RE: Decisions Suited to Collaborative Efforts

[Ken Jones <kjones@gmied.org>]

My name is Ken Jones and I am the Director of the Green Mountain Institute for Environmental Democracy. We work with many collaborative projects around the country and I would like to respond to Greg's observations about the Decisions Suited to Collaborative Efforts.

In order to give participants in a project a sense of the direction of the effort and a vision of the possible outcomes, it is sometimes useful to identify the environmental outcomes that the project is attempting to accomplish. In this way, you can also identify the individuals and organizations that have a stake in seeing through the resulting project activities. These stakeholders are the ones that will receive the benefits from accomplishing improved environmental outcomes. 

At the same time, a project should consider the types of activities that may be necessary to accomplish the desired outcomes. From this list, a separate set of responsible actors is identified that will need to take some action in order for the project to accomplish its vision.

With this set of vision elements, activities, and stakeholders, a general set of observations is available to consider the role of collaboration in meeting the project goals. When the individuals who will benefit from the project outcomes are the same as the individuals responsible for taking action, participation is relatively easy and the prospects for success are linked to the relative self interest of participants. In the more interesting case, those that will receive the benefits are different from those that must act. The challenge of collaborative processes is to consider whether any linked activities can be designed that will provide benefits to those necessary to act.

The reason that I raise this model is that there are some projects where the individuals that receive the benefits are different from those that act and there are not good prospects for building linked activities that provide sufficient benefit to the responsible actors. In these cases, the standard public policy path is the non-collaborative rule and regulation that assigns responsibility to a set of actors that will not receive the benefits. This policy path works and it may be useful for projects to consider whether this is going to be their ultimate project direction before pursuing the challenging assignment of collaboration.

And yes, I think that this model and set of observations is important for the overall EPA policy on involvement because of the need to identify when a decision is seeking collaborative solutions and when it is complying with a law that has already assigned social benefits to an action requiring the action of a responsible actor.

Thanks for listening.