Sunday, October 16, 2011

IWRM Definitions

Working DefinitionsIWRM “A process which promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land, and related resources, in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems.” Global Water Partnership, www.gwp.org/en/The-Challenge/What-is-IWRM/

It is based on the Dublin Principles, stating that: “1) freshwater is a finite and vulnerable resource, essential to sustain life, development and the environment; 2) water development and management should be based on a participatory approach involving users, planners and policy makers at all levels; 3) women play a central part in the provision, management and safeguarding of water; 4) water is a public good and has a social and economic value in all its competing uses; and 5) integrated water resources management is based on the equitable and efficient management and sustainable use of water.” Global Water Partnership, http://www.gwp.org/en/The-Challenge/What-is-IWRM/Dublin-Rio-Principles/

AM “Seeks to aggressively use management intervention as a tool to strategically probe the functioning of [a system]. Interventions are designed to test key hypotheses about the functioning of the [system]...[it] identifies uncertainties, and then establishes methodologies to test hypotheses concerning those uncertainties. It uses management as a tool not only to change the system, but as a tool to learn about the system...The achievement of these objectives requires an open management process which seeks to include past, present, and future stakeholders. Adaptive management needs to at least maintain political openness, but usually it needs to create it. Consequently, adaptive management must be a social as well as scientific process...” Resilience Alliance, http://www.resalliance.org/600.php

Engle, Johns, Lemos, and Nelson. 2011. Integrated and adaptive management of water resources: tensions, legacies, and the next best thing. Ecology and Society 16(1): 19. [online] URL:http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss1/art19/

Monday, October 3, 2011

Declaration of the Occupation

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

Posted on September 30, 2011 by NYCGA

This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on september 29, 2011

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness' | Paul Kingsnorth | Comment is free | The Guardian

This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness' | Paul Kingsnorth | Comment is free | The Guardian: This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness'

This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness'

Leopold Kohr warned 50 years ago that the gigantist global system would grow until it imploded. We should have listened

Paul Kingsnorth
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 September 2011 16.00 EDT
Article history

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

Living through a collapse is a curious experience. Perhaps the most curious part is that nobody wants to admit it's a collapse. The results of half a century of debt-fuelled "growth" are becoming impossible to convincingly deny, but even as economies and certainties crumble, our appointed leaders bravely hold the line. No one wants to be the first to say the dam is cracked beyond repair.

To listen to a political leader at this moment in history is like sitting through a sermon by a priest who has lost his faith but is desperately trying not to admit it, even to himself. Watch Nick Clegg, David Cameron or Ed Miliband mouthing tough-guy platitudes to the party faithful. Listen to Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy or George Papandreou pretending that all will be well in the eurozone. Study the expressions on the faces of Barack Obama or Ben Bernanke talking about "growth" as if it were a heathen god to be appeased by tipping another cauldron's worth of fictional money into the mouth of a volcano.

In times like these, people look elsewhere for answers. A time of crisis is also a time of opening-up, when thinking that was consigned to the fringes moves to centre stage. When things fall apart, the appetite for new ways of seeing is palpable, and there are always plenty of people willing to feed it by coming forward with their pet big ideas.

But here's a thought: what if big ideas are part of the problem? What if, in fact, the problem is bigness itself?

The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge tranches of public money, which in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of western nations. The European Union has grown so big, and so unaccountable, that it threatens to collapse in on itself. Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass extinction event.

One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of. Unlike Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire revolutions. Unlike Hayek, he did not rewrite the economic rules of the modern world. Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, be they revolutionaries or plutocrats. In fact, Kohr's message is a direct challenge to them. "Wherever something is wrong," he insisted, "something is too big."

Kohr was born in 1909 in the small Austrian town of Oberndorf. This smalltown childhood, together with his critical study of economics and political theory at the LSE, his experience of anarchist city states during the Spanish civil war, which he covered as a war reporter, and the fact that he was forced to flee Austria after the Nazi invasion (Kohr was Jewish), contributed to his growing suspicion of power and its abuses.

