing scientific expertise and administrative and legal understanding of federal land management, and thus were best suited to make land management decisions for the public good. Finally, the federal land managers had considerable organizational capacity behind them, which other participants did not. The combination of decision-making authority and different types of knowledge put federal land managers in somewhat different positions than other partnership participants. Federal participants were the ones who had to be persuaded to act in agreed-upon ways. In that way, they had a sort of de facto veto power that other participants did not.
This is not to suggest, however, that federal personnel held all the power in the group. Other participants brought skills, relationships, and power to the table. Specifically, nonfederal participants brought a compelling vision, selective political pressure, and viable collaborative alternatives (Moseley 1999).
The partnership offered a compelling vision that held the promise of change after more than a decade of highly stressful and conflict-laden processes. Working together, founders argued, would create solutions that were better than could be created individually and would allow people, including agency personnel, to maintain control of land management. Parts of the vision were repeated often in meetings and informal discussions, particularly when participants got discouraged or questioned the utility of putting so much energy into the partnership. This vision and all that it implied led some government personnel to make a commitment to the partnership's vision, values, and goals, and then work within their agencies to foster change.
Not all governmental participants were readily or consistently responsive to the demands of the partnership, either because they differed philosophically or because they felt pulled by other priorities. In these instances, the partnership along with the larger Applegate community applied both indirect and direct pressure. The partnership drew on extensive sets of social networks to argue credibly that the agencies would either “pay now” by creating inclusive, responsive processes from the beginning or “pay later” through costly and time-consuming legal appeals and civil protests. They pressured agency line officers (decision makers) directly through frequent visits to their offices and phone calls to encourage them to sit down with stakeholders and work through a particular conflict, devising solutions that would meet the needs of citizens and the agency. If a federal staff member was particularly unresponsive, the partnership contacted higher-level agency officials in hopes that they might exert pressure down the chain of command.
Ultimately more important than the ability to offer a compelling vision or apply political pressure was the nongovernmental participants’ ability to offer viable alternatives to previous political processes. Limits to change often were institutional rather than due to a lack of adequate incentives for agency personnel. For example, budgeting structures and organizational culture made it difficult for agency staff to collaborate internally or to move away from a focus on timber targets. Instead of merely asking the agency to “just fix it,” the partnership argued that they should sit down together and solve both nonagency and agency problems. The partnership developed a culture of good-faith participation in which agencies and communities actively listened and engaged in problem solving rather than taking positions or assigning blame. Agencies informally gave some of their decisionmaking power to participating citizens by responding to community concerns. In exchange, citizens were expected to help develop viable options that enabled agencies to address community complaints and agency needs simultaneously.
In sum, viewed from the perspective of government as actors, federal land managers were relatively equal participants in the collaborative process. They did not convene or fund the group; instead, they participated as others did in defining the issues and developing group structure and process. Like other participants, federal land managers brought their personal skills to the table, along with as much of their organizations’ capacity as they could muster. Yet some governmental participants held formal decision-making authority, which other participants did not, and other governmental participants had more technical and scientific knowledge than did nongovernmental participants. Nongovernmental participants were able to counter these advantages, however, by providing vision, political pressure, and viable alternatives that both encouraged and pressured governmental participants to implement the partnership's objectives.
GOVERNMENT AS INSTITUTIONS
If government personnel were important players at a nearly equal table, it was also the case that federal institutions loomed large in the partnership. Federal institutions and reactions to them largely defined the context in which the partnership worked, in three key ways. First, the institutions of federal land management agencies, and the laws and political processes that governed them, led directly to the partnership's founding. Second, the partnership sought to change institutional dynamics of agency policymaking. And third, larger institutional processes and politics at times inhibited the partnership's work and even threatened its existence.
The Applegate Partnership was founded in response to the injunction preventing timber harvest in spotted owl habitat. The federal land management agencies, environmental organizations, and the timber industry were locked in a battle that had ground federal forest management to a halt. Although laws had been on the books for two decades requiring the Forest Service and the BLM to manage for vertebrate species on public lands, federal land management had considerable difficulty shifting away from the rules and norms that kept the agencies focused on timber production. Environmentalists successfully used federal laws such as the National Forest Management Act and Endangered Species Act and the courts to force change in the Forest Service and the BLM. Through litigation, environmentalists’ actions and agency and industry reactions created political crisis and bureaucratic stalemate. It was within this context that the Applegate Partnership was founded. Early participants sought to move beyond the deadlock and restart federal land management by initiating participatory processes that would create economic opportunity by restoring naturally functioning ecosystems. Thus, although both nongovernmental and governmental participants came together to agree upon a geographic scale and substantive set of issues, it was done in the context of this larger institutional crisis, which created the impetus for the collaboration and focused attention on public land management that would resolve the crisis at the local level.
