Lessons from the Experiment in Estuarine Governance: Establishing Evaluative Criteria

The challenges of integrated estuarine management in the United States

“…This paper's discussion of the NEP focuses on the difficulty of imposing comprehensive assessment and planning strategies upon estuarine management environments that remain segmented and incrementalized. Building upon past analyses of U.S. estuarine management (Hennessey and Robadue, 1987;Leschine, 1990), I argue that the political forces and governance contexts of American pluralism structure estuarine management environments and dictate their use of scientific information. This paper concludes with the proposition that the utility of the comprehensive assessments and plans developed by the NEP's 21 management conferences would be enhanced by more conceitedly applying estuarine water quality standards to the integration of segmented management programs and by devoting greater attention to the socioeconomic dimensions of alternative means for attaining estuarine water quality standards.…”