CHAPTER 5

ENCOURAGEMENT
THROUGH GRANTS

Ohio's Farmland Preservation Task Forces

The habitat conservation planning case (Chapter 4) highlighted how government as an institution, in the form of the Endangered Species Act, combined with governmental actors to provide regulatory relief to influence collaborative efforts. This chapter examines how, in the absence of regulatory threats, governmental institutions and actors can encourage collaborative environmental management through a grant program. Through a study of 15 counties involved in the Ohio Farmland Preservation Planning Program, we look at the role of the state government as an institution, as well as local governmental actors and institutions, in encouraging collaborative planning. For policymakers considering how to promote collaboration, grants may be especially attractive in that they are less politically charged than regulations. As shown in the analysis that follows, however, government influences far more than just the financial resources available for the collaborative effort.

THE OHIO FARMLAND PRESERVATION PLANNING PROGRAM

Throughout the United States, open space and agricultural land are disappearing. Between 1959 and 1992, land cover in cropland and pasture decreased by 40 million acres (USDA 1998b). Approximately 1 million acres of U.S. agricultural land are being converted to housing, industry, and other uses each year (AFT 1998). Land use, and resulting land cover patterns, increasingly are linked to issues such as food security, recreation, employment opportunities, and community health. In addition, land-use changes can raise many environmental concerns, including rare species protection, wildlife habitat, soil conservation, water quality, and global climate change.

In the eastern United States, where most land is owned privately, efforts to shape land-use patterns face the challenge of coordination among many different stakeholders. Government has limited control over how private lands are used. In addition, local governments, which typically control land-use changes through planning and zoning, may not have the same priorities as state and federal agencies. Therefore, top-down government regulation of land use is neither feasible nor necessarily desirable. Instead, collaborative planning is being used more frequently to address this challenge.

An increasingly popular mechanism for governments to encourage collaboration is to provide funding to applicants and then step aside as the grantees craft collaborative processes tailored to their local circumstances. This raises important questions about what grant giving can achieve, how grantees act with these financial resources, and how governments influence these collaborative processes. In other words, in government-funded efforts to encourage collaborative efforts, what can money buy?

Government grant programs, as institutions, may have a bigger impact on collaboration than conventionally thought. In general, these programs establish goals and then provide funding for collaborative efforts so that they can work to achieve these goals. But government appears to influence much more than goals and financial resources when it works through a grant program. Rather than simply supporting a collaborative effort between governmental and nongovernmental partners, it appears that government places its imprint on all aspects of the process and outcomes.

In the Ohio Farmland Preservation Planning Program (OFPPP), governments played both institutional and actor roles. Most obviously, the state government played an important institutional role in establishing the grant program, including how funding was to be distributed, who was granted authority to oversee it, and what was required of grant recipients. But state governmental institutions were not the only governmental institutions at play here. Local governments (counties and townships) have created existing rules affecting land-use choices, and these formed the backdrop against which the collaborative task forces developed plans and determined which policy recommendations were feasible.

The role of government as actor was played not by state officials, but by a wide range of local government officials who were involved in creating and maintaining task forces and planning activities. In many groups, governmental actors provided critical human, technical, and financial resources. Moreover, governmental actors participating in the task forces were involved in establishing group structures and processes. Thus the importance of local governmental institutions and actors in shaping the task forces indicates that even as one government seeks to spark collaboration through purely institutional means, how that collaboration plays out can depend on governmental institutions and actors at other levels.

Like many grant programs, the OFPPP aimed to transfer funding from state to local governments as a means to achieve policy goals. In this program, the goals were related to land-use planning and farmland preservation, and local communities were given considerable flexibility in carrying out planning processes tied to local contexts.

In June 1998, the Ohio Department of Development's Office of Housing and Community Partnerships (OHCP) announced a matching grant program for rural counties to prepare local farmland preservation plans. The program's objective was to encourage counties to “gather appropriate data from which local goals [could] be established relative to the agricultural industry and farmland.” Once they had set their goals, strategies could be devised (Graves 1998).

