Wicked Problems and Cooperation

Today I reviewed the Rittel and Webber 1973 piece on planning and wicked problems as well as skimming through Craig Thomas' Bureaucratic Landscapes which details the unmandated cooperation between agencies to increase and protect biodiversity in California. Both provided some valuable insight.

The Wicked Problem piece is a highly regarded paper that develops a concept that is used very frequently today, especially in environmental management circles. The concept is built out of the lack of solutions and whole-society utility failures of the great society and war on poverty programs. Turns out we could not engineer our way out of these issues. Many of society's problems are beyond the capacity of mechanical solution. Simply defining the problem and locating it become highly controversial and invoke challenges and conflict.

One source of these problems is social heterogeneity. Advanced societies have not conformed to a standard set of values and preferences. Instead their differences have increased. Many different publics exist within a society with different preferences and beliefs. When a problem is shown to have many possible solutions, and those solutions depend upon the definition and location of the problem, and the outcomes of the solutions themselves are hard to measure or observe and are rife with normative assessment, the true/false dichotomy to choose solutions in engineering is replaced with a good/bad value-laden one. These values are fought over between the publics and professional administrators and planners cannot be deferred to for technical solution.

Fire is definitely one of these problems, as is biodiversity. We don't want fire, but without fire fire is worse. We want endangered species but we also want socioeconomic activity and accessibility to our public lands. These situations of tradeoffs between different definitions, locations and solutions of problems are wicked indeed. Collaboratives are described as better ways to handle these problems. But as Koontx and Thomas point out, this does not mean that they actually are.

The one other interesting point I wish to share at this point from the Thomas book is the declaration that mandated coordination is less effective than unmandated coordination. This question is interesting in that in Colorado community wildfire prevention plans (CWPPs) are mandated at the county level along with a collaborative approach. This might be an interesting experiment for investigating the difference between mandated and nonmandated collaboration. The constitutional level rules about collaboration can influence outcomes further down the line.

Yaffee et al 1996

I won't title posts like this, a citation,unless  the article or book is of particular import. Yaffee et al is one of those pieces that plays such a major role in the literature that I want to flag when I write about it. This article is actually a report for the federal government on the implementation of ecosystem management.  What the authors found when researching this new management strategy is that collaboration plays a major role in what managers consider success. This is one of the first timezone the environmental policy literature where formal collaboration appears as a primary driver of success and helped prompt the developments in studying watersheds and estuary collaboratives that were the empirical setting of many of the articles I have discussed.

This article is so early it does little more than describe the results of a survey. In doing so it establishes a.nice set of concepts that may or may not be connected in successful ecosystem management.

In order to understand how ecosystem management and collaboratives are connected I need to talk about the former. Ecosystem management attempts to correct the historical tendency of separate management activities being redundant, interfering with one another or negating each other. By looking at a issue or management activity's target as part of an entire ecosystem this piecemeal, one dimensionally optimized, narrow scope approach could be changed. When managers start to think that way it becomes clear that traditional job, division, organization or even sector cannot anticipate the breadth of implications of many management activities. Collaboration between individual actors, agencies and sectors becomes an important component of successful management.

This shows how the emergence of collaboratives is tied to problems too big for traditional hierarchical separate management. One of the proposed causes of collaboratives is problems that cannot be addressed by an existing entity even while that entity has responsibility to solve it. Other causes include the existence of networks or sponsors encouraging collaboration and the environment is particularly rife with uncertainty. Bryson, Crosby  Sand Stone in the previously mentioned 2006 PAR issue propose these three situations as precursors to collaboration.

This approach of what causes collaboration is different than the approach of Koontz and Thomas take in this same issue. They ask if given collaboration as a management choice when should it be taken? This prompts an investigation into the differences between the forms of management to see where outcomes improve with collaboration.

These three articles along with others not mentioned here have brought me to the point of asking the question, "How do different causes leading to collaboration (uncertainty, mutisector failure or sponsorship and existing networks) result in different forms of collaboration? And in turn what are the different outputs and outcomes from these different forms of collaboration?"

