Whole Systems

COLLABORATION

Goal Setting

Funding Management and Restoration Regional Context

Monitoring and Adapting Optimism for the Future

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Collaboration among various agencies, private interests, and the public at large in the Sierra is the most significant principle that emerges from SNEP strategies. As they collaborate, agencies, private landowners, and the public begin to function as interacting parts of a whole system, and the number of ways to balance use and environmental quality increases exponentially. Collaboration may also encourage private landowners to innovate and to develop creative approaches that will accomplish broad ecological goals in advance of regulations. The mix of lands and resources in the Sierra, including intermingled private and public land, required SNEP to assess ecological conditions at appropriate scales and develop strategies at similar scales. For example, accounting for cumulative watershed effects required that solutions be addressed by all watershed stakeholders. These examples suggest that actual strategies must also extend across property or jurisdictional boundaries.
Successful collaboration requires a mix of expertise and considerable institutional support. Mobilization of people and resources and coordination of activities may require collaboration at a local scale, but as activities engage more technical, financial, or legal issues, specialized expertise usually found in state or federal agencies will be required. Collaboration will succeed to the extent that it receives ongoing support from top management and feeds directly into existing budgets, business processes, and agency missions.
Collaboration springs out of perceived mutual interest. State and federal agencies and other interests have experience in collaborating, especially in response to disasters and threats to life and property. A potential for improvements in service and structure of incentives may also lead to collaboration. In the absence of other threats, avoiding potential regulation remains one of the most powerful incentives to collaborating. Decentralizing control and restructuring agencies to focus on clients may greatly enhance effective collaboration.
Careful restructuring of natural resource laws could encourage participation, thereby reducing the temptation to withdraw and increasing the effectiveness of collaboration. The incentive for collaboration diminishes if alternatives provide apparently quicker, albeit incomplete, resolution for individual participants. Bilateral negotiation rather than full collaboration, for example, probably will lead to only partial solutions, perceptions of bad-faith bargaining, and a retreat to adjudication.
Collaboration will collapse if any of the parties attempts to dominate. Like any negotiation, successful collaboration is based on mutual respect for the rights and equity of all participants. This concept is particularly clear in the case of private landowners, for whom equity is generally expressed in terms of land values. It applies as well to public agencies and takes the form of legal authority, budgets, and scope of action. For members of the public, the form it takes is less established but no less important.

GOAL SETTING

The development of goals is fundamentally a social and political process rather than a technical one. SNEPs contribution lies in defining important dimensions of goalsfor instance, old growth, aquatic biodiversity, community well-beingrather than the goals themselves. Identification of specific goals requires active participation of all stakeholders. Although the need for goals to organize human activity may appear self-evident, the barriers to convening and managing the development of ecosystem goals are enormous. Convening such a process requires common acceptance of the whole ecological and social system, joint understanding of how the system works, and a shared sense of the importance of the values at stake. Lake Tahoe is a good example in that its value is tangible to people, it is related to its watershed through water and sediment flows, and it has loss of clarity as the preeminent problem. Other issues that have a central ecological role and impact on economic value, such as the erosion of biodiversity and fire, may also bring stakeholders together.
Public agencies can incorporate collaborative goal setting into their land-management mission. They are already able to contribute technical, legal, and financial expertise to the goal-setting process, and they are also capable of representing and interpreting rangewide and national perspectives. They can also help to convene the full range of stakeholders needed to address issues, ownerships, and jurisdictional and even cultural boundaries. This process may involve trades and negotiations among participants. In so doing, agencies would not direct the goal-setting activities but rather, within legal and practical limits, participate in a manner that allows stakeholders to achieve common understanding and agreement.