The program made grants of up to $10,000 available to each of the 81 counties eligible for federal Small Cities Community Development Block Grant funds. Funding was contingent on the counties providing a 1:1 match in dollars or in kind and each establishing a county farmland preservation task force that included a “cross section of interests” (Graves 1998). The state granted the funds to county commissioners, who then were responsible for creating the task forces. The grants came with very few strings attached, requiring only that each task force produce a plan that included soils information, submit its plan to the OHCP by December 31, 1999, and include a “cross section of interests” in creating the plan. Of the 81 eligible counties, 61 participated in the grant program.

Because the program was highly decentralized, task forces operated independently from each other and with little direction from state officials. In practice, many county commissioners delegated responsibility for convening the task force to other governmental actors or to citizens. The task force leaders were free to select members, coordinate procedures, allocate budgets, and handle the division of labor as they saw fit, in conjunction with other task force members. Several counties combined this opportunity with ongoing planning efforts, in effect leveraging significant additional funding for farmland preservation planning. As a result, though each of the participating task forces received the same grant amount of $10,000, collaborative processes and outcomes played out very differently across the counties.

ISSUE DEFINITION

Land-use and land-cover changes in Ohio are not new phenomena. Forests and wetlands were converted to agricultural use in the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth century. Later in the twentieth century, agricultural use decreased as a result of farm abandonment and metropolitan expansion. As in other states with growing populations, land has been developed as people have migrated into formerly rural areas.

In the past few years, policy debates about preserving farmland often have been combined with discussions about open space and green space. For example, an Ohio statewide voter initiative passed in 2000 created a broad Clean Ohio Fund. The initiative authorized the state to issue up to $400 million in bonds to pay for programs that conserve and preserve natural areas, open spaces, farmlands, and other lands. Framing the scope of an issue broadly is one political strategy for increasing support (Schattschneider 1960).

When government plays the role of grant giver, it gets to define the issue, in terms of problem framing and scale. In the case of the OFPPP, the state defined program objectives as centering on preserving farmland, rather than on open space or green space. This narrow way of framing the issue encouraged task forces to gather information and focus proposed policies on agricultural lands, rather than on land use generally. Moreover, it encouraged task force membership that was weighted heavily toward agricultural interests, rather than a more diverse array of participants.

The grant program also defined the biophysical boundaries when rural counties were designated as the eligible recipients. This set the spatial scale at which the problem was to be tackled—the county. This spatial scale yielded several benefits. First, it was compatible with existing soil data from the Natural Resource Conservation Service and Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which facilitated data gathering to meet the grant requirement that each county plan include soils maps. Second, the county level was conducive to encouraging regular participation from task force members, as all lived only a relatively short drive from the meeting sites. Finally, the county level was a logical scale for interactions between task force members and the government jurisdictions with primary authority over land use related to agriculture: counties and townships (political subdivisions of a county).

Although counties proved to be a workable scale, well suited to the level at which many land-use policies are made, one drawback was that where county farmland was affected by land-use trends in other counties, interests from those counties were not included in the collaboration. For example, watershed boundaries typically do not fall along county lines, yet land uses upstream can affect downstream water and land substantially. Moreover, urbanization and development often are driven by growing urban populations in adjacent counties, and task forces did not analyze such areas in their plans. Another drawback was that in some counties, land-use authority rests with townships; in those places, a county-level planning effort did not match the level of decision-making authority.

Additionally, defining the program around farmland, rather than open space or green space more generally, made it difficult for task forces to garner widespread public support for the issue. In fact, in a number of counties, task force members cited obstacles related to public understanding and recognition that farmland preservation was an important and desirable goal. Although this lack of community concern did not interfere with task forces’ ability to create a plan, it did lead some task force members to doubt whether their plans could be implemented. After all, if community members do not view farmland preservation as a big concern, then even the finest plan is not likely to succeed.

Within constraints established by the state, task forces were allowed to tailor their plans to local biophysical and social contexts. This flexibility was appropriate, given several important differences across counties, most notably in geographic location, level of urbanization, and amount of land in farms. These differences are reflected in the set of 15 counties examined in this analysis, which ranged from rural to metropolitan fringe counties located throughout the state, with farmland from 50,000 to 268,000 acres.

