CHAPTER 1

GOVERNMENTAL ROLES
IN COLLABORATIVE
ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Like many parts of the country, California faces increasing environmental challenges, including those related to urbanization. Explosive suburban growth during the 1980s and 1990s, much of it spreading out from the urban cores of Los Angeles and San Diego, left a wake of development that decimated many natural plant and animal communities. A significant collaborative effort emerged in the 1990s to save what remained of one such natural community: coastal sage scrub.

Coastal sage scrub is composed of several species of sage plants, shrubs, and seasonal wildflowers. It is not something most people want to save, because it is too dense and prickly to walk in without a well-cleared path; it contains no charismatic species whose names are readily known; and it dries and turns brown in the summer. Yet coastal sage scrub provides habitat for species whose populations had been declining because of development pressures, such as the coastal California gnatcatcher, the San Diego cactus wren, and the orange-throated whiptail lizard. Most landowners, developers, and local government officials were little concerned with coastal sage scrub until the early 1990s, when environmentalists and federal officials began to argue that some wildlife species that relied on coastal sage scrub, particularly the gnatcatcher, should be listed under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). If these species were listed, development might come to a halt on some of the most expensive undeveloped real estate in the country.

The ESA is one of many command-and-control environmental policies created in the 1970s. It tells people what they cannot do, not what they should do, to protect the environment. Although the ESA provides some incentives for collaboration among the public, private, and nonprofit sectors through federal matching grants passed through states to local communities, it does not require collaboration. On the contrary, in many contexts, listing of endangered species has led to considerable conflict and polarization. Moreover, the potential for listing a species as threatened or endangered under the ESA could encourage self-interested individuals to act unilaterally before others do—that is, to alter the habitat of a species that might soon be listed, rather than risk having development opportunities stymied when the ESA's regulatory regime kicks into gear after a species is listed.

Despite the lack of formal incentives, some individuals in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors established a formal collaborative process in the early 1990s to preserve coastal sage scrub before species were listed. Natural Communities Conservation Planning (NCCP) initially was conceived as a state-sponsored program that depended on voluntary participation by landowners, developers, local governments, and public agencies to protect habitat before species were listed under the ESA. Yet some of the NCCP partners recognized that without a federally listed species, many private landowners would not enroll their lands in the program. Small landowners, in particular, lacked an incentive to participate in a lengthy and costly planning process, preferring instead to develop their land in the short term before species were listed. Large landowners, by contrast, sought a longer-term strategy because they did not want to flood the market with new housing. But it was clear that if NCCP remained a voluntary program, with participation occurring primarily among a few large landowners, collaboration would be limited, less habitat would be saved, and more species likely would be listed in the future. With NCCP failing as a voluntary program because of limited enrollments, state officials asked federal officials to level the playing field by listing the coastal California gnatcatcher under the ESA.

Collaboration could have disappeared at that point, as command-and-control regulations under the ESA were implemented. But the NCCP example is interesting precisely because the stringent regulations of the ESA provided an incentive for landowners to collaborate. State and federal officials worked together to develop a special rule that linked the federal ESA to the state-sponsored NCCP, whereby voluntary participation in NCCP became a means for meeting legal obligations under the ESA. Thus, although the federal government had stepped in to assert regulatory authority, it did so primarily to encourage participation in a collaborative process. Listing provided sufficient incentives to encourage a significantly larger group of landowners, developers, local government officials, and others to develop their own collaborative plans to protect coastal sage scrub in the long run under the auspices of the state-run program.

Federal officials faced several options as the coastal sage scrub crisis unfolded. One option was to maintain the status quo and wait for one or more species to be listed under the ESA, without encouraging any stakeholders to work together. Under this option, the courts likely would have played a predominant role as environmentalists, developers, and others filed lawsuits. These lawsuits would open up a wide range of possible outcomes, including moratoriums on development, which would significantly affect the local economy and the political legitimacy of the ESA itself. A second option for federal officials was to participate in collaborative efforts initiated by other stakeholders, such as developers, environmentalists, or local and state governments. A third option was to play an active role by encouraging collaboration in habitat conservation planning. This might have included providing technical and financial assistance or other resources to aid those developing collaborative plans to preserve coastal sage scrub. A final option was for government officials to play a lead role in the emergent collaborative process, by formally convening meetings, developing decision-making procedures, and otherwise taking charge of the collaboration.

Given the wide distribution of coastal sage scrub within many local jurisdictions and on both public and private lands, federal officials believed that large-scale collaboration likely would produce a more encompassing and consistent plan for preserving coastal sage scrub and the species that depended on it. Moreover, with such a diverse array of stakeholders involved, the likelihood of lawsuits was high if collaboration failed. Therefore, federal officials did not simply rely on the ESA's standard provisions. Nor did they take a lead role or follow others as they developed a collaborative process. Instead, they sought to encourage the emergent collaborative effort—NCCP—by designing federal regulations in a way that assisted the effort and by providing technical and financial support.

This opening story illustrates the complex set of roles government has played in a collaborative effort to preserve coastal sage scrub on public and private land in Southern California.¹ By wielding a regulatory threat under the ESA, on the one hand, and providing various kinds of assistance, on the other, federal officials encouraged broader participation among multiple stakeholders in a collaborative process. In this instance, governmental institutions defined the problem to be one of conserving the habitat of a federally listed species and promoted collaboration through regulations that made it possible to provide financial resources. At the same time, government representatives were individual actors who provided technical assistance. This distinction between governmental institutions and actors is important in clarifying the multiple roles government plays in collaboration. Governmental institutions and actors can encourage collaborative environmental management in some instances. In other situations, governments can initiate a collaborative endeavor or can follow the lead of nongovernmental actors. In some cases, governmental institutions establish a legal basis for action in policies that determine the composition of a group, while governmental actors may work as nonspecialist team members, seeking to accomplish collaborative goals and objectives, or may fill the roles of experts and technical advisors.

The central purpose of this book is to analyze how government influences collaborative environmental management through its dual role as actor and as institution. In the search to create better policy, it is vital to understand different governmental roles and how they influence both the process and outcomes of collaboration. The rise of collaborative environmental management is the result of years of policy change, as well as policy experimentation and learning. Understanding governmental roles in collaborative environmental management therefore requires looking at the genesis of public participation in policymaking in the United States, the transition to collaborative approaches to governance, and the influence these trends have had on environmental decision making and management.

FOUNDATIONS FOR COLLABORATION

The movement toward collaboration has roots stretching back to the late 1940s, when U.S. federal agencies began efforts to seek out and incorporate the views and preferences of the public in policy decisions. Before that time, public involvement in policymaking processes occurred on an ad hoc basis at the discretion of each governmental agency. With the institutionalization of the New Deal programs and the rise of larger bureaucratic agencies, however, concerns arose over the public's opportunity to influence decision making. Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in 1946 to set a minimum standard for public involvement in administrative decision-making processes (ACIR 1980). The APA required all federal agencies to publish draft rules in the Federal Register, provide public notice and comment periods during the rulemaking process, offer opportunities for group representation during trial-type hearings, and hold public hearings when appropriate (ACIR 1980; Kerwin 1999). Participation in rulemaking has varied widely, however, in part because the process is obscure to most citizens, which allows well-organized interests, particularly corporations, to dominate during the notice and comment period (Golden 1998).

