Community-Based Collaboration: Bridging Socio-Ecological Research and Practice

1 The Community-Based Collaborative Movement in the United States

1 The Community-Based Collaborative Movement in the United States Karen E. Firehock This chapter provides a brief description of the community-based collaborative (CBC) movement in the United States. It addresses what collaboration is, what CBCs are, why CBCs emerged in the United States, how they both solve and engender conflict, what CBCs contribute, how outcomes are measured, and what CBCs mean for environmental governance. This chapter thus sets the definitional and historical stage for later chapters in the book dealing with community knowledge, how CBCs can take an adaptive management approach, how they govern, building effective collaboratives , the theory of collaboration, and finally, the promise of collaboration and what the movement means for the future. It is fair to question why community-based collaboration even matters. Why does the phenomenon warrant the attention of federal agencies, state and local governments, scientists, politicians, environmental and civic groups, and community members? The contributors to this book suggest that CBCs are worthy of attention primarily because they represent a quiet revolution in American environmental governance. They provide a unique forum for addressing complex environmental problems, a forum that is likely to become increasingly important in the future. CBCs may offer the best hope in cases where traditional resource management has failed because they bring together parties with diverse perspectives, knowledge, and interests, and they often include groups that have the capacity to implement solutions. What Is Community-Based Collaboration? Many terms have been used to describe the work of collaborative groups. Among them are collaborative stewardship (Burchfield 1998), collaborative environmental management (Randolph and Rich 1998), community-based con- 2 Karen E. Firehock servation (Snow 1998, 254), collaborative conservation (Brick 1998), communitybased environmental protection (U.S. EPA 1997), and grassroots environmental management (Weber 2000). Cooperative conservation is yet another term applied to these efforts at the 2005 White House Conference, “Faces and Places of Cooperative Conservation.” Since these descriptions also often include the notion of collaboration, it is worthwhile including a definition of that term. Potapchuck and Polk (1994) propose as a definition a locally based process in which parties who have a stake in the outcome of a problem (stakeholders) come together in a structured forum to engage in joint decision making. Gray (1989) defines collaboration as the joint ownership of decisions and collective responsibility for achieving the jointly agreed-upon objectives. Some groups, such as the Policy Consensus Initiative (2010), have set standards for collaboration. The Policy Consensus Initiative suggests determining whether a group is truly collaborative based on the existence of the following standards: • Jointly agreed-upon indicators of success or milestones for measuring progress. • Mechanisms to monitor whether participants are contributing to meeting the jointly agreed-upon objectives. • Jointly developed strategies and actions that spell out commitments, taking into account the differences among the participating groups and individuals. • Contractual agreements or other provisions that describe roles and responsibilities for carrying out jointly agreed-upon objectives. • Evidence of resource sharing or exchanges. • Mechanisms for regular exchange of information and feedback about joint progress toward objectives. This chapter adopts the definition of community-based collaboration advanced by the Community-Based Collaboratives Research Consortium (CBCRC) at a conference held in 1999 (Moote et al. 2000). The consortium ’s definition of a CBC is as follows: “(1) A group that has been convened voluntarily from within the local community to focus on a resource management issue(s) or planning involving public lands or publicly owned or regulated resources whose management impacts the physical, environmental , and/or economic health of the local community; (2) Was brought together by a shared desire to influence the protection and use of natural resources through recommendations or direct actions that will impact the THE COMMUNITY-BASED COLLABORATIVE MOVEMENT 3 management of the resource; (3) Has membership that includes a broad array of interests, some of which may be in conflict; and (4) Utilizes a decision-making process that requires participation by local stakeholders” (Moote et al. 2000, 2). As suggested by this definition, what makes a CBC unique is not simply the sharing of decision making or the monitoring of outcomes but the diversity of the collaborative’s membership. This diversity can aid the collaborative in problem solving. Since CBCs are made up of representatives of diverse stakeholder groups, participants in CBCs often are able to lend unique perspectives to framing problems and solutions. They may include fishers or ranchers, scientists, federal agencies, resource managers...