Settling in the US, Kohr began to write the book that would define his thinking. Published in 1957, The Breakdown of Nations laid out what at the time was a radical case: that small states, small nations and small economies are more peaceful, more prosperous and more creative than great powers or superstates. It was a claim that was as unfashionable as it was possible to make. This was the dawn of the space age – a time of high confidence in the progressive, gigantist, technology-fuelled destiny of humankind. Feted political thinkers were talking in all seriousness of creating a world government as the next step towards uniting humanity. Kohr was seriously at odds with the prevailing mood. He later commented, dryly, that his critics "dismissed my ideas by referring to me as a poet".

Kohr's claim was that society's problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called "the human scale": a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors. Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from, would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions have shown – because "the problem is not the thing that is big, but bigness itself".

Drawing from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it. The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world's problems was not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of any one unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative. On a whistlestop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does a brilliant job of persuading the reader that many of the glories of western culture, from cathedrals to great art to scientific innovations, were the product of small states.

To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr's vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some if it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for "whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions". Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

We have now reached the point that Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where "instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence". Kohr's "crisis of bigness" is upon us and, true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, geoengineering schemes, more economic growth. Big, it seems, is as beautiful as ever to those who have the unenviable task of keeping the growth machine going.

This shouldn't surprise us. It didn't surprise Kohr, who, unlike some of his utopian critics, never confused a desire for radical change with the likelihood of it actually happening. Instead, his downbeat but refreshingly honest conclusion was that, like a dying star, the gigantist global system would in the end fall in on itself, and the whole cycle of growth would begin all over again. But before it did so, "between the intellectual ice ages of great-power domination", the world would become "little and free once more".

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Corporate Takeover of Drinking Water

The UN Is Aiding a Corporate Takeover of Drinking Water

Billions of dollars are being given out to the most ardent promoters of water privatization.