In the 1960s, the United States, along with many other countries, experienced a “participation explosion” (Almond and Verba 1963, 4). As part of this movement, calls for citizen participation in federal policymaking were heeded in the urban poverty programs of the Great Society. Citizens’ right to be involved in policy formation was affirmed in the 1960s, and in contrast to the 1940s, a more explicitly participatory approach for the public was adopted. Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964, which created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Two years later, the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act (Model Cities) was passed. The OEO legislation provided that programs be “developed, conducted, and administered with maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of the groups served”; Model Cities encouraged “widespread participation” of traditionally underrepresented groups. In contrast to the earlier participation laws, the intent of these initiatives was to accord citizens partnership status and real decision-making power (Stenberg 1972, 192). But rarely was the participatory ideal of the public working hand in hand with agency bureaucrats realized during these early phases of citizen involvement. Instead, antipathy, alienation, and confrontation characterized citizen involvement in many of the OEO and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs (Stenberg 1972; Wengert 1971).

At the same time that public participation efforts were increasing, skepticism was rising over government's ability to deliver community services. Concerns about effective and efficient service provision led to pressures for devolution of authority to state and local organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. As governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations emerged to deal with social problems at the local level, efforts at devolution laid the foundation for the development of interorganizational and intergovernmental relationships to facilitate service coordination and integration. Community Action, community mental health programs that created centers, model cities, comprehensive health planning, and service integration, set the stage for collaboration in the years to come (Agranoff and Pattakos 1979; Alter and Hage 1993). Building on these nascent structures, the 1980s movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill led to community-based care and created the need for interagency coordinating committees (Alter and Hage 1993). Contracting, client orientation, the use of market mechanisms, and other new public management ideas were taken from the private sector and applied to the public sector to improve efficiency (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). These changes transformed the role of government from the sole provider of services to one of many participants working in loose coalitions with private and nonprofit providers. As such, government increasingly has come to be viewed as an equal player in a world of interdependent activity (Mandell 1990, 1999; Kickert et al. 1997).

The consequence of public participation legislation combined with devolution, decentralization, and privatization in the United States has been increased emphasis on collaborative approaches to policy and public management. Under these types of arrangements, government, as a formal institution of the state, ceases to hold sole power through command-and-control mechanisms, thereby shifting to governance, a process that takes place through the collective action of a variety of participants, all of whom retain some control over decision making or implementation (Milward and Provan 2000). As more “nongovernmental governance” emerges (Milward and Provan 2000, 359), some public policy, public management, and public administration scholars have argued that government no longer is the governing agent over society (Rhodes 1996). The movement away from government and toward governance established a foundation for collaboration along two critical dimensions. One is the rise of interorganizational and network arrangements, which reduced the role of government in public policy, public administration, and public management. The other is the provision for public participation, which increased the role of nongovernmental actors in these processes.

THE EMERGENCE OF COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Similar to the general patterns present in U.S. policy and public decision making, regulatory change and devolution contributed to increased collaboration in environmental management. A key piece of legislation contributing to this shift was the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The NEPA dictated that all federal agencies undertaking any “actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment” were required to prepare detailed statements regarding the “environmental impacts of proposed action.” The call for public participation in the environmental impact statement (EIS) process usually was restricted to involvement in public hearings and scoping processes during the early stages and to solicitation of public comments when the draft EIS was released (Westman 1985). According to regulations set forth by the Council on Environmental Quality, the draft EIS was made accessible to the public for a minimum of 45 days. Agencies were required to respond to each public comment received (Westman 1985). In addition to the NEPA, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 established the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States, while also providing for public participation in the development, revision, and enforcement of any regulation (Rosenbaum 1978). Following in the footsteps of these initial laws, a flurry of environmental and natural resource statutes with these new provisions for public participation were passed in the 1970s.²

Many programs developed in this era were criticized on several fronts. First, this so-called participatory legislation did little to allow the public to substantively influence environmental policymaking. The formalized procedures used to gather input did not lend themselves to spurring policy change. Second, the scope of citizen involvement was not representative of society at large (Ethridge 1987). Privileged, directly affected, and well-organized groups were disproportionately involved. Third, in many cases, the programs were not effectively implemented. Three years after their creation, the participatory provisions of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act were critiqued by the Commission on Water Quality as lacking goals, explicit objectives, and funding, which hampered the ability of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to implement or enforce the mandate (Rosenbaum 1978). These results were not unique, as Rosenbaum (1978, 122) noted: “The EPA can claim not only the prototype program, but unfortunately, prototype results.” Thus, while the ideals for public involvement remained lofty, the reality was much less inspiring.

Efforts to promote public participation in federal decision-making processes declined in the late 1970s and remained low through the mid-1980s. At the same time, the United States experienced an expansion in local environmental activity. By the early 1990s, growth in grassroots concern about the environment led to new demands on agencies for alternative means to solving environmental programs, including greater involvement of diverse stakeholder groups in decision-making processes. In response to these pressures, federal agencies began promoting collaborative approaches to environmental management. For example, the EPA embarked on its Community Based Environmental Program in 1994, and the Forest Service moved to integrate collaborative planning into forest management (Carr et al. 1998; Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000). More broadly, 18 federal agencies, including the Natural Resources Conservation Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Energy, Bureau of Land Management, and Fish and Wildlife Service, adopted ecosystem management approaches that included collaboration as a central tenet (Morrissey et al. 1994). In 2000, both the secretaries of agriculture and interior announced a unified policy for land and resource management that focused on watersheds. The policy, Watershed Approach to Land and Resource Management, called for agencies to work with state and local governments, citizens, and other interest groups to coordinate efforts to protect and manage natural resources (USDA and U.S. DOC 2000).

A number of states, as well, have embraced collaborative approaches for addressing environmental issues, in many instances actively promoting the creation and development of collaborative partnerships. State programs have provided technical, educational, financial, and facilitation assistance to support watershed protection. In Ohio, for example, state agencies have given grants to watershed partnerships to develop watershed action plans, and they have created the Ohio Watershed Network to provide technical assistance to scores of watershed groups across the state (Ohio Watershed Network n.d.). The Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds emphasizes community-based action and coordination among multiple stakeholders (Malone 2000). In Florida, the Office of Ecosystem Management spearheads efforts to involve stakeholders in environmental management decisions (Malone 2000). In West Virginia, a state program was created to fund collaborative watershed associations and provide assistance in the form of arranging meetings, providing facilitators, and furnishing technical assistance (Collins et al. 1998).

