A Typology of Collaboration Efforts in Environmental Management

Abstract

Collaboration involves stakeholders and the public in a process of consensus building to address some of the most difficult environmental management problems facing society today. Collaborative groups vary widely, ranging from small watershed councils to regional ecosystem collaboratives to groups addressing large-scale policy issues. While these collaboratives all match the common principles of collaboration, a closer examination reveals many differences. Using institutional theories about levels of decision making provides a way of classifying collaboratives along a spectrum from action level to organizational level to policy level. This typology is applied to thirty-six collaboration case studies in Australia and the United States that were investigated over a series of years through interviews, observation, document analysis, and surveys. The application reveals different tendencies among the case types in terms of population, size, problem significance, institutional setting, and focus of activities. The typology also reveals functional differences in the types of stakeholders involved, the management arrangements for implementation, and the approaches to implementing change. This typology can help practitioners better understand the challenges and appropriate types of collaborations for different settings. It helps highlight differences in the role of government and decentralization of power. It distinguishes the different theoretical foundations for different types of collaboratives. Finally, it elucidates the different evaluation approaches for different types of collaboratives.

Adaptive governance and managing resilience to natural hazards

“…Another challenge is joining up agencies and governments to willingly share power. Many studies in collaborative natural resource management and watershed management have provided evidence that cooperation at these higher levels poses one of the greatest challenges to the effectiveness of multilevel nested collaboration models (Freeman and Farber 2005;Margerum 2008). One way of overcoming this is for national governments to provide sufficient incentives (legal and economic) to ensure lower-level bodies have sufficient motivation to genuinely engage in joint governance processes…”

“…Collaborative relationships may be one-off events, but many are ongoing processes, where stakeholders plan, implement, monitor, and adapt their actions over time. Some involve only government agencies, others involve only citizens, some involve both (Margerum 2008;Holley 2010b). Participation and collaboration favorably influence the capacity to manage resilience.…”

Purposeful collective action in ambiguous and contested situations: exploring ‘enabling capacities’ and cross-level interplay

“…Collective action is nested and embedded within multiple levels of functional organisation (Ostrom 2005;Margerum 2008). The role of the heuristic is to guide theoretically-informed inquiry within a particular empirical setting, respecting the key role of context in conditioning the specific ways that purposeful collective action emerges.…”

“…regulations, policies, organisational setups) to enable and support collective action (Folke et al 2005;Pahl-Wostl 2009). Collaboration refers to the capacity for actors to work collaboratively in practice, including relationships and trust among them (Bouwen and Taillieu 2004;Margerum 2008). Engagement refers to buy-in, and commitment of important actors who need to be involved in addressing a problem (Röling and Wagemakers 1998).…”

Partnership approaches in flood risk management: lessons from the Eastern Alps

“…This includes a broader co-operation between local authorities, especially in rural areas. The key aim is consensus building between the different groups [2,3] .H\ DVSHFWV DUH µLQFOXVLRQ power-sharing and joint decision-PDNLQJ ¶ DV ZHOO DV µDQ interaction of equals, rather than a subject-object UHODWLRQVKLS ¶ [2: p. 492].…”