Collaborative Water Management Faces Tough Demands, Scrutiny

Kirk Emerson, Director, U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution of the Morris K. Udall Foundation contributed this Guest View

Over the past ten years, collaborative resource management has spread like Buffelgrass throughout the Western United States. Integrating stakeholder input and representation into natural resource planning and management activities is becoming more and more common, particularly for watershed and water resource issues.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Arizona, where efforts to engage public and private interests in water-related partnerships, consortia, and advisory groups abound. (See text box) Collaborative water resource management will become even more important as we face the uncertain but increasingly evident challenges that climate change will bring. The current 12-year drought is a likely harbinger of tougher times ahead, making water policy and planning decisions all the more difficult and the need for adaptive management and public engagement even greater. Compounding these challenges, of course, will be the future requirements of the growing Arizona population that is expected to double by 2050.

These increasingly stressful environmental and demographic conditions will demand much more of collaborative water management in the future than has been expected or delivered thus far. Increasing competition for scarcer water resources will require tougher public choices, more timely decision making, and more effective conflict management. Collaborative processes will need to be more effectively institutionalized; stronger legal and financial incentives put in place to engage public and private interests in productive deliberations. Collaborative processes will require the ongoing commitment of public and private leadership to turn stakeholder dialogue into effective collaborative governance.

As our current experiences with collaborative resource management unfold, researchers, managers, and decision makers are beginning to take a harder look at collaboration and ask some important basic questions:

Is collaboration a good thing? The challenges we face in managing water resources in Arizona and throughout the arid Southwest present strong rationales for working together across divided watersheds, interests, and jurisdictions. “Co-laboring” can lead to leveraging combined financial, political and institutional resources to assure adequate water supplies and distribution. All the sectoral interests in water do need to be treated in an equitable and practical manner for the well-being of our communities and our economies. And we need to assure the lifeblood of our natural systems and wildlife habitats is secured in restored riparian systems and adequate instream flows. Hence, collaboration, it would seem, in any form, would enhance our water resource management practices.

Most people would consider collaboration, like motherhood and apple pie, to have a positive value, on its face. To argue against engaging stakeholders in public deliberations over our future water resources seems rather old-fashioned today. Yet it is still legitimate to question the extent to which corporate and non-governmental interests should influence public decision making about water resources. It is still important to articulate the normative value and limits of collaboration.

In part, this question raises the definitional problem. Some stretch the term “collaboration” to describe a myriad of joint efforts, to the point of having very little meaning at all. While others see it laden with code for local control or decentralized federal authority. Some suggest we may have conflated adaptive management with collaborative, consensus decision making. With such instability in our terminology, it is often not clear what to expect from collaborative resource management.

If indeed collaboration is generally a good thing, it may not always be the right thing at the right time. Determining when to engage public and private interests in what kind and degree of joint effort is critical. The more practical questions become: what should the role of other governmental and non-governmental stakeholders be in this collaborative effort and how can we maximize the value of their engagement and reach the best informed and practical management decisions?

Is collaboration working? This is an essential question and its answer will guide future investment in collaborative resource management. There are conceptual and methodological challenges that make answering this important question difficult. But researchers are making headway and a number of empirical studies are contributing to our understanding of how collaborative management processes work. There is growing agreement on multiple measures of successful collaborative outcomes, such as better, more informed decisions and improved working relationships among parties. How to measure collaboration itself — its essential attributes and whether they were present and to what degree — remains very challenging given the large variation in processes and contexts. This is important because we need to measure both performance outcomes and those factors that contribute to performance in order to make process improvements.

At the applied level, it can be most useful for public managers and the engaged parties to set forth their expectations and measures of success at the outset. Reaching agreement on the objectives of the collaborative effort can not only make subsequent evaluations easier and more relevant, but will focus the group on more effective deliberations in accordance with shared expectations.
Is collaboration enough? Collaborative processes are sometimes viewed as sufficient unto themselves: bring people together and they will be able to work out their differences and reach win-win consensus agreements. Our evaluation research at the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution suggests otherwise. There are important factors that indeed influence outcomes when people are seeking agreement or resolution of a dispute. Among these factors are having all the right parties at the table and drawing on the skills of a trusted third-party.

But much more is at work in assuring successful collaborative resource management. These are not isolated processes, producing self-implementing solutions. None of this happens outside of existing legal, regulatory, and political contexts. No existing authorities can be usurped or compromised. Without regard for or integration with covering procedures or jurisdictions, such as those required by the National Environmental Policy Act or a court of law, any agreements reached have no guarantee of being acted on, monitored and enforced. Without adequate financial or institutional incentives to negotiate and work together, no one needs to come to or stay at the table. Without skillful leadership from public decision makers as well as from the represented interests, agreements are rarely forged.

The key challenge in practice is how to design effective engagement of contending parties appropriate for a particular situation that is able to produce more effective public decision making. This is particularly important for long standing collaborative efforts that require careful organizational frameworks, representational arrangements and decision rules.

These and other questions are being asked of the first generation of collaborative water resource management initiatives. This increased scrutiny will serve us well as we learn from these collaborative experiments to meet the challenges ahead in managing our water resources in Arizona together.
The opinions expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the official view of the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution or the Morris K. Udall Foundation.

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