The ideals for involving the public remain, but it is clear that they have not been fully achieved. To understand the transition from command-and-control to collaborative approaches to environmental management at federal, state, and local levels, it is useful to examine the evolution of policy and management practices within three specific policy arenas: public land management, private land regulation, and water pollution control.

Public Land Management

Public land management in the United States is perhaps the best example of changing environmental management strategies and a transition toward collaboration. Federal land management initially was vested in several agencies at the turn of the twentieth century. Since that time, Congress passed legislation to broaden public involvement in the management of public lands and placed greater pressure on agencies to decentralize their management efforts. Federal policy shifted from land disposal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to expert-led conservation and preservation during the Progressive Era, then to regulations enforced by courts after 1970, and more recently to collaborative endeavors. Each new phase has not abolished the old so much as added a new layer to management approaches.

Two hundred years ago, as the fledgling United States sought to expand its borders after achieving independence, the federal government acquired vast amounts of land. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 added 560 million acres of land, the Florida Purchase 16 years later added nearly 50 million acres, and the 1840s saw the acquisition of more than 520 million acres from the Oregon Compromise and Mexican Treaty (Cubbage et al. 1993, 285). As the country expanded its borders, policymakers sought to move ownership into private hands. The Homestead Act of 1862, for example, provided a process for citizens to gain title to 160 acres by settling the land and cultivating it for at least five years. The governmental role in managing public lands was to privatize them. Government management focused on selling and giving away these lands to encourage economic development through farming, grazing, and the building of transportation networks such as canals and railroads.

With growing concern about corporate monopoly, resource exploitation, and corruption, Congress passed the General Revision Act in 1891, which allowed the federal government to retain public lands for natural resource values. The Weeks Act of 1911 empowered the federal government to acquire land from private owners for the development of dams and waterways and inclusion in national forests. In that era, the federal government began to assert more authority in regulating public land management.

A new model of public land management emerged in the early twentieth century, riding the crest of the Progressive reform movement. Stressing expert-based management within a structured agency hierarchy, Gifford Pinchot championed a cadre of professional agency employees applying natural science to maximize efficient and wise use of resources (Hays 1959). His efforts led to the creation of the Forest Service. As its leader, Pinchot emphasized efficient use of national forest lands for meeting human demands, rather than ecological preservation. At the same time, preservationists such as John Muir worked to have federal lands set aside in national parks, where they could be preserved for people to enjoy. The dual emphasis on conservation and preservation continued throughout much of the twentieth century, with national forest land management based on the notions of agency experts directing practices to achieve efficient use of natural resources and long-term conservation. In parallel fashion, other federal public lands, such as Bureau of Land Management (BLM) holdings, gradually came to be managed under the same centralized, scientific model by the middle of the twentieth century (Cubbage et al. 1993; Hirt 1994; Mullner et al. 2001). Under this approach, bureaucratic experts increasingly had authority to make management decisions, based largely on natural science knowledge.

Before World War II, many resources were in abundant supply, and public land management agencies were primarily custodial. After the war, however, natural resources, especially timber from private lands, began to run short, and the Forest Service and BLM continued to apply principles of scientific forestry to timber extraction on federal lands (Hirt 1994; Klyza 1996). But even as rapid economic growth fueled rising demand for commodities such as timber and minerals, the public was increasingly interested in using public lands for noncommodity purposes such as recreation and the enjoyment of scenic beauty (Hays 1987). With a wider array of stakeholders expressing interest in public land issues, federal managers faced growing requirements to provide opportunities for public input into management decisions (Davis 2001).

Until the 1970s, Congress had left the Forest Service to implement expert-driven conservation based on general principles and provisions. The Forest Service, however, used this broad authority to pursue intensive timber management just as environmental awareness and the demand for noncommodity uses of the national forests were increasing. After controversies and court cases over timber management in the Monongahela and Bitterroot National Forests, Congress responded with the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) of 1976, which provided some specific guidelines about how the agency should balance timber management with ecological protection and other land management objectives. The NFMA, along with the NEPA and ESA, created a new body of positive law directing the Forest Service to incorporate environmental provisions. Perhaps most significantly, the NEPA and NFMA expanded the opportunity for the public to affect Forest Service decision making by inviting citizens to comment on proposed forest management plans and environmental analyses of those plans, as well as creating avenues for appealing agency decisions.

Timber harvests declined as these laws took effect and with the recession of the early 1980s. But during the Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush administrations, timber harvests from the Forest Service and BLM rose to record levels. In response, environmental groups that opposed harvest decisions began to use administrative appeals and the courts to ensure that their perspectives were heard or to greatly constrain the actions of the Forest Service and other public land management agencies (Culhane 1981; Hoberg 1997). Environmentalists won major victories in courts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the battles among timber interests, environmentalists, and the federal land management agencies over public land management created enormous conflict and administrative deadlock.

Legislation leveled the playing field between timber interests and environmentalists by giving environmentalists a way to be involved in the decision process. But administrative deadlock became unacceptable to some groups, and at the local level, collaborative groups began to emerge to find ways to move beyond conflict (Snow 2001; Brunner et al. 2002). In this new collaborative approach, environmental management shifted to combine multiple stakeholder interests, perspectives, preferences, and knowledge in arriving at collaborative decisions about public land management (Mullner et al. 2001).

Following the lead of these localized community-based collaborations, the Clinton administration began encouraging federal land management agencies in the early 1990s to participate in these collaborative efforts. By the late 1990s, Congress was providing authority and direction to federal agencies to collaborate with each other and with the public. Beginning with the Forest Service's 1998 appropriation, Congress directed the Forest Service and, more recently, the BLM to use collaboration when developing stewardship contracts—mechanisms to implement ecosystem restoration while benefiting rural communities. In 2000, the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act mandated that the Forest Service and BLM use a collaborative process to set priorities and approve restoration projects using funds from the so-called county payments law. These two recent laws followed a decade of ground-level collaboration and encouragement from agency officials to collaborate with communities and other stakeholders to develop agreements about how to best manage public lands. In part, the drive toward collaborative environmental management was a response to the expanded involvement that had brought deadlock in the courts. Collaboration was seen as a strategy to avoid such impasses. Collaboration continues to vary among agencies, with the least sued (e.g., the National Park Service) being the least responsive to calls for collaboration (Thomas 2003b). Despite such variation, the move toward collaboration has been consolidated as a new generation of resource managers, trained in new ways of thinking, has risen in the ranks of these agencies (see Chapter 2). Although the agency-directed approach has not disappeared, collaborative environmental management of public lands has become more prominent.

Private Land Management

Unlike federal public land management, private land management has been marked by decentralization in the hands of private landowners. Regulatory authority rests predominantly with state and local agencies, with federal agencies playing a more limited role as both a regulator and a provider of funding to encourage particular types of management behavior by private landowners. The primacy of property rights in the United States limits government's role in the regulation and management of private lands, although laws such as the ESA have placed major constraints on how some private lands are managed. Local, state, and federal programs also have encouraged collaboration in the management of private lands, primarily through financial incentives.