Partnership participants agreed to work within existing laws. Even so, the group sought to change federal management processes to involve citizens earlier in planning processes, provide a broader array of information to the public, consider ecological and social systems rather than manage for single purposes in isolation, and think about management across ownership boundaries, among other new approaches. Partnership participants quickly discovered that making these sorts of changes required not only agreement among participants, but also institutional shifts in agencies that had been expert driven and fragmented, and generally communicated formally with the public and only late in the planning process. Participants in the Applegate Partnership expended considerable time and effort in seeking these institutional changes in the Forest Service and the BLM.
They had some successes getting local federal land management units to adopt these new ideas, such as with the Forest Service's Partnership One and the BLM's Thompson Creek projects. With Partnership One, agency and nongovernmental partnership participants collectively developed a restoration-oriented timber sale through a series of field trips and meetings. With the BLM's Thompson Creek projects, the Ashland Resource Area BLM expended considerable energy early on outreach to partnership participants and community residents. The Ashland Resource Area developed a process to incorporate what was learned in one phase about the effectiveness of particular prescriptions and treatments into the next phase.
The agencies did not always follow collaborative approaches, however. For example, after the Thompson Creek projects were well under way, managers of another BLM management unit in the Applegate Valley presented a timber sale to the partnership and community residents only after it had been developed, largely following old-style planning processes. Local grassroots environmental activists not involved in the partnership vehemently opposed the timber sale. Although Applegate Partnership participants initially attempted to broker a resolution to the disagreements between the BLM and community residents, over time the conflict was played out in ways that harked back to the formal adversarial processes, such as through public comment and appeals. Moreover, trust, never very high between the environmental activists from the local subwatershed and the BLM, diminished further.
In another example, a Forest Service innovator developed a long-term management project for one of the Applegate Valley's key subwatersheds. The project was to last for several years. The innovator pulled together a team of cross-disciplinary Forest Service staff to participate in the project. It entailed analysis and planning across ownership boundaries and considerable resident participation, and it was to involve implementation of a long list of restoration projects. Eventually, however, the Forest Service and BLM land managers became impatient with the project's complexity and slow process and canceled it, to the considerable frustration of local residents who had been involved in the project over the course of several years. Ultimately, the project did not fit well with the institutional norms of the Forest Service, which favored projects that could be done with segmented staff and budgets, emphasized routine over creativity, could show concrete, measurable progress, and could be easily supported up the chain of command.
These examples suggest the constant struggle that governmental and nongovernmental partnership participants faced in trying to change the institutional habits of the federal land management agencies. At times they succeeded in creating a collaborative, participatory environment in which a diversity of knowledge and opinions were incorporated into planning processes. But other times more traditional institutional processes prevailed.
Sometimes the Applegate Partnership found itself at the mercy of institutional processes and politics beyond the partnership and the Applegate Valley. Shortly after the adoption of President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan, external actors, both industry and environmentalists, threatened by the diminished power that the Northwest Forest Plan and collaborative forest management might mean for them, used federal rules and laws to try to block partnership efforts. Timber industry members sought to use the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) to argue that the collaborative, public-private process the administration had used to develop the plan was illegal because it involved inappropriate advice from nongovernment personnel. Concerned that the plan could be scuttled, the White House required that government personnel pull back from collaborations, including the Applegate Partnership. The partnership was a particular lightning rod, because during the development of the Northwest Forest Plan, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt visited the partnership, and the president held up the partnership as an example of the type of efforts he hoped would emerge from the plan. The White House forced government personnel to resign from the partnership board, and for a while, they were not sure whether they were even allowed to attend meetings.