July 3, 2011 |

Early last month, pharmaceutical titan Merck became the latest multinational to pledge allegiance to the CEO Water Mandate, the United Nations' public-private initiative "designed to assist companies in the development, implementation and disclosure of water sustainability policies and practices."
But there's darker data beneath that sunny marketing: The CEO Water Mandate has been heavily hammered by the Sierra Club, the Polaris Institute and more for exerting undemocratic corporate control over water resources (PDF) under the banner of the United Nations. It even won a Public Eye Award for flagrant greenwashing from the Swiss non-governmental organization Berne Declaration. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
"There is no admission of problems with the Water Mandate, or the United Nations Global Compact itself" -- the strategic policy initiative committed to human rights, labor and the environment -- Blue Gold and Blue Covenant author and activist Maude Barlow, who also chairs the National Council of Canadians and Food & Water Watch, explained to AlterNet. "These initiatives continue to flourish, not least because the most powerful member states of the United Nations are fully behind them. This also means that the United Nations is not funded fully. Programs and agencies often rely on private sponsorship to function, and are often barely getting their core administrative budgets funded."
Another major problem is that routinely compromised and controversial institutions like World Bank, International Monetary Fund and regional development banks in general are in control of the United Nations' biggest projects. In April, the World Bank assumed control of the United Nations Climate Conference's new $100 billion Green Fund, which is the opposite of a comforting proposition, considering the World Bank's repeatedly noxious financing of oil and coal projects.
"That gives control of billions of dollars to those who have been the most ardent promoters of water privatization," added Barlow, whose foreword for the Council of Canadians' recently damning report on private sector influence over the United Nations (PDF) argued that the planet is on the verge of a water crisis of terrifying proportions. "We're also seeing the IMF forcing indebted nations to sell off public assets, including water systems, as a condition of receiving financial support. The whole system is rigged for these corporations, and they still are losing contracts, not meeting their obligations and watching as remunicipalization moves forward in France and other core markets."
That kind of illogical corporate performance would logically lead to less control, not more. But the United Nations continues to hand over the reins to multinationals like its new cosigner Merck, which has repeatedly settled in court over everything from carcinogenic pollution to deceptive marketing. Despite the fact that the United Nations' own Joint Inspection Unit stated in a 2010 report (PDF) that the Global Compact's corporate partnerships were an unregulated mess.
"The lack of a clear and articulated mandate has resulted in blurred focus and impact," the report stated. "The absence of adequate entry criteria and an effective monitoring system to measure actual implementation of the principles by participants has drawn some criticism and reputational risk for the Organization, and the Office’s special set up has countered existing rules and procedures. Ten years after its creation, despite the intense activity carried out by the Office and the increasing resources received, results are mixed and risks unmitigated."
The report suggested that not only was a clearer mandate from Member States required to "rethink and refocus" the Compact's corporate partnerships, but that the United Nations' General Assembly must better direct the Secretary-General to delineate the Compact's overall functions "in order to prevent a situation whereby any external group or actor(s) may divert attention from the strategic goals agreed to promote interests which may damage the reputation of the United Nations." The short version? It's not working, and won't work in its current form for the foreseeable future.
But the United Nations' own advice to itself has evidently fallen mostly on deaf ears.
"Unfortunately, the United Nations appears to be embracing more and more partnerships with the corporate sector across the board," Corporate Accountability International campaign director Gigi Kellett told AlterNet. "Civil society has been raising concerns about this flawed approach for over 10 years. There are strong voices within the United Nations, including some Member states, who are questioning the partnership paradigm adopted by the UN and calling for more transparency and accountability."
But they are voices in the wilderness without the concerted support of a motivated public, as well as the usual civil society champions who make stopping this strain of corporate abuse their life's work. Power truly respects only one thing, and that is equally exercised power. And the public is fully empowered to make all the change it wants, provided it can unplug itself from distracting sex scandals and mainstream media marketing primarily designed to nurture its collective complacency.
"Corporations rely on people's tacit support and willingness to look the other way when they engage in conduct that harms people or the environment and undermines democratic governance and decision-making," Kellett said. "When people come together in coordinated fashion and withhold their support from a corporation, that relationship is turned on its head. Boycotts are one powerful way that individuals can withhold their support, but there are range of other strategies. When activists come together and raise questions about a corporation's actions and tie them to its brand and image, the resulting media exposure can greatly impact how the corporation is perceived by consumers, investors or even government regulators."
But how do you boycott a multinational that controls your water supply? Can you shame a mammoth corporation into abdicating control over a lucrative commodity that should instead be regarded as a universal human right? Talk about your Sisyphean tasks.
"Boycotts are much more difficult with water than a product like Coke," said Barlow. "There are no substitutes for water, and when these corporations are given monopoly power over water systems, boycotts are very unrealistic. Suez, Veolia and others are very concerned about their corporate image, but there is no effective means to hurt them financially except to end or block the contracts before they are signed. Boycotts have been very effective as public awareness campaigns, but citizens need to apply pressure on their governments as the first step in stopping the proliferation of voluntary initiatives."
Demanding regulation of the private sector's products -- from water and natural resource commodification to inscrutable financial instruments and beyond -- as well as the public's political electives appears to be the paramount first principle. Because the problem is getting worse and going nowhere, especially now that our dystopian climate crisis has permanently disrupted business, and existence, as usual. From escalating warming and extreme weather to destabilized nations and environments, Earth is already precariously balanced on the tipping point. And giving profit-minded corporations voluntary control over their power and procedures is a 20th century anachronism best left behind.
"We have not proven to have what it takes to deal with the climate crisis," argued Barlow, "and this is because it is all seen as a giant political and financial game, rather than the best and only chance to head off a catastrophe like we have never before imagined. Climate change is upon us, but we will never admit it fully, nor invest in stopping it, if our governments continue to represent corporate interests above others. It is up to us to challenge our states, and make sure they know we are engaged and aware."

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Coalitions, Science, and Belief Change

Status: Published

Weible, Christopher M. and Sabatier, Paul A. (2009) Coalitions, Science, and Belief Change: Comparing Adversarial and Collaborative Policy Subsystems. The Policy Studies Journal, 37(2)

Christopher M. Weible and Paul A. Sabatier from the University of Colorado Denver found that collaborative approaches: (and I quote from Page: 1)

will mitigate conflict

help integrate science and values

policy subsystems are associated with convergence in some beliefs between rival coalitions

policy participants are no more likely to rely on science-based, empirical beliefs in collaborative than in adversarial policy subsystems.

Weible and Sabatier "use the advocacy coalition framework (ACF; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993; Sabatier & Weible, 2007) to compare adversarial and collaborative policy subsystems concerning (i) convergence in beliefs regarding both water quality problems and Comments from page 1 continued on next page agreement with policy proposals; and (ii) the relative use of empirical versus normative beliefs in supporting policy proposals." Thus they Conclude (clipped directly from Page: 14)

This long-term shift toward science suggests learning has occurred in the Basin and supports Weiss’s (1977) enlightenment function that science slowly accumulates like sedimentation in the minds of decision makers.