Government's role in private land management has varied over time. Taking a laissez-faire approach in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the federal government shifted in the twentieth century to increasingly shape private land management through command-and-control regulations and technical and financial assistance. By the end of the twentieth century, collaborative approaches became much more common as public officials realized the limits of command-and-control regulations in addressing some environmental problems.

During the nineteenth century, federal regulation of private land was virtually nonexistent. Federal policy focused on privatizing the public domain, not regulating private landowners or encouraging good stewardship practices. Instead, state and local laws regulated land use. In addition, common-law notions of nuisance limited landowners’ actions in some cases. A nuisance is an intentional or unintentional act that interferes with the ability of others to enjoy the reasonable use of their lands or with the health, safety, or welfare of the community as a whole. Before the implementation of federal environmental legislation in the 1970s, court interpretations of nuisance under common law were the most important federal limitation of behavior on private lands.

Hunting statutes provided the first significant federal regulation of management practices on private land. During the nineteenth century, state governments typically owned wildlife, which meant that state laws governed wildlife use and management on private lands. The state ownership doctrine was challenged repeatedly in court during the nineteenth century, but it was not seriously eroded until the twentieth century. The Lacey Act (1900) was arguably the first serious challenge to the state ownership doctrine. It prohibited the interstate transportation of any game killed in violation of state law and allowed states to prohibit the importation of game killed lawfully in other states. This was followed by the Migratory Bird Act (1913), which declared all migratory game and insect-eating birds to be under federal protection and regulation. Many more laws asserting federal supremacy over wildlife policy followed, culminating with the Endangered Species Act in 1973, which provided for species management on both public and private lands. The ESA placed far-reaching constraints on private land use with provisions limiting habitat modification. Although the ESA later afforded important incentives for collaboration, it initially appeared to be just another in a long line of regulatory prohibitions telling private landowners and those using private lands what they could not do.

In addition to regulations, the federal government developed programs to provide technical and financial assistance to landowners to help them become better stewards of the land. After the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the Soil Conservation Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), became the primary organization for delivering such technical assistance to farmers and ranchers. The NRCS does not have regulatory authority as the EPA does. Instead, it collaborates with private landowners and local governments, such as resource conservation districts, to implement stewardship practices. Unlike regulatory agencies, technical assistance agencies long have relied on collaboration as a means for achieving programmatic goals.

State governments also shape management practices on private lands through regulation and technical and financial assistance. Some states, such as California, have promulgated more stringent regulations than the federal government. Other states, such as Ohio and Colorado, seek to influence local land use through financial incentives. Ohio uses incentives to encourage collaboration in the preparation of plans to preserve agricultural land (see Chapter 5). In Colorado, a quasistate agency provides funding for open space protection as long as proposals meet requirements that include collaboration in the creation and implementation of proposed projects (Steelman 2000). Many western state governments have enacted comprehensive forest practice statutes to regulate private lands (Cubbage et al. 1993). State governments also delegate zoning authority to local governments because local governments do not have sovereign status in the United States.

Hence the exercise of local land-use control must be based on state authorization. Private landowners who seek to challenge local zoning ordinances must press their cases against state governments in court. In such cases, courts must decide whether the land-use law constitutes a regulation or a taking under the Fifth Amendment. If the law is deemed to prevent harm to the public, then courts typically consider it to be a regulation, and thus a permissible use of policy power to regulate private land under common law. On the other hand, if a court finds that land-use law provides a public benefit, rather than prevents harm, then it becomes a taking that requires just compensation. Thus far, there have been few takings cases that have limited land-use laws, but several states have developed takings statutes. Although these cases and statutes have had limited effects to date in terms of rolling back land-use restrictions, they have nevertheless concerned local, state, and federal officials, who must now think more carefully about the limits of their regulatory authority on private lands.

Within this context, collaborative environmental management has become increasingly attractive to public officials and private landowners. Federal statutes such as the ESA provide an incentive for multiple stakeholders to collaborate at the local level to avoid more stringent and inflexible regulations imposed from above (see Chapter 4). Many government and nongovernment officials have recognized the limits of command-and-control regulations in other situations (see Chapter 3). Not only have command-and-control regulations not effectively addressed some environmental problems, especially those requiring site-specific knowledge or adoption of rapidly changing technology, but their very existence is potentially threatened by takings legislation and court decisions (John 1994). Moreover, the popularity of such regulations has been undermined by horror stories in the press about their effects on jobs and the economy. With regard to endangered species, for example, former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt referred to such horror stories as “environmental train wrecks,” which might ultimately lead Congress to weaken the Endangered Species Act itself. Therefore, Babbitt developed new incentives to encourage private landowners to develop collaborative habitat conservation plans that would protect species before such “train wrecks” occurred. For public officials facing the limits of regulations, and for private landowners seeking more discretion on how to manage their lands, collaboration seemed increasingly promising in the 1990s.

Water Pollution Control

For most of U.S. history, controlling water pollution was left to states and localities. In a nation viewed as having boundless natural resources, little interest in expending federal resources to curb pollution existed. Economic growth and development took precedence over pollution reduction, and states and localities were not eager to set controls that would discourage industries from locating in their jurisdictions. Beginning in the 1970s, water pollution control gradually was centralized at the federal level. In more recent years, greater authority has devolved back to states and localities to address their water pollution problems, thereby creating more opportunities for participation in decision making at the local level.

The earliest water law in the United States was based on common-law principles such as riparian rights, the nuisance doctrine, public trust, and the prohibition against government taking private property without compensation (Rose 1983). Under these principles, in the eastern United States, rights to water arose from owning riparian land, so disputes about water were seen as disagreements between property owners based on their expectation of “reasonable use” of the water flowing by their property (Rose 1983, 307). The nuisance doctrine could be invoked when water pollution caused a “substantial and unreasonable interference with the use and enjoyment of one's property” (Rose 1983, 315). That is, a downstream property owner could sue an upstream discharger for damages suffered as a result of pollution.

Relying on common law to address water quality issues had obvious logistical problems. Because the effects on any one downstream user were generally smaller than the benefits that accrued to the discharger, the affected parties did not have the incentives, nor often the resources, to file suit. Also, it was often more efficient to treat wastes in large-scale plants than for each discharger to treat its own wastes. Addressing pollution through individual cases did not imply a standard level of water quality among regions, nor was there any provision for transmedia pollution. Therefore, some kind of regional water quality authority was needed to manage water resources (Kneese and Schultze 1975).

Water law developed to reflect the public interest in clean water. Over time, local, state, and finally the federal government became involved in protecting water quality. The first federal law addressing water pollution was the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act (33 USC 402–413), which declared it illegal to discharge refuse into navigable waters without a permit from the secretary of the army (Patrick 1992).