Beyond the state grant requirements, important governmental institutions existed at the local level. County-level governmental rules had a substantial impact on the framing of the problem and how it could be addressed. The prevalence of land-use zoning, which is determined by county and township governments, ranged from none to all of the townships in a county. Task force members planning for farmland preservation took the existing level of zoning into account in making policy recommendations. Those without zoning faced a constrained set of alternative solutions. A task force member in one such area said, “We did not use the ‘Z’ word .... The more rural you get, the more resistant people are to zoning. We had to be very sensitive about this. We had to promise going into these township meetings that we would not mention zoning. If a township trustee became somehow tied to zoning, they would never get reelected.” In contrast, in counties with zoning rules already in place, task force members included zoning as a feasible solution for farmland preservation.

Thus the focus of collaboration in the OFPPP was determined largely by the grant program, a governmental institution at the state level. The program provided the funds to establish task forces addressing a particular issue, farmland preservation, at a particular biophysical scale, the county. Governmental institutions at the local level were important as well, particularly the existing set of land-use zoning rules.

RESOURCES FOR COLLABORATION

Grant giving represents an effort to augment resources for collaboration. Although the grant itself is a form of financial resource, the grant requirements, along with the funding provided, can influence other resources, including human and technical resources. In addition, resources are tied to actors and institutions in government jurisdictions other than the state granting agency.

Financial Resources

The funding that is provided through grant programs such as OFPPP is an important resource for promoting collaborative endeavors. In the OFPPP, the $10,000 grants provided resources for task forces to be established, to function, and to produce plans. The 1:1 matching requirement allowed the state government to leverage its investment by ensuring that each task force had additional resources at its disposal. In fact, some task forces expended considerably more than $10,000 of their own funds. But at the same time, the matching requirement discouraged some of the state's rural counties from participating.

Governmental actors often were influential in acquiring funding beyond the $10,000 grant. In some cases, county commissions provided the match in cash; in others, the task force members from governmental agencies such as soil and water conservation districts and county planning offices logged hours as part of an in-kind match. According to one member, county commissioners who did not see farmland preservation as a high priority were less willing to contribute financial resources to the effort. In other cases, task force members who were employees of governmental agencies were entrepreneurial in securing funds from their agencies.

The task forces used government funds to pay for consultants, staff time, materials such as slide shows and brochures, postage, food and mileage for members attending meetings, and the costs of producing and copying plans. Across the 15 cases, task force total expenditures ranged from a low of $400 to a high of more than $30,000.¹

In some of these counties, state funding was used to pay for existing staff time and planning efforts, for tasks that might have been done anyway. In one county, for example, the farmland preservation funds were directed to the planning commission, which used a portion for a “cost of community services” study and the rest to support its ongoing planning efforts. In another county, grant funds were transferred to a regional planning commission and charged to planning activities that had occurred before the grant was awarded (some information produced from those earlier efforts was included in the farmland preservation plan).

Through the grant program, state government institutions provided a range of influence, relative to other financial sources, across the cases. For some task forces, the state grant program provided nearly all of the fiscal resources; for others, it provided a minority portion. In all cases, financial resources were wholly or predominantly provided by various governments, rather than by private citizens.

Human Resources

The OFPPP did not create a strong human resources presence from the state. Rather, it formally vested authority over the collaborative efforts with county commissioners. Such ceding of power from the state to local officials can increase trust in the collaborative effort, especially in states with strong traditions of local control (“home rule”) in land-use matters (see Thomas 1999). At the same time, it does not ensure that a wide cross section of public and private individuals will belong to the groups. Instead, it can serve to foster the engagement of particular sets of human resources—those in existing governmental structures traditionally used by local officials.

In every county, the commissioners delegated leadership to others, resulting in considerable variation in leadership and expertise across the task forces. In more than half (8 of 15) of the counties, government officials working in regional or county land-use planning departments served as task force leaders or coleaders. Ohio State University Extension personnel had a hand in leading six of the task forces, consultants took on leadership roles in four of the task forces, and citizens at large helped lead in four of the task forces. In three task forces, soil and water conservation district public employees served as leaders or coleaders. Overall, local governmental actors provided important leadership roles in most of the task forces.