This will need much revision but this overall investigation into the process of understanding collaborative environmental management and governance may prove quite promising.

Best Laid Plans

I took a short aside to prepare some data for a paper I am coauthoring with Edella Schlager and Tanya Heikkila for the 2012 APSA conference. While I intended to keep investigating Swimming Upstream instead I found a new set of readings that are as valuable as the core readings from that book I already covered. 

On suggestion from Kirk Emerson I am working through a 2006 Special Issue on Collaborative Public Management of Public Administration Review. This collection tackles both theoretical and practical matters of collaboratives, especially matters of government. This issue is the original publication of the subject  of one of my earliest posts, the Koontz and Thomas article on outputs of collaboratives.

This issue has a lot of very closely similar yet still competing conceptualizations of collaboratives. The definition used in the introduction by the editorial team is 

Collaborative public management is a concpet that describes the process of facilitating and operating in multi-organizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved or easily solved by single organizations. Collaborative means to co-labor, to cooperate to achieve common goals, working across boundaries in multisector relationships. Cooperation is based on the value of reciprocity.

This is differentiated from participatory governance:

Participatory governance is the active involvement of citizens in government decision making. Governance means to steer the process that influences decisions and actions within the private public and civic sectors. 

This is a very different distinction than has been suggested elsewhere. The first is implied to be about implementation. Problems are actively solved with multiple organizations. This process of solving problems then has its own set of governing arrangements. Therefore collaborative governance can have participatory and nonparticipatory governance and participatory governance can oversee collaborative and noncollaborative management. 

This division seems to sync with the operational/collective choice/constitutional level divisions from Ostrom and IAD work. The actual management is operational. The governance is collective choice. What makes this messy is that a lot of collaboratives tend to set their own rules while simultaneously engaging in management activities at an individual and collective level. This distinction in other parts of the literature seems to be one of process versus outputs. Questions of how collaboratives govern themselves are about process and what they do operationally is a matter of outputs. This doesn't adequately address the situation because there are aspects of process that are framed by governance rules at a higher level that should not be confounded. 

This set of articles sets up a very nice conversation about collaboratives and where the literature is. I am actively seeing some hypotheses and research questions emerging and I am hoping that I can start posting some of those very soon. More PAR tomorrow. 

Swimming Upstream 2

Today we look at two empirical tests of the theories from an earlier chapter of Swimming Upstream by Sabatier et al. These two chapters focus on beliefs and social capital. The first is by Mark Lubell and the second is by William Leach and Paul Sabatier.

These tests do not emerge as clearly as claimed from the theory chapter that precedes it. Lubell's chapter looks at transaction costs, from the institutional rational choice theories of collaboratives, but heads straight down the road of beliefs and the advocacy coalitions framework. It seems to be attempting to find some common ground between them but mostly relies on theories of the ACF. The hypothesized model is built in a way that suggests that factors that reduce transaction costs lead to an interaction with policy beliefs that in turn influence secondary collective choice beliefs. It is these collective choice beliefs, such as the level of scientific uncertainty and understanding, trust and dominance of the agenda, that in turn influences behavior and agreements between stakeholders.

Transaction costs -> collective choice beliefs
Policy beliefs -> collective choice beliefs
But also
Transaction costs -> policy beliefs, but not really.

But it is only in the case of disagreement about the watershed that transaction costs might "mediate" the effects of policy beliefs. See, the policy beliefs are not going to change as a result of collaborative arrangements. Their influence over collective choice beliefs however may be influenced. You don't trust people with whom you don't share policy beliefs. This is the devil shift. This shift might be mediated by institutional arrangements but not overcome.