Changes in beliefs, for example, might not result from the emergence of a collaborative subsystem but rather from turnover in policy participants or to other unknown factors. [$$$ is my personal experience].

Political events in the Basin, however, show the same trends found across many environmental policy subsystems: a shift from adversarial processes … to collaborative processes.

Analysis finds that in a collaborative policy subsystem some beliefs converge between coalitions, suggesting the mitigation of conflict to more intermediate levels.

Sabatier Paul A., and Hank Jenkins-Smith, eds. (1993) Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach. (Boulder, Co: Westview, 1993), 290pp.

Sabatier Paul A., and Christopher M. Weible. (2007) The Advocacy Coalition Framework: Innovations and Clarifications. In Theories of the Policy Process, 2nd edn, ed. Paul A. Sabatier. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 189–220.

Weiss, Carol. (1977) Research for Policy’s Sake: The Enlightenment Function of Social Research. Policy Analysis 3 (Fall): 531–45.

weavers leadership web
Author: (c) June 17, 2011 2:04 AM Eric Weaver

Integrated regional water management

Status: Published

Lubell, Mark and Lippert, Lucas (2011) Integrated regional water management: a study of collaboration or water politics-as-usual in California,USA International Review of Administrative Sciences 2011 77: 76

Mark Lubell is a Professor at UC Davis helped Lucas Lippert an MS student who "conducted a survey of Bay Area stakeholders regarding their participation and attitudes towards IRWMP.” Lubell and Lippert completed an evaluation of the IRWM development in San Francisco California specifically to inform other water management professionals of the importance of this collaborative model. However, the majority of their reviews found that the old-guard set on the command and control paradigm would invariably circumvent and over ride any new stakeholder and cooperative collaboration that impeded their “politics-as-usual.” Lubell and Lippert conclude by discerning the need to further research issues like “How much change, over what time span, is enough to continue investing in integrated approaches?” Of course any research to reduce the fragmentation and encourage integration and collaboration is important while they found the IWRM “only make incremental changes in the short-run."

weavers leadership web

Author: (c) June 17, 2011 12:32 AM Eric Weaver

Institutional development for IWRM:

Status: Published

Bandaragoda, D. J. and Babel, Mukand S.(2010) Institutional development for IWRM: an international perspective, International Journal of River Basin Management, 8: 3, 215 — 224, First published on: 01 July 2010

Bandaragoda, is the Retired Regional Director for International Irrigation Management Institute (IIMI)'s South East Asia Regional Office and Senior Management Specialist for nine years in IIMI's Pakistan program based in Lahore after serving as a member of the Sri Lankan administrative service while MUKAND S. BABEL, is a Associate Professor, Water Engineering & Management at the Asian Institute of Technology, Pathumthani, Thailand. Together they document the development of integrated water resources management (IWRM) through the United Nations Conference on Water in the Mar del Plata (1977), the International Conference on Water and Environment (1992), the Second World Water Forum (2000), the International Conference on Freshwater (2001), the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002, and the Third World Water Forum (2003) which made IWRM central to global politics. They discussed IWRM’s zenith with “The fourth World Water Forum in Mexico in 2006 dealt with sharing experience and finding ways to further the implementation of IWRM” before Bandaragoda and Babel went back into the concept’s history to note that China addressed water management back in the twentieth century BC. After completing the historical review the authors reviewed current applications and ambitions attempts in Asia which resulted in critical questions:

Why have the water sector institutional reforms failed?
Is it necessary to have hydrologically based RBOs [river basin organization] for the promotion of IWRM?
Can the developed-country models of RBOs be successfully replicated in developing countries?