The state grant did not specify who should serve on the task forces, stipulating only that the resulting task forces must “ensure that a cross section of interests have input into this process” and suggesting the consideration of interests such as “Farm Bureau, Farmers’ Union, Grange, environmental organizations, developers, farmers, chamber of commerce, realtors, home builders associations, local government officials, conservation districts, local citizens, non-profit organizations, [and] agricultural business representatives” (Graves 1998). The grants did not specify how many of these might constitute a “cross section.” In the 15 counties, task forces ranged in size from 9 to 51 members. So although the grant guidelines did provide task forces with a starting point in selecting participants, the lack of specific requirements meant that the set of participants was not strongly influenced by grant rules. In practice, representation across the task forces ranged from 4 to 12 of the 14 interests listed above.

Most task forces reported that farmers and local government officials were the dominant stakeholders represented on the task forces. In contrast, land developers, real estate interests, and environmental groups were less prevalent. This somewhat narrow range of task force members limited the breadth of expertise brought to bear on the collaborative planning process. One member described his task force as “a bunch of old German farmers sitting around trying to imagine what other groups would think.” Several task force members reported difficulties in increasing their legitimacy with broader publics because of this lack of representation. One said that even though his group was supposed to include a cross section of interests, its membership was fairly narrow, and thus the county commissioners viewed it as a special-interest group. This discouraged the commissioners from providing much financial support for the plan.

When the OFPPP defined the problem relatively narrowly, as farmland preservation rather than open space or green space preservation, this affected which interests were invited to the table and which were not. Clearly there was widespread agreement among task force members about the value of farmland and recommendations for how to preserve it. But members recognized that in the broader community, farmland preservation issues did not generate much concern or agreement about appropriate actions. Thus, although a grant program with a relatively narrowly defined problem such as farmland preservation may be well suited to spurring discussions among agricultural interests, it may be less successful in fostering policy change that is implementable and acceptable to the broader community.

In addition to human resources within the collaborative groups, each member brought a set of social relationships that represented networks of human resources outside the groups. The Office of Farmland Preservation sought, to a limited extent, to help build networks across task force members through a farmland preservation conference in March 1999. In this capacity, state governmental actors drew together numerous task force members from across the state.

More important than state-supported networking was the set of social relationships individual members brought with them to the task forces. Important differences across the counties were evident in the level of networks, as some task forces had participants who had been involved in land-use issues previously and were members of well-established networks with planning experience, often involving governmental actors. A task force member in one county said, “We weren't starting from scratch, so the task wasn't so daunting ... There is great agency cooperation in this county, with a track record of working together in the past. That helped us in working together on the task force.”

In addition, seven of the task forces were in counties that had county or township comprehensive plans updated since 1995, and four had members currently working with other land-use organizations to develop comprehensive plans. In places where task force members could tap into recent county comprehensive plans, networking with government planners helped them accomplish their goals. As a task force member in one county explained, “The regional planning office had GIS available. We had a good relationship with them and they were able to prepare ... maps for us.”

In contrast, other task forces were inexperienced with land use issues and comprehensive planning and had no preexisting networks to support these efforts. Two were in counties without comprehensive land-use plans, and two others were in counties with existing comprehensive plans that were at least 25 years old. Without these human resources to draw on, task forces in these counties devoted significant time and energy to learning about fundamental concepts such as policy tools and farmland preservation benefits. In fact, one such task force plan devoted a substantial section to explaining what comprehensive plans are.

Across the 15 counties, human resources available to the task forces largely were governmental actors. This was facilitated by rules of the grant program, which centered grants on existing governance structures at the county level. By working through the county commissioners, who were already familiar with government planners and soil and water conservation district personnel, the program fostered the use of governmental actors in farmland preservation planning. Where members had experience in prior land-use issues or were skillful at connecting with people—especially government personnel—outside the group, task forces had substantial human resources to employ in their collaborative efforts.

