Chris from NERR and UNE, who introduced the conference, is up again to present her work on collaborative learning for stakeholder engagement. She has been working on developing a series of social science tools to address the barriers to watershed management plan implementation, as well as, ways to ensure that science is applied to policy and management, and that governments and municipalities are adopting best management practice.
Her project was developed in response to a finding an obstacle to implementing ecosystem based management is getting policy makers to adopt the products that NGO and think tanks were developing. For example, NERR creates products based on science to be put to use in land and coastal management. However, because of the disconnect between NGOs and agencies and the different way they approach problem solving, governments and municipalities were not adopting these products. To create a "bridge" between these two entities Chris developed the Coastal Training Program. The Program, designed to facilitate collaboration between the private and public entities, included an assessment, collaborative activity, implementation and evaluation phase.
The first step in the assessment phase was to determine: (1) who the target audience was; and (2) what issues need to be address. Ultimately, Chris decided that water quality was the issue that she wanted to focus on and that municipal officials were the target audience.
Chris notes that her research was action research, i.e. research driven by a need or desire to solve a problem, rather than the scientific method.
To get an understanding of what perspectives and values each participant associated with water Chris spent hours interviewing stakeholders. These interviews produced some interesting results. For example, the interviews revealed that there are six core values shared by all stakeholder:
1. water is the basis of life
2. nature "makes" water
3. water is landscape
4. water is a resource to use
5. water is a commodity
6. depend on water to take away societies waste
In addition, Chris found that everyone from scientists to municipal officials to citizens understood the threats to water and framed these threats to water in terms of loss.
Chris explains that the information from the interview played an important role in the next step in the process: designing and implementing a water management plan (Save Our Children's Water). Because there needed to be a wide variety of people with varying expertise at the table identifying the stakeholders common goals allowed stakeholders with varying interests to engage in a collaborative effort. Putting these common goals to use Chris' plan included a vision and mission that was the same mission as most comprehensive plans and used the common values to identify issues that stakeholders could come to a consensus on. In addition, successful collaboration required making conflicts explicit through dialogue and deliberation, developing a uniform vocabulary, and identifying and addressing the economic consequences of land use.
Chris asks everyone to think about the speakers we have heard to day and think about whether or not the elements of ecosystem management had been incorporated into the projects?
What was the goal of your project?
Steve Burns, York Community Development Director: The goal that drove my work was protecting clean water.
Pete Solovinsky, Maine Geologic Society: coastal resiliency, tying together ecological, economic, and social issues. We are starting to work with the Muskie School to incorporate economics into our research.
Chris says Lindwood Pendalton is an an economist who may be coming to Maine to do project to help us develop an understanding of how ecosystem management impacts economics
How frequently does economics come up when you are doing conservation planning with municipalities?
Judy Colby-George, Spatial Alternatives: It is always in the background. People do not want to save everything because it is not economically feasible.
With Save Our Children's Water we are gauging our progress based on getting certain things done, not the ultimate water quality. We need to be developing a link to the end environmental benefit. Right now NERR has a water quality monitoring project, but it is not linked to the Save our Children's Water Project. So right now we are building the collaborative potential, but are missing the links as of now.
What environmental outcomes do you have?
Pete Sloivinsky, Maine Geologic Society: Protect private property and the integrity of the wetland ecosystem
John Sowles, Dept. of Natural Resource: What we need to work on is getting the municipalities involved and maybe incorporating the states water quality standards into the outcome goal. Right now we have measurable goals based on historic data.
Talk about the process of agreeing to the numbers
John Sowles, Dept. Of Marine Resources: We came up with the numbers with an advisory group, we have not yet gone to the public. It was dialogue- a consensus type of thing and it is flexible. We did have base standards, we were lucky enough to have historical data that created a base for us to work with.
It is important to set attainable goals, but these goals should also be flexible-able to adapt to changes in the environment.
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