Abstract
With the contemporary collaborative turn in planning, many books and peer-reviewed articles assess instances of collaborative management of natural resources. In The Challenges of Collaboration in Environmental Governance: Barriers and Responses, the editors’ stated goal is to include “a diversity of experiences and scholarship focused on collaboration approaches to environmental governance” and show “that collaboration has rapidly evolved from an emerging concept to a leading practice and paradigm” (1).
This edited book has seventeen chapters and twenty-nine authors/coauthors with affiliations at sixteen U.S., seven Dutch, and six Australian institutions. While some chapters are theoretical explorations, others examine cases of collaboration for environmental projects in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, and India. The authors hail from geography, urban planning, political science, business administration, public policy, public administration, and natural resource management.
The editors organized the book around three themes: collaboration, challenges, and governance. The editors define collaboration as “working across boundaries, a regional focus and public consultation” (7) and discuss its challenges, limitations, and weaknesses. The editors define the concept of governance as collective action—whether from formal government and/or community networks. Governance can also include a wider community-based perspective in which stakeholders are decision makers alongside formal government. The editors’ intent is to inform practitioners, academics, and researchers on which collaborative governance strategies work (and why), which ones do not work, and which ones need further development.
The book has six sections: Theory and Context (four chapters), Problems and Context (three chapters), Policy, Politics, and Power (three chapters), Organizations, Stakeholders, and Governance (two chapters), Process and Participation (three chapters), and Conclusions (one chapter). The chapters in the Theory and Context section examine collaboration from theoretical standpoints in planning, environmental studies, and public administration. The Problems and Context chapters are about collaborations undertaken for environmental work, for example, salinity science in Australia, water management for climate change adaptation in the Netherlands, and the Healthy Waterways program in Australia. The chapters in the Policy, Politics, and Power section address collaborative governance from the perspectives of natural resource management, political science, and business administration. The chapters in the Organizations, Stakeholders, and Governance section investigate cross-boundary collaboration within the Indian Forest Service and floodplain management across several Dutch governmental agencies. The Process and Participation chapters report on research undertaken with community participation and a, narrative, that is, storytelling, as a device to learn about collaborative learning in communities, and collaborative partnerships involving Indigenous hunting cultures in the Australian outback.
Chapter 7, “Collaborative Governance—Does It Work for Climate Change Adaptation? Insights from the Dutch Delta Program,” by van Buuren and van Popering-Verkerk, examines the Dutch approach to climate change adaptation, using secondary analysis of a previous study supplemented by interviews with thirty key players in the program. The contributors found that the collaborative approach shows promise but takes considerable time and money.
Chapter 11, “The Role of Power in Collaborative Governance,” authored by Purdy, discusses two kinds of power: episodic power, which is derived from interactions among persons, and structural power, which is tied to the places of actors in the social order. Two resource governance approaches are distinguished. One governance approach, rational-legal governance, depends on the powers of regulatory authority or private property rights. The other governance approach, collaborative processes, is typified by political economist Eleanor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize–winning work on common pool resource management. Ostrom’s research recognized how important collective choice arrangements are, as well as acknowledgment by upper-level managers of community self-determination. As Purdy states, “Every collaboration is, at some level, about power. . . . Power is a perceived quality that emerges from contextual and relational dynamics” (246).
Chapter 14, “From the Table to the Street: Strategies for Building a More Inclusive Collaborative Process,” by Rongerude and Sandoval, begins with the premise that planners must recognize that the commonly used table metaphor includes inviting stakeholders, especially marginalized groups, to the table but that it is not exactly the same as inclusive collaboration, which involves people working together to involve the perspectives of underserved populations in the community. Rongerude and Sandoval devised a four-step process, called justice collaborative practice, to achieve inclusive collaboration: identifying emerging stakeholder groups, using research to learn more about marginalized groups within the local context, starting with the grasstops (i.e., social service and cultural organizations that work with marginalized local groups), and using a variety of formats and locations to engage in dialogue. They also argue that collaborative practitioners must think more about “power, structural inequality, and racism” (333) and about how collaboration can and does contribute to a more just society.
In chapter 15, “The Challenge of Transformative Learning: Mining Practice Stories to Study Collaboration and Dispute Resolution Strategies,” Forester advances a powerful, well-written argument for reversing the design process in professional planning. Forester maintains that the design process starts with the planner asking the local community what they want, rather than the professional planner presenting a design to a community and then defending it. Indeed, the values and interests of the community should be the foundation, and storytelling by the community members and also by the reflective planner are ways to uncover these. Based on his extensive research in this area, he suggests that analyzing oral accounts of planning practitioners’ experiences with collaborative planning can yield rich insights into work with communities resulting in transformative learning. The learning transforms both the planner and the community members, such as residents, property owners, and merchants. Forester’s respect for and innovative work with collaborative processes for dispute resolution serves as part of the groundwork for his argument for bottom-up planning. Forester advocates for the use of oral history centered on the project—having people narrate their own story and using “how” instead of “why” questions in interviews. With the latter, it is not “What did you think . . . ?” but rather “How did you handle, or respond . . . ?” (349). He proposes three processes with fundamentally different roles for planners and practitioners. The first is conversation and dialogue, which require a skilled facilitator. The second one is debate, which needs a skilled moderator. And the third is negotiation, which needs a skilled mediator. The result can be rich practice stories grounded in collaborative communities and the collaborative challenges inherent in those.
In the concluding chapter, “The Challenges of Collaborative Governance: Towards a New Research Agenda,” Margerum, Robinson, and Genskow argue that there are collaborative deficiencies based on two trends that have prevailed in research. One trend is that the vast majority of researchers tend to stay within a domestic or regional agenda, not comparative international work. The other trend is that researchers often stay within their disciplinary home, rather than reaching out across disciplines.
Margerum, Robinson, and Genskow argue that a collaborative approach in environmental governance needs to succeed to make a difference. Yet how to measure success comes down to community involvement and achievement of community environmental goals. On the former, this chapter’s contributors rate efforts of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and communities as positive or as having mixed results. Community environmental goals are more difficult to measure because of long time frames needed for results and because of more nebulous processes, partly due to the nature of the consensus process. Rather than seeing conflict as a negative, the contributors believe that it is a precondition for consensus: “Conflict is the prelude to consensus and debate about the efficacy of collaboration is rarely fully resolved” (2).
This volume plays a valuable role as the contributors represent a wider than usual array of disciplinary perspectives, evaluating applications of collaboration in environmental governance for projects in their respective countries. The book’s topic of addressing the shortfalls within collaborative governance is opportune, especially when it comes to how to represent and include disempowered populations in a time of declining public budgets
The book has several strengths. The contributors hail from a diverse range of disciplines and pay careful attention to detail. Also, this book is organized well, which allows the reader to find specific chapters relevant to an issue. One weakness of the book is the narrow geographic scope of the case studies discussed in the chapters. Most chapters focus on three countries in the developed world; only one chapter reaches beyond, focusing on collaboration involving the Indian Forest Service. Another weakness is that a few chapters state the obvious, such as ending with a statement about existing power relations being important and that further research is needed to understand structural aspects of power affecting collaboration. In sum, this book is of interest to those who are new to collaborative governance and those wanting fresh perspectives on this topic.