Although Bandaragoda and Babel claimed this review represents a “fairly bleak picture” professional water managers can benefit from these recommendations:

Pilot projects to establish sub-basin level stakeholder organizations were successful.
A clear water policy and related water laws are essential requirements to guide this collaborative arrangement.
Expensive institutional device such as RBOs is not necessary.
Local stakeholder involvement, an inter-sectoral representation is most essential.

weavers leadership web

Author:(c) June 17, 2011 12:37 AM Eric Weaver

Beneath the surface: international institutions and management

Status: Published

Milman and Scott (2010) Beneath the surface: international institutions and management of the United States Mexico transboundary Santa Cruz aquifer. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 2010, volume 28, pages 528 - 551

Christopher A Scott is an Asst. Research Professor, in the School of Geography and Development and Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, University of Arizona, with Anita Milman as a graduate student in his program. They examined the Santa Cruz aquifer along the Arizona and Mexico boarder to understand polycentric management methods for transboundary groundwaters. The exploration begins with the three-Cs: “competence, compatibility, and capacity” (as discussed by Young 2002, pages 98-100) which is used to determine how “regulations” and “regulators” are intertwined in the area through an array of acronyms. Their analysis “identified specific gaps, overlaps, and ambiguities that arise from the polycentric and evolving nature of the intranational institutional environment in both the US and Mexico and explained how these reduce the competence, compatibility, and capacity of each country to address transboundary groundwater management.” Other water management professionals must recognize that states rarely have “complete control” over there water resources and that their management methods must be more decentralized, addressing private sector participation, and marketable property rights.

Young O R, 2002 The Institutional Dimensions of Environmental Change: Fit, Interplay, and Scale (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)

weavers leadership web

Author:(c) June 17, 2011 1:31 AM Eric Weaver

Water Sustainability: Anthropological Approaches

Status: Published

Ben Orlove and Steven C. Caton (2010) Water Sustainability: Anthropological Approaches and Prospects. Annual Review of Anthropology. 39:401–15

Ben Orlov an anthropologist who earned a BA from Harvard University and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley., has since the 1970s, conducted field work in the places like the Peruvian Andes, East Africa, the Italian Alps, and Australia collaborated with Steve Caton Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies in the Department of Anthropology Program at Harvard University. These anthropologists provide detailed insight into Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) which has become a central theme for water governance internationally as a “total social fact.” They begin with a review of the two central themes for water of connectivity and materiality in context with human and environmental uses and then expand this into the five analysis issues of value, equity, governance, politics, and knowledge. From here they discuss the various perspective of water regimes, watersheds and waterscapes and how these are all intertwined with IWRM which often goes beyond them. Orlove and Caton conclude by presenting to the professional water audience that future explorations of water in all these contexts must go beyond just the consumer and must be studied ethnographically through a combination of approaches that are determined case by case based on the connections and materials involved with in the water: "regime," "shed" and “scape” configuration.

weavers leadership web

Author: (c) June 17, 2011 1:29 AM Eric Weaver

Analysing water governance in heterogeneous case studies

Status: Published

Knieper, C.; Holtz, G.; Kastens, B.; Pahl-Wostl, C.; (2010) Analysing water governance in heterogeneous case studies: Experiences with a database approach Environmental Science & Policy. 13(7):592-603

Knieper, Holtz, and Kastens are graduate students (staff members) with Pahl-Wostl who chairs the Resources Management research group at University of Osnabrueck, Institute of Environmental Systems Research, Osnabrueck, Germany where she has over 100 publications and currently administers 8 projects. In this article they further review the application of the Management Transition Framework (MTF) as a comprehensive analysis tool of water management through the review of two flood management case studies. These additional cases will be added to the MTF relational database, to expand it for supporting more detailed analysis of water governance technologies. The process of creating a shared language through the MTF for defining the governance processes enhances future empirical evaluations with the database. However, this is addressed specifically to professionals developing with these tools. as they found in this case, professionals involved can use the same tools and language but document governance processes at many different levels of detail which makes future comparisons more complicated.

weavers leadership web

Author: (c) June 17, 2011 1:19 AM Eric Weaver

Thursday, June 16, 2011

five sentences? Just FIVE = 5?

Status: Published

C. Knieper, G. Holtz, B. Kastens, C. Pahl-Wostl (2010) Analysing water governance in heterogeneous case studies: Experiences with a database approach Environmental Science & Policy. 13(7):592-603

weavers leadership web

Author: (c) June 17, 2011 1:19 AM Eric Weaver

Status: Published

Ben Orlove and Steven C. Caton (2010) Water Sustainability: Anthropological Approaches and Prospects. Annual Review of Anthropology. 39:401–15

weavers leadership web

Author: (c) June 17, 2011 1:29 AM Eric Weaver

Status: Published

Young O R, 2002 The Institutional Dimensions of Environmental Change: Fit, Interplay, and Scale (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)

weavers leadership web

Author:(c) June 17, 2011 1:31 AM Eric Weaver

Status: Published

Why have the water sector institutional reforms failed?
Is it necessary to have hydrologically based RBOs [river basin organization] for the promotion of IWRM?
Can the developed-country models of RBOs be successfully replicated in developing countries?

