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.