Over time, FACA was clarified, and government personnel resumed active participation in the partnership, though not as board members. Board membership was not an important symbol of participation, and thus federal membership continued largely as before. In addition, the Forest Service and the BLM created a joint staff position to act as a liaison between the partnership and the agencies. At the time, the FACA crisis caused substantial upheaval in the partnership, and many feared that it would not survive. Ultimately it did, and participants became more determined to succeed, but the FACA crisis is one example of how governmental institutions, in this case laws, can combine with interest-based politics to affect a collaboration.
A second example of political institutions affecting a collaboration was the legal appeal of the partnership's first on-the-ground collaborative project, Partnership One. In this project, agency, industry, environmental, and community participants sought to create an agreed-upon restoration activity that would produce timber as a by-product. The group, including environmental participants, hoped that by focusing on restoration and low-impact timber harvest methods, and by using a collaborative process, the agency would be able to avoid environmental appeals that would try to halt the project. After the participants had agreed on the goals and prescriptions of the project, Partnership One was shepherded through the formal environmental review processes. But a regional environmental organization appealed the project on technical grounds, largely because it opposed community-based collaborative processes. The Pacific Northwest Regional Office of the Forest Service upheld the appeal, requiring the local ranger district to rewrite the environmental assessment. Although the partnership had reached agreement about the project, this did not exempt them from the rules of environmental appeals processes or the larger culture of adversarial environmentalism, which was still largely in play when the partnership was founded.
Thus, in many ways, governmental institutions affected the Applegate Partnership fundamentally. A crisis of the federal land management agencies led to the partnership's founding and defined the group's initial focus. The partnership sought at once to change these institutions, especially the organizational norms and habits of the Forest Service and the BLM, while working within existing laws. These efforts yielded mixed results, sometimes leading to changed management approaches and other times to retrenchment. The partnership and the agencies implemented several management projects that had involved considerable collaborative input and were based on the ecological, social, and economic principles that the partnership had developed as part of its vision. At the same time, however, the agencies frequently followed older institutional habits. As a result, federal land management in the Applegate Valley came to be driven at once by traditional conservationist institutions and by new collaborative approaches, creating a complex and sometimes contradictory management environment. Although collaboration was a popular concept with the Clinton administration, and many local agency personnel were open to the idea, more deeply embedded bureaucratic habits and norms dominated agency actions at times. Moreover, people outside the partnership who felt threatened by the institutional changes and loss of power that collaboration implied sought to scuttle the partnership.
CONCLUSIONS
As a set of institutions, the government had a large impact on the issue definition of the collaborative effort. It was a crisis in federal land management that led to the group's founding, and it was federal land management institutions—laws, organizational norms and procedures, management practices, and interest group politics—that the group had to work within and sought to change. These institutional realities led the group to focus primarily on federal land management, especially initially. When the partnership faced major roadblocks, such as the FACA crisis and the appeal of Partnership One, partnership participants broadened the way that the group framed the problems to address restoration on private lands in the Applegate Valley.
As participants, the government brought human resources—people with varied skills, abilities, and experience—and technical expertise about land management to the collaboration. These government resources had varying effects on the partnership's efforts, depending on the particular circumstances that brought them to the table. Sometimes agency technical expertise helped the group understand ecological processes and develop innovative plans for management. At other times this technical expertise could get in the way, such as when it was backed with an attitude that experts know best and others have little to contribute, or when it reflected old ways of managing national forests.
The government both as participant and as institution affected the group's structure and decision-making processes. Although beliefs about open, inclusive, informal structures were broadly and deeply held by participants, federal involvement also required that meetings be open and participation be informal. The prohibition against federal personnel as board members reinforced the group's belief in a weak role for formal structures.
The government both as institution and as actor interacted with partnership participants in diverse ways to affect social and environmental outcomes. Governmental actors were nearly equal participants in a community-based collaborative process whose goal was, in large part, to create more inclusive public land management. Because the group was focused primarily on public land, government personnel were participants on whom the group depended for its ecological success. With federal involvement, the Applegate Partnership began to create ecosystem-based management on public land in the valley. Federal personnel tried to listen to input, incorporate new ideas, and change management practices.
Although government personnel participated actively in trying to make this happen, in the end, governmental institutions were as important to the outcomes of the group. The partnership created space within the thick institutional milieu of federal land management for collaborative approaches and ecosystem-based management. But alongside this collaborative environmental management effort, the institutions of expert-driven management and adversarial environmentalism remained, constantly shaping its focus and limiting its activities.