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.