After World War II, public interest in cleaner water grew. The postwar economic boom contributed to substantial increases in pollution, while at the same time creating additional leisure time and opportunities for people to engage in outdoor recreational activities. As a result, citizens began calling attention to environmental problems and demanding a greater governmental role in solving them (Davis 1998). At this time, the federal government's primary role was to provide technical assistance and funding to states, which generally retained a laissez-faire approach to regulating pollution. For example, the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 (33 USC 466) and its amendments gave primary responsibility for water pollution control to the states, sponsored research on water quality, and authorized federal construction grants for municipal waste treatment facilities. It was not until the Water Quality Act of 1965 (PL 89–234), however, that interstate water quality standards were established. This attempt at federal water quality protection was viewed widely as ineffective (Patrick 1992; Freeman 2000; Lamb 1980; Kneese and Schultze 1975).

A new governmental role was evident in significant amendments to the Water Pollution Control Act in 1972 and 1977, which became commonly known as the Clean Water Act (Freeman 1990). In addition to including public involvement provisions, the central feature of the Clean Water Act's water quality protection strategy was effluent control through the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). Under this system, all point sources of pollution into navigable waters must have effluent permits. Point sources are “discrete, identifiable” sources of pollution, such as “industrial or municipal discharges” (Lamb 1980, 83). An effluent permit lists the pollutants to be discharged, along with average and maximum daily limits for each, a compliance schedule, monitoring and reporting provisions, and an expiration date no more than five years after issuance (Evans 1994; Rose 1983). The NPDES is overseen by the EPA, but most states have qualified to administer their own NPDES permit programs (Evans 1994; Freeman 1990). Thus water quality protection historically has focused on control of point sources through permits established by state and federal agencies. Assigning permits based on individual point-source emissions, rather than establishing ambient water quality, encourages polluters to act independently rather than to collaborate. Because polluters are held responsible only for their own effluent discharges, not the cumulative and collective degradation of the water body, they have no incentive to work together.

In recent years, the cumulative importance of nonpoint sources of pollution has been increasingly recognized (Patrick 1992). Nonpoint sources are those that cannot be traced to a single source; these include agricultural, urban, and road pollutant runoff (Evans 1994). The 1987 Clean Water Act Amendments, in Section 319, required states to prepare nonpoint-source management programs (Evans 1994; Patrick 1992). Although significant steps were made toward controlling nonpoint-source pollution and conducting comprehensive basinwide planning, these efforts were technically and politically more difficult than point-source control (Freeman 1990).

Several things account for this difficulty. First, agricultural and other land-use practices, particularly plowing and fertilizing, are major contributors to nonpoint-source pollution. The EPA historically has not been involved in directly regulating agricultural practices. Local governments are responsible for regulating changes in land use, including conversion of forested or agricultural land to development. Such conversion is a major cause of nonpoint-source pollution (Barker 1990). Atmospheric inputs of pollution, especially nitrogen, are increasingly recognized as a cause of eutrophication, but the Clean Water Act does not regulate airborne pollutants (Tripp and Oppenheimer 1988). Thus the act does not provide for the effective control of three significant sources of water pollution that were regulated by separate agencies: agriculture, development, and atmospheric deposition. Subsequent environmental policy changes have been aimed at facilitating more comprehensive management of water resources, with collaboration as one means to do so.

One area in which particular attempts have been made to integrate management efforts is the coastal zone. The federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 encouraged states to develop comprehensive coastal management plans (Archer and Knecht 1987). The states’ coastal program authority is limited to the coastal zone, so these management programs seldom have influence over activities in the upper watersheds, even though such activities may be significant sources of estuarine pollution. This challenge is compounded when the watershed includes land in two or more states. Within a single state, multiple agencies dealing with issues such as water quality, fisheries, habitat, and transportation may have jurisdiction within the coastal zone (Lawrence 1988; Beatley et al. 2002; Cicin-Sain and Knecht 2000). Thus even in coastal areas included under relatively comprehensive coastal zone management programs, many different regulatory frameworks apply to the various activities and impacts within the watershed.

These challenges have led to increasing efforts to implement collaborative watershed management. Several programs have sought to encourage comprehensive, collaborative planning and actions for water resources. For example, the Great Lakes Remedial Action Planning process prescribes using an “ecosystem approach” to restore beneficial uses to 43 “areas of concern,” with substantive public and industry participation across multiple jurisdictions (MacKenzie 1996). The National Estuary Program provides for state and federal partnering to involve managers, scientists, and stakeholders in creating comprehensive plans to protect critically threatened estuaries (see Chapter 6). Across the nation, the federal EPA and state agencies increasingly are focusing on improving ambient water quality by encouraging stakeholder participation and community involvement in watershed planning (see Chapter 7).

CHARACTERISTICS OF COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Across a wide range of environmental arenas, the paradigm of expertise-based, scientific management of public lands is evolving to include collaborative environmental management. Even where government officials have regulatory authority over private land, they are now working in more collaborative ways in many parts of the country. Further, the transboundary challenges associated with diffuse water pollution have begun to eclipse traditional command-and-control models of pollution control as more collaborative approaches to regulation, especially with respect to water resources, emerge in numerous jurisdictions.

Whether these efforts are called community-based environmental management (Kenney and Lord 1999), collaborative conservation (Brick et al. 2001), community-based initiatives (Brunner et al. 2002), grassroots ecosystem management (Weber 2003), participatory natural resource management (Vira and Jeffrey 2001), partnering (Leach et al. 2002), co-management (Singleton 2000), or ecosystem management (Cortner and Moote 1999), a common theme is collaboration among or between different stakeholder groups as a means for airing diverse viewpoints and generating information that will address increasingly complex environmental problems. Rather than government solely regulating the actions of private parties or managing publicly owned resources, collaborative environmental management implies that government shares decision-making power and authority with other stakeholders.

Collaboration can be led or encouraged by governmental actors and institutions or by citizens and nongovernmental groups. Across these configurations, collaborative environmental management can take many different forms. For instance, government participation in collaborative efforts may or may not include legally binding outcomes, depending on the purposes of the group. With habitat conservation planning under the ESA (see Chapter 4), collaborative groups develop plans to manage land-use activities in a specified area; these plans are formally adopted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which issues regulatory permits that allow activities covered by these plans. In other cases, such as Ohio's Farmland Preservation Task Forces (see Chapter 5) and the Darby Partnership watershed effort (see Chapter 3), a collaborative group does not possess binding legal authority, but the group nevertheless strives to effect changes in both environmental and social conditions.

Collaborative environmental management addresses some of the gaps and problems found in traditional approaches to regulation. A number of scholars, however, have raised concerns about the performance and appropriateness of such efforts. For example, the environmental outcomes of collaboration may be less protective of natural resources than under traditional efforts, especially if consensus decision making leads to a “lowest common denominator” decision (Coglianese 1999). This can put government officials in the awkward position of having to either enforce a policy they believe is flawed or overturn a collaborative decision (Rhoads et al. 1999). Some fear that collaborative decision making may provide federal regulatory agencies with an excuse to abdicate their power over environmental protection (Kenney 1999; Coggins 1998). This could lead to government policymaking being co-opted by special interests (McCloskey 1996). Moreover, collaboration emphasizing local stakeholders may not adequately represent broader interests in matters of national scope (Coggins 1998; McCloskey 1996). Even within a local community, groups such as the poor or minorities are often left out of a collaborative process.