Technical Resources

Technical resources consist of information and knowledge about the natural resource and its management. Both scientific and local time-and-place data are important resources for collaborative groups to draw on in planning. In the OFPPP, grant guidelines had minimal technical requirements—only that the plan include a soils map. As actors, personnel in the Office of Farmland Preservation served as a resource for task forces seeking information, and the March 1999 conference drew participants from task forces across the state to share information. Task forces rarely interacted with each other to share technical information, however. This was partly a function of the grant program, which established 61 independent grants for 61 separate farmland preservation plans, without requirements or incentives for interaction among task forces.

For farmland preservation planning, three key types of information are land use, agricultural economic, and public opinion (Korfmacher and Koontz 2003). With each task force left to collect information independently, information gathering varied greatly. In some counties, the task force did not access even basic land-use data, such as existing county soils maps, whereas in other counties, the task force developed complex geographic databases and collected rich socioeconomic information.

Task forces drew on a variety of sources of information, both governmental and nongovernmental. Within the task forces, governmental actors as well as citizen members shared in obtaining information. Task forces also drew on resources outside the group, with nine of them turning to private consultants for technical assistance, including financial analyses, technical writing, and land-use analyses. In three of the counties, task forces obtained technical assistance from government officials engaged in broader land-use planning activities.

Much of the technical information used, even that from private consultants, came from governmental sources. The OFPPP grant guidelines listed 19 potential sources of information, 13 of which were governmental (Graves 1998). One listed source that many of the task forces used for agricultural economic data was the U.S. Census of Agriculture. But most used the data without careful consideration of its applicability to the local context; instead of selecting categories of particular importance to their county, they typically just listed categories used in the census. Thus the ready availability of government-generated information contributed to its inclusion in the farmland preservation plans.

GROUP STRUCTURE AND DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES

Group structure and decision-making processes allow a group to select participants, coordinate activities, and make collective decisions. Because the grant rules did not specify any structural or process requirements, each task force was free to create its own arrangements. Thus the state grant program itself did not directly influence structural or process features. Many of the task forces, however, were led by governmental actors, who did affect structure and processes.

An early step that structures a collaborative effort is the selection of participants. Conceptually, selecting participants can be divided into two broad categories: closed or open. Closed selection refers to officials appointing members; open selection denotes people self-selecting or being elected at public meetings (Pierce and Doerksen 1976). Closed selection gives group leaders more influence over group composition than does open selection.

The majority of task forces (10 of 15) used only closed selection. Typically, task force leaders invited particular individuals to join. As one leader explained, “We wanted to include stakeholders in the community, with a balance of rural and agricultural interests on one side, and development interests on the other.” Similarly, another leader said, “We brainstormed a list of who the community leaders are in agricultural issues ... and sent invitations to them to join.” In cases where governmental actors led the task force, they played an important role in selecting participants.

Five of the task forces used both closed and open selection methods. In these cases, the leaders typically began by creating lists of individuals to invite, and then augmented these lists with announcements and meetings targeting the general public. As one leader said, “We invited people to participate through phone calls, newsletters, ads in the paper. All the meetings were open to the public. We always had an ad in the paper before each meeting.”

The OFPPP did not specify how the task forces were to structure their efforts, so the groups coordinated activities and organized themselves in a number of ways. All of the task forces relied on meetings to bring together the whole group. Most task forces held meetings monthly, but attendance varied from nearly all of the task force members, in some counties, to just a small subset of active participants in others. In addition to task force meetings, eight of the groups structured work by creating committees to tackle particular tasks. Across the task forces, decisions about coordinating activities were shared between governmental actors and lay citizens alike.

The process of collaboration requires establishing decision-making procedures to incorporate individual input into group actions. Many proponents of collaboration recommend the use of consensus, whereby a decision requires assent from all group members to be sanctioned by the group. Consensus, they argue, can encourage groups to continue deliberating until a solution acceptable to all is found. This process can lead to the discovery of win–win solutions not previously thought possible. On the other hand, consensus gives any individual a veritable veto power over the decision, which can scuttle promising proposals. Moreover, consensus may result in watered-down compromises rather than innovative solutions.

