Is collaborative governance a legit model to solve public land disputes?
It took eight years for the diverse stakeholders in Owyhee County, Idaho, to resolve their differences. It took eight years of monthly meetings, seasonal field trips, arguments, hand-wringing and consensus-building to arrive at a solution that worked for everybody—and nobody.
But the “everybody wins when nobody wins” concept is an integral part of compromise, which is the central pillar of a concept called collaborative governance.
Collaborative governance has emerged in the last few decades as a response to the high cost and politicization of regulation, and as an alternative to the outsized role special interest groups have played in public processes. [1] The convergence of these dynamics has produced an environment brimming with adversarial tension.
The collaborative political process dramatized in my mystery, Deception at the Diamond D Ranch, is based on the real processes that have been used to resolve public land disputes throughout the United States. While I used the fictional process in my novel to give a bad actor a platform to manipulate their peers, the fact is that collaborative governance models have helped solve some longstanding challenges on public lands in the West.
Owyhee County shows how collaborative governance works
In southwest Idaho where part of Deception at the Diamond D Ranch takes place, legislation called the Owyhee Initiative was passed by Congress in 2009 following an eight-year experiment in collaborative governance. Owyhee Initiative participants did not imagine a new a national park as my book’s characters did, but they implemented innovative strategies that continue to shape public land management in southwest Idaho today.
In the words of participants, the Owyhee Initiative is “a consensus agreement reached by a number of national, regional, and local stakeholders to promote the ecological and economic health within Idaho’s Owyhee County.” [2]
The agreement was crafted by local ranchers, county representatives, conservationists, outfitters, the Shoshone-Paiute Tribe and others to address longstanding public land issues in southwest Idaho.
Specifically, the diverse people participating in the collaborative governance process in Owyhee County accomplished the following:
• Regulation of off-road vehicles,
• Permanent protection for wilderness areas,
• Permanent protection for rivers,
• Voluntary livestock grazing retirements,
• Preservation of tribal and cultural values.
The Owyhee Initiative agreement was hammered out through collaborative governance over nearly a decade, but it only provided a framework to resolve the longstanding rifts between people who had been deeply divided for decades. Once they found common ground and forged agreement, it took political leadership to make it into law.
The Owyhee Initiative Implementation Act was introduced in 2009 by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and that’s what provides the legal vehicle needed to implement and enforce the agreement.
Why do public land management practices fall short?
Collaborative governance by definition distinguishes itself from alternative patterns of policy making. In particular, scholars have worked to differentiate the concept from governance styles coined adversarialism and managerialism.
Adversarialism encourages dispute and results in a winner-take-all form of management. Managerialism is implemented by agencies making unilateral decisions through closed decision processes, typically relying on agency experts to make decisions.
“In collaborative governance,” write the authors of the white paper, Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice, “stakeholders will often have an adversarial relationship to one another, but the goal is to transform adversarial relationships into more cooperative ones … and although managerial agencies may take account of stakeholder perspectives in their decision making and may go so far as to consult directly with stakeholders, collaborative governance requires that stakeholders be directly included in the decision-making process.”
Why collaborative governance isn’t a sure bet
While collaborative governance efforts in places like Owyhee County have succeeded, there are also examples of failed collaborative governance experiments.
The authors of Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice reviewed 137 examples, and they didn’t all succeed.
“The term ‘collaborative governance’ promises a sweet reward,” they write. “It seems to promise that if we govern collaboratively, we may avoid the high costs of adversarial policy making, expand democratic participation, and even restore rationality to public management.”
However, there are “…problems that collaborative strategies encounter as they pursue these valued outcomes: powerful stakeholders manipulate the process; public agencies lack real commitment to collaboration; and distrust becomes a barrier to good faith negotiation.”
And so it was in my novel where I used a landscape where a grassroots collaborative governance effort actually succeeded. I built my own fictional collaborative and used powerful stakeholders to manipulate the process.
There’s no story without tension, after all, and I’m proud of the tension I built in my mystery. And, simultaneously, my hat is off to the men and women who succeeded in Owyhee County.
Their success at setting aside differences to work together in pursuit of common goals is a model for all of us, whether in the workplace, in our personal relationships or in the policy arena.
The authors of Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice” underscore this in their conclusion:
“Bitter adversaries have sometimes learned to engage in productive discussions; public managers have developed more fruitful relationships with stakeholders; and sophisticated forms of collective learning and problem solving have been developed.”
Citations
Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice. Chris Ansell, Alison Gash. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Volume 18, Issue 4, 13 November 2007. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/mum032
What is the Owyhee Initiative. Owyhee Initiative website. Accessed 31 October 2021. https://owyhee-initiative.squarespace.com/