Nevertheless, a wide variety of people, from policymakers and scholars to community members and grassroots activists, promote collaborative environmental management as a means to transcend political boundaries, manage environmental conflicts, and address complex problems that have not been solved by traditional means (Kenney and Lord 1999; Weber 2003; Vira and Jeffrey 2001; Leach et al. 2002; Singleton 2000; Brick et al. 2001; Cortner and Moote 1999). Furthermore, many recommend collaboration as a way to formulate more locally relevant policies and include diverse interests and values in decision making. In a wide range of settings, governmental agencies have come to recognize the importance of integrating community knowledge, skills, values, and views into environmental decision making and management. The resultant proliferation of collaborative approaches raises the issue of how to think about government's role in collaboration and how its influence imprints such efforts.

In this volume, collaborative environmental management is explored as an application of the general concept of collaboration. Collaboration is a process in which diverse stakeholders work together to resolve a conflict or develop and advance a shared vision (Gray 1989). In collaborative efforts, stakeholders come together to gain a more comprehensive understanding of problems and implement strategies to address important issues. Whereas traditional participation has connoted involvement in scoping issues, commenting on plans, or attending public meetings, collaboration strives for more integrated involvement of diverse groups of stakeholders in the initiation, creation, implementation, and evaluation of alternatives that they have identified. Moreover, collaboration promotes equal decision making among all stakeholders, at least in theory (Gray 1989). Throughout the remainder of this text, we use the term collaborative environmental management to refer to collaboration in the management of environmental issues. We take an inclusive approach and therefore regard the initiation, planning, implementation or generation, and evaluation of alternatives as integral aspects of environmental management.

GOVERNMENTAL INFLUENCES ON COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES

Collaborative environmental management is based on diverse groups, including public, private, and nonprofit stakeholders, working together to address environmental issues. Given that the traditional role of government is as expert, manager, or enforcer, collaboration implies significant changes in the way that governmental agencies and actors engage in environmental management. To some, it may be paradoxical to imagine a governmental role in collaborative environmental management as anything other than “getting in the way” or “getting out of the way.” After all, collaborative environmental management often is described as a grassroots, bottom-up endeavor—the antithesis of government-directed management and regulation. But governments rarely leave the picture entirely; in fact, they often play a central role in the creation or development of a collaborative effort.

In recent years, numerous case studies and a few broad survey analyses have described a wide variety of collaborative environmental management efforts across the country, examining group activities, barriers to success, and accomplishments (Kenney and Lord 1999; Weber 2003; Vira and Jeffrey 2001; Leach et al. 2002; Singleton 2000; Brick et al. 2001; Cortner and Moote 1999). Although such research provides a large and growing mass of data, little progress has been made in understanding the role of key players, particularly governments, in collaborative environmental management. Where research has considered the role of government, it has focused on how agencies and institutional constraints pose barriers to collaboration (e.g., Grumbine 1994; Cortner and Moote 1999; Meidinger 1997). Analysts have largely neglected the diversity of roles—some more positive than others—that government can play in collaborative environmental management. As a result, a number of important questions remain unanswered about the extent to which government is able and willing to share power in environmental management, the means through which government actions and efforts facilitate or hinder collaboration, and the extent to which collaboration leads to better environmental outcomes. It is unclear whether collaborative environmental management has fostered achievement of the aspirations embodied in previous attempts to involve the public or delegate authority to nongovernmental actors in decision making.

Government as Institution and as Actor

In order to understand governmental roles, it is important to distinguish between government as institution and as actor, and to consider key factors that influence collaborative processes and outcomes. Institutions are described differently by different scholars (Hall and Taylor 1996; Crawford and Ostrom 1995; Peters 1999). Building on historical institutionalist and rational choice definitions, we define institutions to be structures, rules, laws, norms, and sociocultural processes that shape human actions (Thelen and Steinmo 1992; Hall 1986; Peters 1999). For our purposes, governmental institutions are the structures, processes, rules, and norms of the administrative state. Structures, rules, and laws formalize the constraints and incentives facing participants by prohibiting, requiring, or permitting specified actions (Ostrom et al. 1994; Crawford and Ostrom 1995). Although norms and sociocultural processes often are informal or implicit, they too shape behavior by establishing parameters for what forms of action are acceptable (March and Olsen 1989; Peters 1999).

Governmental actors are the flesh-and-blood employees, elected officials, and other people in government who take action within the context of institutions. They are not simply individuals who carry out the formal rules or embody the social norms of the agencies within which they work. Actors also have the ability to shape those norms and rules and to act outside of them. Institutions do not entirely constrain actors, although rational choice and historical institutionalism differ in how much autonomy they attribute to actors (Smith 1992; Hall and Taylor 1996). Typical governmental actors include civil servants, political appointees, and elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels. As participants, governmental actors bring their individual perspectives, personalities, skills, and needs to collaborative groups and endeavors. Governmental actors can choose to take action in certain collaborative processes, including challenging the rules and norms of their organizations to enhance or reduce collaboration.

Governmental actors and institutions, together or separately, constitute governmental roles in a particular collaborative effort. The relative influence of governmental actors and institutions is likely to vary from one collaborative case to another. In some cases, governmental actors might critically affect collaboration; in others, institutions may dominate; in yet others, both could be crucial; and in some cases, neither may make a substantial impact. Governmental actors and institutions are also interdependent, in that actors shape institutions and institutions shape actors. Thus governmental roles in a particular case may be quite complex, particularly if the actors are seeking to change institutions in ways that promote or constrain collaboration.

Factors Influencing Collaborative Processes and Outcomes

To understand how governmental actors and institutions influence collaborative environmental management, we must carefully examine the factors that are thought to affect processes and outcomes. Previous research examining collaboration has identified a number of critical factors. These can be grouped into three broad categories: issue definition, resources available for collaboration, and group structure and decision-making processes.

Issue Definition. Issue definition refers to how an issue is framed, what set of solutions is seen as feasible, and the scale of the issue. Scholars have long noted that the way a problem is presented and understood lays a foundation for who is likely to become involved, what forces will come into play, and which solutions will be given serious consideration (Schattschneider 1960). Framing a particular problem one way, such as “there is too much pollution in the river,” rather than another, such as “pollution control along the river is not being properly implemented,” establishes a basis for the range of action and solutions that are relevant and appropriate (Snow and Benford 1988). The way that a problem is defined and framed can affect potential stakeholders’ interest level and willingness to participate, as well as the way that a collaborative group approaches environmental management (Moseley and KenCairn 2001).