In deciding how to make collective decisions, task forces were not significantly influenced by governmental institutions. In fact, the grant program was silent on this point. Because the OFPPP did not prescribe any decision-making procedures, task force leaders and members themselves decided how to make collective decisions, developing their own ways to determine what to include in the plan and whether to accept the final version. In several cases, external consultants gave advice on how to manage meetings; in other cases, the methods resulted from the views of task force leaders and members, both governmental actors and lay citizens.

For plan creation decisions, six task forces used consensus; eight used simple majority; and one used supermajority, with 85 percent assenting votes necessary for passage. According to members of the task forces using majority, few if any votes were close. Nevertheless, it was possible for these task forces to adopt something without the 100 percent agreement required for consensus. All but one of the task forces considered the approval of the final version of the plan as a whole, with seven using consensus, six using majority, and one using supermajority. In two of the counties using majority voting, dissenting members refused to sign the final plan, indicating that not all participants supported it.

COLLABORATIVE OUTCOMES

Environmental Outcomes

Because the OFPPP was a planning program, plan contents were an important environmental management outcome. Although the grant guidelines stipulated only that each task force plan include a soils map, they suggested 15 items that a task force should consider for possible inclusion: number and types of farms by commodity; changes in farm numbers and conversion rate of farmland over the last five years; location of existing farm inventory on a map; ages and locations of existing farm owners; identification and locations of important farmland; soil productivity; farm receipts for county (based on commodity); survey to determine the locations and types of investments in agricultural assets; location of agriculture supportive business and trends; identification of farms signed up in agricultural districts; locations of farms with land enrolled in government plans (e.g., wetland reserve, conservation easement); current zoning; identification and analysis of existing and proposed infrastructure; proposed growth areas (residential, commercial, and industrial); distances from municipalities, villages, and major residential or commercial developments and locations of existing protected natural areas, open space, parks, and so on (Graves 1998).

Table 5-1. Plan Contents

^aPartial item = 0.5.

^bDouble-spaced equivalent.

^cThis document was a more general land-use plan, of which farmland preservation was a small component.

Three of the completed plans did not meet the minimum technical requirement—inclusion of a soils map (see Table 5-1). In addition, the number of suggested content items greatly varied, from 1 to 12. The depth and sophistication of plans ran the gamut as well, with page counts ranging from 14 to 331. Thus the farmland preservation plans, which represent an important environmental management tool, varied significantly across the cases.

Another environmental management outcome from these collaborative efforts, cited by members of several task forces, was increased public education and awareness of farmland preservation issues. As one member explained, “I think that if there are a dozen people in each county that now know more about farmland preservation and can act in their communities, then that is a huge success.” This outcome is especially important in counties with low levels of preexisting public concern and knowledge about farmland preservation, where even the most sophisticated farmland preservation plan would not have been likely to influence policy.

Governmental institutions, of both the grant program and the counties within which the task forces operated, had a significant impact on the set of feasible alternative solutions available to task force members carrying out their work. The grant program was for advisory planning, not for policy creation or implementation. Although the role of grant giver, supporting collaborative efforts with no legal authority, may be politically popular, it is not necessarily a reliable means to achieve on-the-ground results. Members of several task forces said their primary goals were to raise public awareness of the need to preserve farmland. They hoped that changes in public opinion might one day lead to policy changes.

Even without policy authority, however, in a handful of cases the task force plans provided input for county comprehensive plans being created or updated. Members of such task forces saw their collaborative efforts as affecting policy indirectly, even without formal authority. It seems that planning exercises, under the right circumstances, may be an effective means to change policy.

In terms of tangible environmental management outcomes, what did the OFPPP accomplish? At a minimum, stakeholders came together and discussed farmland preservation, and plans were written incorporating input from a variety of group members. But the state granting authority did not hold task forces accountable for meeting the original three grant requirements. In addition to the failure of three plans to include a soils map, no standards were in place to determine whether a cross section of interests was represented on the task forces, and several plans were not submitted by the deadline. In the end, the plans varied widely in content, depth, and sophistication.