Although Bandaragoda and Babel claimed this review represents a “fairly bleak picture” professional water managers can benefit from these recommendations:

Pilot projects to establish sub-basin level stakeholder organizations were successful.
A clear water policy and related water laws are essential requirements to guide this collaborative arrangement.
Expensive institutional device such as RBOs is not necessary.
Local stakeholder involvement, an inter-sectoral representation is most essential.

weavers leadership web

Author:(c) June 17, 2011 12:37 AM Eric Weaver


Status: Published

Mark Lubell is a Professor at UC Davis who “focuses on human behavior and the role of governance institutions in solving collective action problems and facilitating cooperation" currently involved with "watershed management, environmental activism, agricultural best management practices, and institutional change in local governments” with Lucas Lippert an MS student who “conducted a survey of Bay Area stakeholders regarding their participation and attitudes towards IRWMP.” Lubell and Lippert completed an evaluation of the IRWM development in San Francisco California specifically to inform other water management professionals of the importance of this collaborative model. However, the majority of their reviews found that the old-guard set on the command and control paradigm would invariably circumvent and over ride any new stakeholder and cooperative collaboration that impeded their “politics-as-usual.” Lubell and Lippert conclude by discerning the need to further research issues like “How much change, over what time span, is enough to continue investing in integrated approaches?” Of course any research to reduce the fragmentation and encourage integration and collaboration is important while they found the IWRM “only make incremental changes in the short-run."

weavers leadership web

Author: (c) June 17, 2011 12:32 AM Eric Weaver


Status: Published

Weible, Christopher M. and Sabatier, Paul A. (2009) Coalitions, Science, and Belief Change: Comparing Adversarial and Collaborative Policy Subsystems. The Policy Studies Journal, 37(2)

Christopher M. Weible and Paul A. Sabatier from the University of Colorado Denver found that collaborative approaches: (and I quote from Page: 1)

will mitigate conflict

help integrate science and values

policy subsystems are associated with convergence in some beliefs between rival coalitions

policy participants are no more likely to rely on science-based, empirical beliefs in collaborative than in adversarial policy subsystems.

This long-term shift toward science suggests learning has occurred in the Basin and supports Weiss’s (1977) enlightenment function that science slowly accumulates like sedimentation in the minds of decision makers.

Changes in beliefs, for example, might not result from the emergence of a collaborative subsystem but rather from turnover in policy participants or to other unknown factors. [$$$ is my personal experience].

Political events in the Basin, however, show the same trends found across many environmental policy subsystems: a shift from adversarial processes … to collaborative processes.

Analysis finds that in a collaborative policy subsystem some beliefs converge between coalitions, suggesting the mitigation of conflict to more intermediate levels.

weavers leadership web
Author: (c) June 17, 2011 2:04 AM Eric Weaver

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Stalled regime transition

Sendzimir, Flachner, Pahl-Wostl and Knieper (2010) Stalled regime transition in the upper Tisza River Basin: the dynamics of linked action situations. Environmental Science & Policy. 13(7):604-619

Tisza River map ===>

Jan Sendzimir from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria; and Zsuzsana Flachner of the Research Institute for Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary completed this article with the help of the Management Transition Framework (MTF) experts Claudia Pahl-Wostl and Christian Knieper from the Institute of Environmental Systems Research, Department of Mathematics & Computer Science, University of Osnabruck, in Osnabruck, Germany.

They discussed the transformation of the Tisza River governance system from the existing flood defense system to a more Adaptive Management (AM) process after a series of severe floods. Specifically they used MTF, developed at Osnabruck, Germany, to assess the critical factors in transformation from the ineffective Command and Control system to the more progressive AM system.
The created MTF system chart is presented (see upper right), they discussed the components of it in detail and then reviewed this in context of their 7 different "hypothetical characteristics of river management regimes" including: Learning, Finance & Risk, Infrastructure, Info Management, Scale of Analysis, Sectoral Integration and finally Governance (below right).