So where does that fit into the mix of theories presented? Lubell argues it is a hybrid of TCE and ACF. This is the basis of the collective action belief. This hybrid seems to oversimplify TCE. The argument is simply that certain institutional arrangements create lower transaction costs for certain situations. Collaboratives may be a better fit than not collaboratives and therefore have lower transaction costs. This will result in stakeholders believing they have lower transaction costs. There is no variation in the collaboratives, only presence and absence. This is a valid approach of course. However it is rather limited in actually using transaction cost theory. There is nothing about the collaboratives as institutional arrangements that make them have lower transaction costs. They just fit better. This leaves the article pretty much only looking at how the presence of a collaborative results in potentially different beliefs. This is just the ACF, as the ACF has a spot for constraints and resources of subsystem actors. The stakeholders are subsystem actors and the presence or absence of a collaborative is just a different set of resources. This may be because of transaction costs, but we don't know because they aren't measured or specified.

The second article is not an attempt to hybridize theories. It goes right after theories of social capital and how collaboratives might create it. It is well done certainly and I can see why it is highly recognized in the literature. The major question is one of endogeneity: does trust lead to success or does success lead to trust? It is an interesting model that shows the result of age has an influence, demonstrating the possibility of a repeated prisoner's dilemma or other game-theoretic model. The collaborative creates a space in which initial attempts to come to an agreement result in reciprocity which builds into trust. The necessity of action prompts the initial reciprocity and then later trust allows for the possibility of more complex agreements. This is not necessarily what is being argued in this social capital theory but there are certainly similarities and I would like to build on them.

I am going to continue with Swimming Upstream for a few more days and hope to be able to start generating some alternative theories and ideas that I will put up as I go along.

Swimming Upstream 1

Today I cracked open the book Swimming Upstream by Sabatier, Focht, Lubell, Trachtenberg, Vedilitz and Matlock. It is an applied social sciences look into watershed collaboratives and how they look and work. It is heavily cited as one of the summative works on collaboratives and trust building. I wanted to see how this work perceives and specifies collaboratives and what theoretical approaches the authors take. Luckily these two items are easy to find.

On the first matter the collaborative is not clearly defined conceptually outside of the actual observable watershed collaborative partnership. This emerges from the basis of the research being specifically on this type of entity rather than on general theory building. The collaborative here has some clear distinguishing characteristics that tie in nicely with other definitions:

• Informal
• Include government and nongovernment actors
• Develop management plans

• Long-term (5 to 10 year affairs)

• Little legal authority
• Forum for negotiation where outputs are turned over to member agencies for formal legal action

• Complement and transform traditional agencies. Do not replace these agencies
  

This list makes them something different than other collaboratives discussed but in line with these authors' other works. The mandatory inclusion of both government and nongovernment actors is one notable distinction. Whereas other authors tread around the differences in collaboratives that are heavily public or private this sticks both in there no matter what. I believe this is a positive step in working out what collaboratives are and how they work. I think of high importance is that they have little legal authority, exist in parallel with agencies and other command and control structures (or alongside them in a polycentric federal arrangement), and include both these actor types. If the concept that includes these items sticks then there is more likely to be traction on other issues. 

Next is how they pick out collaboratives in different theories of collective action. Chapter 6 tackles this. The authors compare Institutional Rational Choice theories (Ostrom's CPR theory, though they call it IAD incorrectly, and Lubell's Political Contracting Theory based heavily in Transaction Cost Economics) with Social Networking theory based in Putnam's social capital work and their own Advocacy Coalition's Framework. They appear to like their own a lot, but more on that later. As can be seen in the title of this blog, the institution stuff is what interests me. 

This book's approach to Ostrom and Lubell's work generated some ideas in my head. First they claim that collaborations are a form of collective choice body, in that their outputs determine some of the rules framing operational level action. Specifically they call the "management actions" of collaboratives operational rules. This seems to fundamentally contradict their definition of collaboratives. If collaboratives have little legal authority and exist alongside traditional agencies without replacing them then they cannot be making operational level rules. Rules require legal founding and basis. They don't have to be formally written down, but they do need to have consequences. If the collaborative has no ability or authority to sanction actors at an operational level then they are not making rules.