Issue definition also includes the biophysical scale of the effort, which is intertwined with the definition of the problem and the range of possible solutions. One collaborative endeavor might have the goal of changing who participates in federal land management; another may tackle the challenge of remedying water quality in a degraded watershed. The biological and physical characteristics of the landscape that are linked to problem definition can affect collaborations in a number of ways. For example, whether pollution is concentrated or diffuse can greatly affect the likelihood that collaborative partnerships will emerge (Lubell et al. 1998). If pollution is diffuse, the ability of concerned parties to recognize the problem and organize around it may be more limited than if the problem is concentrated in one geographic locale. Another important biophysical element is geographic size. Thomas (1999) describes how collaborative efforts operating on a large bioregional scale fell apart as potential participants faced a half-day's drive to attend meetings.

Resources for Collaboration. Resources for collaboration are the second set of factors that shape collaborative processes and outcomes. A number of researchers have argued that group resources are critical in determining what collaborative partnerships can achieve (MacKenzie 1996; Yaffee et al. 1996). In a comparative case study of two collaborative groups working on similar water quality issues, Steelman and Carmin (2002) argue that strategies, activities, and success were tied closely to group resources. Three types of resources commonly discussed in writings on collaboration are human, technical, and financial.

Human resources refer to the personnel and the skills, abilities, experience, and level of effort they bring to collaboration. As in other endeavors involving human interactions, people and personalities matter in collaborative environmental management. Collaborative partnerships often hinge on the ability of leaders to facilitate group processes to build trust, reciprocity, and a supportive environment for members (Kellogg 1998; Moseley 1999; Thomas 1999; Steelman and Carmin 2002). In addition, volunteer and paid staff members are crucial to such efforts (Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000).

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 that can affect interactions among public and private stakeholders. For example, because the Applegate River Watershed Council was led by a geologist, the collaboration could easily engage and work with government scientists on technical problem solving. In contrast, other nearby watershed councils lacking internal technical capacity relied more heavily on government technical advice and had more difficulty in developing viable restoration programs (see Moseley 1999). Technical consultations and expertise can be contracted from entities external to the collaborative group or may be found among actors within the group itself (Steelman and Carmin 2002).

Financial resources refer to funds obtained from members, fund-raising activities, and grants from governmental and nongovernmental sources. Funding has been described as one of the most important resources shaping group activities (Yaffee et al. 1996). In some instances, funding comes from individual and organizational donors that place requirements on how the funds may be used; in other instances, the issues addressed and the type of expenditures incurred are at the discretion of the collaborative group. The amount of funds available and the way they are disbursed to the collaboration will influence what types of projects can be undertaken and the extent to which group efforts can be directed toward environmental rather than fund-raising activities.

Group Structure and Decision-Making Processes. Group structure refers to the types of organizational or administrative arrangements that have been established, including hierarchy, authority, reporting relations, and division of labor. Collaborative groups develop a variety of structures, ranging from loose federations to groups with tightly controlled membership, and from ad hoc committees with minimal administrative capacity to formal organizations with full-time staff working within a well-defined administrative framework. Structure and the leadership roles that are established are important because they can facilitate or impede relationships among organizations and actors. Tightly controlled groups, for example, may need approval from their membership before working with other groups and agencies; informal groups may have a desire to collaborate but may not have sufficient structural capacity to promote an ongoing relationship.

Collaborative groups can structure and coordinate activities through a number of means, primary among them convening group meetings. Some groups choose to structure workloads by creating subgroups (e.g., standing or ad hoc subcommittees) assigned to particular tasks, whereas others conduct activities primarily through general meetings (Koontz and Korfmacher 2000). Although delegation has many positive qualities, it also may allow important actions to be taken without full consideration by the broader group (Bonnell 2001). Some collaborative structures may be limited in the types of decision-making processes that can be delegated. For instance, the Forest Service often is criticized for its traditional chain-of-command bureaucracy, which constrains the ability to engage in collaborative activity. In contrast, agencies with a looser organizational structure, such as the BLM, are more flexible in the decisions they can delegate within a collaborative activity (Thomas 1999).

Organizational decision-making processes are used to select participants, coordinate activities, and aggregate individual preferences into group decisions. Selecting who constitutes a group is an important task. When inviting citizens to interact with public officials, selection methods may affect the degree to which a group represents the broader community's interests, as well as the degree to which public officials will be responsive to the group's policy recommendations (Pierce and Doerksen 1976).

Collaborative groups in action must aggregate individual input into collective decisions about setting goals, choosing strategies, obtaining and allocating resources, and developing plans and policy recommendations. Many collaborative environmental management scholars, including Wondolleck and Yaffee (2000), have stressed the importance of consensus decision rules in helping find successful solutions and build social capital. But group decisions requiring consensus can lead to policy recommendations on which a group can readily agree, rather than bold, innovative approaches that may be difficult for the group to develop but could lead to more effective outcomes (Coglianese 1999; Blomquist and Schlager 1999). In practice, groups may use a wide range of aggregation rules, including consensus, modified consensus, majority voting, and supermajority voting (typically where two-thirds or three-quarters of voters must support the proposal). Group participants may also “agree to disagree,” which provides a respectful means to avoid bringing contentious issues to a vote. In some cases, decisions by collaborations are binding; in other cases, they are not. Collaborative groups sometimes serve as advisory councils, rather than as true decision-making bodies. In still other instances, citizens have no substantive input or power sharing, with their involvement being nothing more than symbolic efforts designed to give the appearance of collaboration (Arnstein 1969).

Collaborative Outcomes

Investigating the role of government and the influence of these actors and institutions on collaborative environmental management requires appropriate measures of outcomes.³ In this book, our measures include both environmental and social outcomes. Environmental outcomes include such things as planning documents, restoration projects, pollution reduction, and environmental education. Social outcomes refer to social capital and civic engagement, including increased trust among stakeholders, improved relationships between formerly adversarial parties, and strengthened community capacity to engage in self-governance and community problem solving.

Collaboration may enhance environmental outcomes because it provides a means for diverse stakeholders to coordinate their behavior and support collective actions to address environmental concerns (Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000; Kenney and Lord 1999). As John (1994) and others have emphasized, legal strategies such as command-and-control regulation and permitting are not well suited to problems of waste runoff, soil erosion, and other forms of natural resource degradation involving many dispersed decision makers. Instead, for multiple decision makers conducting myriad activities across a landscape, collaboration allows the possibility of integrating multiple viewpoints and knowledge sources to protect and enhance environmental quality (Weber 1998). In instances in which environmental solutions require local, voluntary implementation, support from local stakeholders is essential for effective and efficient results (Brunner et al. 2002). Collaboration may be valuable in providing time- and place-specific information to foster better environmental management.