Of these 7 characteristics Governance and Learning were most prevalent involved at 28.4% and 20.8% of the processes respectively. In conclusion they found that "Governance and Learning opened the door to new ideas, but neither was sustained sufficiently by consistent leadership to secure transformation."

Monday, June 13, 2011

Integrated and adaptive management

Engle, N. L., O. R. Johns, M. Lemos, and D. R. Nelson. (2011) Integrated and adaptive management of water resources: tensions, legacies, and the next best thing. Ecology and Society 16(1): 19.

Engle, Johns, Lemos, and Nelson specifically addressed the challenges and short comings in the water governance systems of integrated water resources management (IWRM) and adaptive management (AM). They reviewed the issues found in the literature and then discussed their own empirical analysis of cases in Brazil. They found many of the same problems and issues that IWRM and AM claim to resolve. The top-down command-control paradigm is still present and decidedly difficult to replace. When leadership is committed to more community and democratic policy development the distribution of stakeholders and priorities are still often in line with leadership.

As previously noted multiple and fragmented priorities results in unsustainable systems. Thus, there has been a trend to combine the IWRM and AM approaches to create a new management technique. This combined effort seeks to more broadly provide the means for (Engle et. al. 2011):

increase effectiveness through integration across social, ecological, and hydrological systems;
add legitimacy and promote public acceptance through stakeholder participation, cooperation, decentralization, and democratic decision making;
incorporate technical expertise through inclusion of different forms of knowledge and promotion of social learning; and
promote flexibility and adaptability through experimentation and learning in managing water resources.

However, the research indicated that IWRM and AM have not been able to address all these issues in practice. For example Engle et. al. notes that "Medema et al. (2008) argue that because these
theoretical frameworks are difficult to translate into practice, they mostly fail to provide successful examples of implementation." The strongest representations for the more integrated adaptive approach has been supported by other authors reviewed in this blog. Specifically, Engle et. al.mentioned "the NeWater project (www.newater.info/), which underscores the need for adaptive integrated water resources management (AWM) to address the uncertainty associated with increasingly complex and interconnected problems (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007)."

More research is needed to evaluate how integration techniques can work. Such research needs to address the tensions that come from such integrated approaches and how to avoid these issues. Empirical analysis of the hybrid management systems will support further work in this area.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Analyzing complex water governance regimes

Pahl-Wostl, Claudia; Holtz, Georg; Kastens, Britta; Knieper, Christian. (2010) Analyzing complex water governance regimes: the Management and Transition Framework. Environmental Science & Policy Volume 13, Issue 7, November 2010, Pages 571-581

Pahl-Wostl, Holtz, Kastens & Knieper presented a description of the Management and Transition Framework (MTF) which is proposed as a method for analyzing the development of watershed plans. It could be used for a multitude of governance systems but was developed specifically for creating a database of coherent applications for watershed governance comparisons. For example, they noted that "Folke et al. (2005) point[s] out that adaptive governance systems often self-organize as social networks with actor groups that draw on various knowledge systems and experiences for the development of a common understanding and policies." Thus, a interdisciplinary system for context specific evaluations was needed as Pahl-Wostl et al. defined here:

Management and Transition Framework (MTF) that has been developed to support the analysis of water systems and management (Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007a,c). The MTF is an interdisciplinary conceptual and methodological framework that supports the understanding of water systems and management regimes and transition processes towards more adaptive management.

The Pahl-Wostl et al. review of MTF summarized key thematic areas:

adaptive management and characteristics of adaptive water management regimes,
social learning and regime transitions,
the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework analyse collective choice process.

Each of these areas were defined in context of water resource governance referring to literature for specific examples for setting the framework for the MTF analysis. The actual framework for MTF evolved from the specific processes, structures and conditions for watershed governance which are represented in a graphical representation using a "unified modeling language." Thus, every relationship and governance structure is represented in a formal diagram to show the activities and cycles used in the management processes. Each step of the management process development would require more a detailed MTF to study related problems and analysis.