On the other hand the authors define "informal norms" as shared prescriptions typically enforced through individuals using reciprocal strategies, with punishment meted out through withdrawal of cooperation or social sanctions. These would definitely be a possible way that collaboratives influence operational actors. It creates a parallel institutional arrangement whose outcomes are prescriptions (how the agencies should act and how other members should behave) whose only enforcement is social stigma or withdrawal from cooperation. There is no legal authority. There are no sanctions placed on violators from above. 

These most likely do not perform as well as self-governing arrangements. There is clearly a remaining command and control entity in this mess with the agencies remaining the same and authority over land unchanged. So why do they exist? Where do collaboratives emerge as opposed to self-governing arrangements? How do they perform in comparison? These are some definite questions that emerge from this book. I am going to follow up with other chapters and ideas from Swimming Upstream over the next few days and try to tease out some theory and hypotheses. 

Going back a bit - Different Collaboratives

In the post from last week on Moore and Koontz' typology of collaboratives I discovered a piece by Steelman and Carmin (2002) that was the beginnings of that typology. This piece actually went much further in the description of the differences in collaboratives than Moore and Koontz and includes another aspect: how the collaborative was formed.

Not The Cheat River in West Virginia.

Steelman and Carmin look at two different watersheds that have Community Based Environmental Management (CBEM) in place to deal with mining pollution in rivers. The two watersheds are the Animas in Colorado and the Cheat in West Virginia. Both have problems from mining pollution and tailings harming portions of the watershed. Both have CBEMs that have substantive and social outcomes. They came about in different ways, resulting in different resources allowing them to reach their goals.

This analytic approach selects on the dependent variable (both the outcomes are positive) but looks for equifinality, or different roads to the same outcome. Gary Goertz speaks to this qualitative approach in his 2006 book Social Science Concepts. I think the authors here did some interesting things in choosing an equifinality approach but am left with more than some questions.

What were the two paths to success described here? One was bottom-up through community-directed grassroots action and another was top-down through an agency-directed process. Interestingly the Moore and Koontz article leaves out the details about the formation of the group and instead focuses on who runs the group once established. The process described here, in which the initially involved actors being community or agency changes the resources available and as such the path to success, is more about where the collaborative emerges from.

The bottom-up approach, where active members of the community banded together to accomplish something, began with human resources and networks, built a decentralized structure that was very inclusive, gained legitimacy and eventually recognition that received financial resources allowing for success. The top-down approach, where an agency recognized a problem and appointed people to the CBEM to address it, had expertise, technical and financial resources from the outset that allowed it to gain network and other resources but never legitimacy. Both resulted in success.

The questions I have about this are about the use of the concept of resources to trace this whole process. Thinking of structure as a resource that can be centralized or decentralized seems to collapse it too much. Having people, money, networks and legitimacy all be "resources" that the organizations gained in different orders seems odd. The conclusions are muddled up in this distinction. But regardless the approach of examining how two different CBEMs reached similar outcomes along different paths in this way acknowledged more variation in independent variables than the other studies I have examined thus far. The ideas here are worthy of building upon more. I look forward to seeing more emergence and longitudinal approaches to collaboratives coming soon.

Outputs from Collaboratives

Having banged our heads against the wall about what collaboratives are for a while I am taking a break to look at two different papers on what actually comes out of collaborative endeavors. Koontz (2003) and Lubbel (2004) both ask if anything actually happens when a collaborative acts. Koonts asks questions about differences in plans and whether or not the plans are lowest common denominator to accommodate the disparate interests involved in the collaborative endeavor or if major changes emerge. Lubbel asks if collaborative efforts actually increase cooperation within a community or if they just create symbolic policy, another way of saying just making those involved feel good. Neither of these studies results in good and interesting developments for collaboratives and variation between them. But they do give some good ground on how to progress in studying them.