Social Outcomes

Another measure of outcomes is social benefits. Using this yardstick, the OFPPP can be seen as more widely successful. Members of several task forces reported enhanced civic participation, and in a majority of the task forces, formal or informal networks were created to address future farmland preservation issues, as well as broader land-use issues.

For some of the counties without recent comprehensive land-use plans, the grants spurred discussions and the beginnings of efforts to address farmland preservation. A member in one county where the comprehensive plan had not been updated in more than 25 years described the modest accomplishments of the task force: “People asked, ‘Why are we doing this plan?’ It's going to just sit on the shelf, they thought. We can be an educational tool—that's why we made the standing committee. Education and additional awareness will be the major impact of the plan. I'm hoping that in the future, we will have other reasons to meet and use this group.”

Table 5-2. Civic Participation and Networking Outcomes

^aNew formal network created with express purpose of facilitating plan implementation.

The process of bringing together stakeholders to collaborate on problem solving can net social benefits beyond the solution of immediate problems. These benefits may include increased civic engagement and the building of social capital through the establishment of new social networks that may bring people together again in the future.

As shown in Table 5-2, members from most of the task forces indicated that they were encouraged by their experience to engage in future civic participation. In addition, members of seven task forces reported developing new formal social networks. In fact, in three cases, members said their task forces already had created committees aimed at facilitating implementation of the recommendations in their farmland preservation plans. Informal networks were cited by members of 10 task forces. In these cases, members foresaw opportunities for new communications channels when land-use and farmland issues might arise. One task force member explained, “I had one person call me the other day—he has his own business and would normally not be connected at all with other people in the county. But this committee has helped him establish networks. We have social organizations, chamber of commerce—everyone is involved. This is another circle of people in the county that are now communicating with each other.”

Governmental Impacts on Outcomes

The environmental and social outcomes of farmland preservation collaboration resulted, to a large degree, from government involvement both as institutions and as actors. The OFPPP was a governmental institution designed to be a flexible grant program that would spur local collaborative efforts without substantial state-level involvement. But the governmental role as grant giver can affect collaborative outcomes in many ways. Fundamentally, by increasing financial resources, it can encourage new groups to form around a particular issue or problem and use resources as they see fit to pursue their collaborative efforts. In some counties, the grant program led to the first sustained effort to involve community stakeholders in addressing farmland preservation issues. Here it tended to stimulate educational and network-building outcomes. But in other counties, farmland preservation planning already had been occurring, and state funding was used to pay for data gathering and analysis to increase the sophistication of farmland preservation plans, an environmental outcome.

Grant programs also affect environmental outcomes by how they specify the biophysical scale and frame the problem. The OFPPP defined rural counties as the eligible recipients, which set the spatial scale at which the problem was to be tackled. This clearly affected the spatial focus of farmland preservation plans. Although counties proved to be a workable scale, well suited to the level at which many land-use policies are made, there were some drawbacks. One was that where farmland was affected by land-use trends in other counties, interests from those counties were not included in the collaboration. Another was that in some counties, land-use authority rested with townships, and in those places, a county-level planning effort did not match the level of decision-making authority, thus reducing the likelihood of farmland preservation recommendations being adopted into public policy. In terms of problem framing, the OFPPP framed it in relatively narrow terms (farmland preservation, as opposed to open space preservation), which affected which interests were invited to participate and, ultimately, the contents of farmland preservation plans and their likely impact on policy.

Another important institution affecting plan contents was local government zoning regulations. Existing land-use zoning regulations varied across the counties, and in many places that lacked zoning, plans were less likely to include land-use regulations as a tool to preserve farmland.

Governmental actors also played a role in determining collaborative outcomes. Local governmental actors led many of the groups and constituted a sizable portion of their membership in most cases. They frequently provided important human, technical, and financial resources that shaped the contents of farmland preservation plans. Moreover, their ties to people outside the task forces often facilitated network building.