Despite widespread agreement about the potential of collaboration, knowledge is limited about the degree to which collaborative environmental management fosters improved ecological conditions in practice. Because of long time horizons, multiple scales, and complex interactions among ecosystem components, measuring causal relationships in environmental quality represents perhaps the greatest challenge in evaluating collaborative environmental management (Brunner 2000; Conley and Moote 2003).⁴ In many instances, groups do not monitor the environmental quality effects or outputs of their activities, focusing instead on tangible environmental management outcomes. Given this limited knowledge, collaborations typically focus on tangible products such as the formation or implementation of plans, projects, standards, and activities associated with environmental improvement, rather than on ecological measures of environmental quality.

In addition to enhancing environmental conditions, collaborative environmental management may alter and improve government relationships with nongovernmental organizations and citizens, as well as with other agencies. Social outcomes involve benefits both to participants and to broader populations through increased abilities to solve problems and the experience of working cooperatively. Collaborative environmental management may encourage faith in government and its efficacy in problem solving (Cortner and Moote 1999; McGinnis et al. 1999) while, at the same time, building local capacity to engage constructively in self-governance. Moreover, it may help build trust and foster improved relationships between formerly adversarial parties (Beierle 1999; Buckle and Thomas-Buckle 1986).

Networks and legitimacy are two additional social outcomes that can arise from collaboration. The repeated meetings, discussions, and activities involved in collaboration may foster the development of social networks. The presence of networks of people dealing with related issues can be a crurial asset, enhancing group efficacy (Lynn 1987; Moseley 1999) as well as a group's ability to garner support throughout the broader community (Press 1998). Legitimacy results when a collaborative group is seen as an appropriate and credible actor (Gray 1989). Legitimacy affects the ability of a group to mobilize resources to implement plans and policies; groups out of step with the broader community may face difficulty in gaining support for their activities. Because relations and perceptions endure, networks and legitimacy often are social outcomes of a given collaboration, and once established, they can serve as a basis for future collaborations.

Rigorous evaluation of the social outcomes of collaboration is challenging. Participants in collaborations typically focus on practical activities and do not expend resources to monitor or measure social processes and relations. Those groups that attempt to monitor social outcomes find that these, too, can be difficult to measure because of conflicting meanings and interpretations of concepts such as trust, self-reliance, and cooperation (Beierle 1999).

FOCUS AND ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

With more governmental actors and institutions at the federal, state, and local levels becoming engaged in collaborative environmental management, a better understanding is needed of the roles they play in such efforts. Previous research suggests that issue definition, resources, and group structure and decision-making processes can influence the nature of a collaborative endeavor. Little consideration has been given, however, to the influence that governmental actors and institutions have on these factors. The chapters that follow focus on how governmental actors and institutions affect these three sets of factors and, consequently, the direct and indirect influences that government has on both the processes and the outcomes of collaboration.

Chapters 2 through 7 present case studies illustrating different governmental roles in collaborative environmental management. Because governments at all levels, federal, state, and local, can play myriad roles, we did not seek to catalog all of the possible permutations. The case studies were purposely selected to represent a discrete range of roles, grouped as government-followed, government-encouraged, and government-led collaborative efforts. To facilitate comparison, all of the cases focus on the planning dimension of environmental management, and each considers how government as actor and as institution influences problem definition, resources for collaboration, structure and processes of collaboration, and outcomes from collaboration (see the Methodological Appendix for a more detailed discussion of the case selection and research methods). We rely on systematic approaches to case selection and case analysis to enhance the validity of inferences from data to theory (Geddes 1990; Yin 1994; King et al. 1995). Along the way, each case also addresses a different conceptual question about governmental roles in collaborative environmental management.

Part I of this volume includes two cases of government-followed collaboration, in which governmental institutions set the stage for collaboration, citizens and nonprofit organizations initiated the collaborative efforts, and governmental actors participated to varying degrees in the collaboration. Chapter 2 uses the Applegate Partnership in southwest Oregon to illustrate how government as actor and as institution influences collaboration even when government is following the lead of others. The case study suggests how perceived failures in government policymaking can lead citizens to seek collaboration as a remedy in public forest management. It also examines the types of challenges governmental actors face when they participate in collaborations that seek to change the governmental institutions in which they are embedded.

Chapter 3 discusses the Darby Partnership, in which a nonprofit organization initiated a collaborative process to change an unacceptable status quo, filling a collaborative void left by existing governmental institutions. Although governmental stakeholders participated in the process, questions arose about how much could be achieved when governmental actors were only participants without any institutional influence. This chapter addresses questions regarding the potential benefits and limitations of collaboration that is led by nongovernmental actors with minimal formal commitment from government.

Part II describes two cases of government-encouraged collaboration. Governmental institutions instigated collaboration in these cases, both directly and indirectly. Chapter 4 discusses habitat conservation planning under the ESA. Here the federal government serves as both institution and actor. As institution, the act, its implementing regulations, and court cases have created a baseline set of expectations regarding environmental management on private land, and for local and state agencies. Within this context, federal officials act as participants in habitat conservation planning efforts by providing various forms of assistance to encourage collaborative efforts. Such efforts typically are initiated by nonfederal actors as a means to avoid the more negative consequences of strict command-and-control regulations for species protection under the ESA. This chapter delves into issues related to how government officials wield command-and-control rules in combination with financial and technical assistance to encourage collaboration.

Chapter 5 demonstrates how a state governmental institution—a capacity-building grant in Ohio's Farmland Preservation Planning Program—can affect collaborative land-use planning efforts at the county level, and how local governmental actors play key roles in collaborative processes and outcomes. It also assesses whether grant funding from institutional sources can buy collaboration.

Part III examines examples of government-led initiation of collaboration. Here governmental actors and institutions both played dominant roles in the collaborative efforts. In Chapter 6, government played an active role by defining the issues, providing resources, and establishing group structure and processes for a collaborative federal-state initiative under the National Estuary Program in North Carolina. This chapter also considers whether science-based collaborative planning can overcome the divergent agendas of different governmental agencies, interest groups, and members of the public.

Chapter 7 illustrates the most active governmental role in collaborative environmental management in this book, with governmental actors taking the lead in developing a collaborative group to create water quality standards for the Animas River. This chapter also reflects on whether or not government-led, community-based environmental management is an oxymoron.

Part IV provides a synthesis and discussion of lessons drawn from the case chapters. Chapter 8 recaps the diversity of findings from each case, moving from government-followed to government-encouraged to government-led efforts. It also compares variations in governmental roles in and influence on issue definition, resources, and group structure and decision making across the cases. This analysis suggests that government, whether it follows, encourages, or leads, leaves a heavy imprint on collaborative efforts. Because governmental actors and institutions featured prominently in most facets of collaboration, these patterns raise questions about how far we have come from the failed versions of public involvement models developed in the 1960s and 1970s, whether government is sharing power, and the extent to which collaborative efforts are achieving integrated and effective approaches to environmental management. These issues are addressed further in Chapter 9, which considers the implications of the findings from the case analyses and discusses the choices and challenges faced by governmental institutions and actors as they seek to realize the potential of collaborative environmental management.