Koontz provides an interesting analysis that asks if differences in the institutional arrangements (he calls process variables) results in differences in plans. Process variables consist of a number of factors internal to the collaborative such as how the group selects members, how they make decisions (consensus, majority), what resources the collaborative has access to and how widely representative the group is. Also controlled for are contextual variables such as the level of community concern, level of pre-existing networks, existing rules and current land use and urbanization.

His results do not show significant influence of any process variable on the contents of a particular plan in this case. The plans had 4 levels of "sophistication" (meaning development, not normative value) including length, meeting standard requirements, number of policy recommendations and completed recommended but not required analyses beyond the basic requirements. None of these varied based on process variables he measured. Instead context seemed to matter, with the content and length of plans being more in response to developing communities or communities on the borders of developing and growing urban areas. Threat prompted action. 

This leads well into the Lubbel piece, because while the outputs of the collaboratives he studied included plans, the dependent variable was actually changes in cooperative behavior of people in the estuary or consensus about policy. This study did not look at variation within collaboratives. Instead it looked at variation between estuaries with collaboratives and those without to see what difference the collaboratives made, if any. One possible set of outputs from collaborative endeavors are symbols to assuage uncertainty and threats felt by stakeholders. In the above study threatened communities may engage in collaborative efforts simply to feel better about the situation and not actually change anyone's behavior. The results are interesting and very limited. 

Lubbel's results show that in cases with a collaborative group making a plan cooperation was no higher than in those without. The difference was in consensus. The theory he proposes to explain this comes from the Advocacy Coalitions Framework, where actors' core and secondary beliefs mediate almost every action. He explains the results as changes in secondary beliefs rather than changes in behavior. 

Tying these two together seems to show that more effort is put into collaboratives that feel threatened, and that threat is assuaged by the endeavor itself, not by changes in behavior resulting from a plan, increased trust or better networks. Luckily both of these studies are limited in their generalizability and only attempts at expanding theory. It is still a fruitful area for investigation on what, if anything, do collaboratives achieve.

The previous two typologies

Leach, Pelkey and Sabatier (2002) and Moore and Koontz (2002) both develop typologies of collaboratives. Leach et al use the breadth of the issues being studied as the primary difference. Moore and Koontz use a classic public/private dichotomy. How do they compare? Would the groups defined fall into the same categories in both? Which is most helpful and why?

First, Leach et al's typology includes participants and place in the policy cycle as secondary characteristics of their types that are primarily driven by the breadth of the issues being addressed. The only true overlap that cold be compared between the two is who is included. Looking at the description of participants only the Advisory Committee type does not have to include a government entity, though the project sponsor selects the participants. The remainder use a logical AND for government entities being represented. This is not necessarily different than Moore and Koontz as they focus on who directs the collaborative endeavor, not who is involved.  This is a rather short path nowhere in comparing the groups.

Taking another approach it appears that Moore and Koontz has groups that do not fall into the categories of Leach et al. Citizen directed groups with a focus on policy change do not easily fit into the types described by Leach. It is possible that these groups would fit into the Stakeholder Partnership except for the participant requirement of multiple federal, state and local agencies. The Citizen-directed group would appear to be around for every stage, could involve a wide number of issues but at the same time be excluded on the basis of being too forceful in their methods of pushing for policy change. The differentiation of private versus public directed might suggest another division within the stakeholder partnership type that depends on participants and methods.

Another interesting comparison is that Leach et al's types all appear to be government directed save for the full stakeholder partnership. Public hearings, advisory committees and negotiated rulemaking procedures are all government directed. Public hearings is one group I noted in the last post that questions the use of the concept of "directed" in Moore and Koontz' typologies. Public hearings are collaborative endeavors that are government-directed but do not necessarily involve more than one government. I would need to investigate further but I would venture the guess that public hearings are not the way that governments collaborate with other governments. I would be interested to see if a state hearing was attended by or had an official representative of a county or local government take part through voicing their opinion. I believe there are different forums for that process. That being said there are advisory committees that include representatives from other governments nested within their jurisdiction, such as townships in a county or neighborhoods in a city.