CONCLUSIONS

At first glance, it may appear that a flexible grant program such as the OFPPP provides just one type of resource for collaboration: financial. But this governmental institution can affect collaborative efforts in many ways. The OFPPP program had a prominent role in defining the issue, determining both the spatial scale and the way the problem was framed. The program also interacted with existing governmental institutions, most notably the land-use zoning regulations (or lack thereof) at the county level. These regulations affected problem framing by influencing the range of alternative policy solutions viewed as feasible.

The OFPPP also influenced, to some degree, the resources employed by the collaborative groups. By granting local oversight to county commissioners, who were embedded in existing governance structures, human resources tended to be drawn from these structures rather than from grassroots citizenry or nongovernmental associations. In addition, because it did not mandate any requirements for task force membership, the grant program did not ensure a diverse array of human resources for each group; in fact, certain interests were consistently absent across the task forces. Similarly, because it did not prescribe information sharing across counties, the program failed to foster much technical information provision among planning teams. The grant did suggest technical information sources, most of which were governmental. Perhaps the biggest resource impact from the grant program was financial, as the OFPPP provided the lion's share of dollars to many of the task forces.

Governmental actors substantially influenced task force collaborative structures and processes. These were largely determined by task force leaders, who tended to come from the ranks of government planners, university extension staff, and soil and water conservation district employees. This influence was especially notable in member selection, which included closed methods in each task force, with leaders deciding which people to invite to join the group.

Government as institution made significant contributions to the environmental outcomes of task forces. In particular, in some cases the grant money was used to generate richer data collection, analysis, and presentation in the plans. Furthermore, local government zoning affected policy tools recommended in the plans. In terms of policy adoption, the program's focus and scale affected the likelihood that plan recommendations would be embraced by policymakers. Government as actor also affected environmental outcomes. The farmland preservation plans reflected technical, human, and financial resources garnered by governmental actors. In some counties, task force members drew on ties to government planning agencies to obtain maps or other information necessary for extensive analysis of farmland preservation issues.

Government as institution had some effect on social outcomes. The existence of the grant program, with its financial incentive, did spur the creation of task forces in many counties. These task forces engaged in collaborative problem solving and planning, and in many cases, they caused members to view public participation more positively and led to the development of social networks for addressing community issues in the future. The importance of government as actor in affecting social outcomes varied across the cases. In some task forces, governmental actors provided links to people outside the group that came to represent new networks for members.

Despite the myriad impacts of government as institution in the OFPPP, there are many things that flexible grants do not ensure. They do not ensure that all recipients will use rich technical information in developing plans. Nor do they provide uniformity in human or financial resources brought to bear on the effort. For such resources, government as actor can be very important. In particular, local government officials constituted a dominant stakeholder in most task forces, and as such, they shaped the resources that task forces could draw on. The diversity of resource levels available in different task forces reflected the different governmental actors, with unique sets of skills, interests, and ties to other organizations and people, working on the task forces.

Overall, the OFPPP suggests that government grant programs to fund collaborative efforts—even those with few strings attached—do not necessarily reduce the role of government to a minor player. Beyond the enhancement of financial resources, grant programs influence aspects of problem definition. Moreover, when grants are administered by government officials, the subsequent collaborative activities may involve a variety of governmental actors who affect collaborative resources, organizational processes and structure, and ultimately outcomes.

Can money buy collaboration? The short answer is yes. The OFPPP did bring together sets of stakeholders to collaborate for a common purpose: developing farmland preservation plans for their counties. The longer answer is that what government grants can buy depends on the local context. In counties with recent comprehensive land-use planning and rich networks of people dealing with land-use issues, the grant money spurred task forces to create sophisticated farmland preservation plans pulling together data from multiple sources. In counties where land-use planning was a new endeavor, task forces tended to create simpler plans. An important result in these counties was the beginning of network building and discussions that might continue after the grant ended.

An important follow-up question to whether money can buy collaboration is, What kind of collaboration can money buy? In the OFPPP, it is clear that even with minimal grant requirements, government did not exit the stage. Through its roles both as institutions and as actors, government left a substantial imprint on collaborative processes and outcomes.