What do we gain from these typologies? First, it is clear that neither is exhaustive. If one had to be picked that was more exhaustive than the other the simpler public/private/hybrid type would be the best. But the other qualification for typologies is that the distinctions are clear. While less exhaustive the use of breadth of issue seems to create a more clear set of distinctions than the "directed" concept.

I gain the notion that both the definition and typology of collaborative are both still up in the air. There are more types that I want to investigate and may come back around to it later.

Another Typology

Yesterday's post on Leach et al.'s types of collaboratives focused on four different types of collaboratives. These differences were based primarily on the breadth of issue being discussed, precipitating who was included and what part of the policy cycle they were in. Today's article looks at an earlier typology that is based simply on participants, posing a distinct difference from the Leach article. Today I outline the Moore and Koontz article and next time I will compare their typologies.

Today's article is a research note by Moore and Koontz (2002). This article explicitly strives to create a typology of collaboratives and investigate their defining characteristics. Their approach is based on who is included in the collaborative as an independent variable and a dependent variable of  different accomplishments by these different types. Notably this examination builds from recommendations by government guidelines on creating collaboratives and a piece I will cover next week by Steelman and Carmin about who should be included in different collaboratives based on what they want to achieve.

Group composition is the primary variation between these types of collaboratives. The possible groups are government agencies or citizens. More broadly (and I would like to see how this extends) the differences are along the lines of government and private interests. A group can be made up primarily of government interests, primarily of private interests or some combination of both. This gives us three categories: government directed, citizen directed or hybrid.

Before looking at their dependent variables they use to demonstrate that there is valid differences between these categories I want to note that this difference was based not on who was directing the collaborative but on who the vast majority of participants were. It is very possible, for instance, in the rule-making procedure from Leach et al that only one government entity is involved and a vast majority of those included are private interests. This group is directed by the government but would fall into the citizen-directed category based on this specification.

Without further analysis or comparison of the typologies we move on to the dependent variable, accomplishments. There is a notable amount of discussion of the selection of accomplishments as a measurable and valid thing, a topic I should address later on. Here the accomplishments that arose in open-ended discussion and coded were the creation of a management plan, group development and sustainability, and increased public awareness.

These three accomplishments were linked with different collaborative types as shown in this table

Management plan	Hybrid (stat sig)	Cooperation is nontrivial with the differences between agency and citizen perspectives (Thomas 1999).  Requires input from a lot so Hybrid best. (This is really weak)
Group development and sustainability	Both Hybrid and Government- directed (stat sig)	These are more recently formed? This is the reason? Ok… So because they are young their simple continued existence is success. These findings found agency and mixed include more disparate interests.
Increased awareness	Hybrid and Citizen-directed (kinda stat sig)	May be due to the lack of importance agencies place on awareness of citizens even while purporting to educate. They really want to influence policy makers.
Forcing change to policy	citizen directed (not stat sig)	May be due to citizen-advocacy and politics

We see plans coming out of hybrids, survival out of young and awareness out of non-government. 

The question that emerges is if these are actually different entities. If age is the primary driver of concerns of sustainability then who is included is only determined by age, and composition is a trivial variable. Increased awareness is another odd one. Hybrid falls into both, which is messy and prevents clear distinctions. Last is forcing policy change, and this is particularly messy.

First, this is not statistically significant. Secondly, one quoted focus group participant noted that awareness was not an accomplishment because what they were really striving for was getting elected official buy-in. Is this not forcing policy change? It seems that both attempt to engage in policy change, albeit through different channels. This is reinforced by Moore and Koontz's discussions about the difference in methodology rather than intention, with citizen groups more willing to be direct and agencies wanting to be more subtle. Lastly agencies are prohibited from engaging in certain activities. So what is the real difference between the collaboratives then, and what does this typology do for us? 

Next time I will compare this typology to Leach's and hope to gain some traction on this matter.

Stakeholder Partnerships

Still trying to define coalitions. Here's one article's approach.

The road of understanding collaboratives is rife with multiple definitions. These multiple definition can coalesce into different types of coalitions. One type identified early on in the last decade was the stakeholder partnership. An article on watershed partnerships in California and Washington by Leach, Pelkey and Sabatier (2002) classifies some forms of collaboration based on the breadth of issues, types of participants and the stages of the policy cycle they work through. This table provides the breakdown:
When narrowed down from the most general definition of collaboration some bounds can be placed on the concept. Stakeholder partnerships, as defined by Leach et al here, is defined primarily by the breadth of the issue or issues that brings people together into the partnership. This breadth in turn determines the participants and the stages of the policy cycle the collaboration is engaged in. The defining characteristics of a stakeholder partnership are:

• Broadly defined issue area
• participation by multiple levels of government
• indefinite duration
• exists for the full policy cycle
• integrated approach to a suite of interrelated problems
• geographic theme (like a body of water or region)
• final outcome is to reach an agreement on one or more specific policies or projects
• intermediate outcomes may include research, education, public outreach, trust-building, grant writing
• strive to include all local, state and federal agencies that may have relevant regulatory or service-based responsibilities

This is all great, and particularly vague. I am not sure how it is that these partnerships are granted any formal policy making power, nor what the definition of policy is in this case. What are the actual outcomes? Well agreement appears to be the primary one. Delving into the specification of the partnerships in their study we can see that this seems to be a major component.

To be included in this study partnerships had to:

• Meet at least 4 times a year
• focus on managing one or more streams, rivers or watersheds
• had to have diverse membership including one state or federal official, one rep from local government, and two opposing interests such as a resource user and regulator or environmentalist.

I note two items on this list because I think they reflect on the loose definition of partnership. First, the requirement that they focus on managing a body of water. Is management the equivalent of policy making? What is management of a river? Is it use, setting rules for use, monitoring use, or all of the above? Seems to confound many things and certainly can go beyond policy making. Second is the idea that the groups had to include opposing interests. This was passed over quickly in the definitions but seems rather important. 

If the primary outcome of a partnership is agreement, and there is a requirement that opposing interests must be included, does this make a partnership a form of conflict resolution? Not necessarily, but it does muddle the water quite a bit regarding the definition. What determines whether interests are opposed or not? If it is solely on the role then there are many instances where there may not be actual opposition. 

Why not focus on partnerships as an attempt to bring together different disparate interests to come to an agreement surrounding the management of a resource? Is this too specific? This broadens opposing interests, narrows policy and management. I am not sure. 

More importantly, and to be addressed later on, is where does a partnership come from? There sees to be some inferred problem that lacks agreement that must exist prior to the emergence of a partnership. What then leads these particular stakeholders to enter into this arrangement? Why not ignore it, do what your agency/firm/self want to do and what is best for you? There must be some form of overarching situation that leads to this involvement. Of course this could just be legislation requiring cooperation. But there is a bigger question here because the people involved are not mandated to be there (save possibly from some agencies or from the possibility of getting some funds). 

I have a feeling these are questions I will continue asking throughout this summer.

Walls

This collaboratives stuff is driving me nuts. I am still not sure what exactly is being discussed in the literature. I am going to continue pursuing this with a broader focus, drawing from a bunch of different perspectives and try circling around the concept until I can get it.

In the meantime it looks like the NSF has funded what may have been the equivalent to my dream research project. Toddi Steelman at NC State, along with a number of other researchers, created the Fire Chasers project going all the way back 10 years ago. This project launched a number of the articles I have examined about fire and community response over the last few months. I did not realize they were all a part of the same effort. Now knowing that something similar to what I want to do was funded is both great in that I know that it can be funded but unfortunate in that the NSF has already poured so much into a similar project.

In the meantime I am going to track down that grant and check it out. Should provide some excellent guidance.