The MTF has specific classes and attributes which are used to define relationships. Relationship diagrams are developed with defined terms for each component. Here is an example Diagram (See Fig 1 at right) with some significant process terms used:

‘Water System’ which comprises all environmental and human
components.
‘Ecological System’ class comprises abiotic and biotic
components of the water system.
‘Environmental Services’ capture the function of an ecological system as provider of different kinds of services for
human activities.
‘Environmental Hazards’ are the threats that an ecological system poses to a societal system.
‘Technical infrastructure’ refers to infrastructure of relevance for the water management issue under concern.
‘Action Arena’ is an issue specific political arena focused on a societal function.
‘Action Situation’ is a structured social interaction context that leads to specific outcomes.

This system provides a criteria for multiple situations to be documented and reviewed with through similar references to create a database of analysis. Thus, with following a defined system the various management systems can be equally evaluated. This defined systems includes: 1. Strategic goal setting, 2. Assess current state, 3. Policy formation, 4. Developing operational goals, 5. Developing measures, 6. Implementation, 7. Monitoring.

Finally, the MTF allows for the collection of standard data on these processes to assess further developments. Systems can be standardized and evaluated. In conclusion Pahl-Wostl et al. "planned to further develop and implement a global database of river governance and management regimes and meanwhile evaluating and revising the framework."

Twin2Go’s Objectives

Objectives:
The failure of governance systems has been identified as being one of the most important reasons for increased vulnerability to water related disasters. Successful governance in river basin management depends on adaptive institutions able to cope with complexity and uncertainty. The EU has established a significant portfolio of research projects on issues of integrated water resources management (IWRM). However, to accelerate the pace at which water management practices and water policy move towards integrated approaches, more importance needs to be given to effective communication of research results and to constructive engagement with stakeholders from all levels, including political decision makers.
Against this background,

Twin2Go’s objectives are:

to review, compare, synthesize and consolidate the outcomes of several EU-funded projects that undertook research on specific IWRM issues in basins around the world
to draw context-sensitive but transferable approaches for improving adaptive water resources management with regards to adaptive water governance
to formulate policy-relevant best practices and tools for implementing adaptive water governance and for improving the uptake of research results
to disseminate outcomes effectively to relevant stakeholders at the policy level.

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USF+AppSysSc: Projects

USF+AppSysSc: Projekte: "ASEM Water resources management by focussing on the five main issues: river basin management, water use efficiency in agriculture, floods, pollution, governance.

	Aquaculture	Aquacultural concepts for Uzbekistan .
	Aquastress	Mitigation of Water Stress through new Approaches to Integrating Management, Technical, Economic and Institutional Instruments.
	ASEM	Water resources management by focussing on the five main issues: river basin management, water use efficiency in agriculture, floods, pollution, governance.
	Eco Campus	connects actors working or studying at universities who actively support the ecological design of research, teaching, and administration at universities.
	Elbe-DSS	Sustainable management of fluvial systems.
	ELPOS	Criteria for persistence and long-range transport of pesticides and industrial chemicals.
<="" td="" width="75" height="45">	ETAPOS	A spreadsheet model for screening assessment of overall persistence, long-range transport and bioaccumulation potential
	For566	Veterinary medicines in soils: basic research for risk analysis.
	GREAT-ER	A GIS Assisted Model For Environmental Risk Assessment and Management of Chemicals in River Basins.
	GWSP	Global Water System Project
	Harmoni CA	Harmonised Modelling Tools for Integrated Basin Management.
	Harmoni COP	Harmonising Collaborative Planning; understanding of participatory river basin management and planning (RBMP) in Europe.
	SARISK	Development of a pollutant dispersal model for risk analysis and evaluation of extreme flood events exemplifying the town and district of Bitterfeld
	MaMBIES	Mathematical Modelling of Bioinvasions and Epidemic Spread
	MaMPFi	Mathematical Modelling of Plankton-Fish Dynamics
	Newater	New Approaches to Adaptive Water Management under Uncertainty.
	PartizipA	Participative Modelling, Actor and Ecosystem Analysis in Regions with Intensive Agriculture.
	Plastics	Plastics in the marine environment
	PSI-Connect	Policy Science Interactions - Connecting Science and Policy through Innovative Knowledge Brokering in the field of Water Management and Climate Change.
	Twin2Go	Coordinating twinning partnerships towards more adaptive governance in river basins.
	VOLAMOD	Field experiments in artificial streams to develop and evaluate a model approach for volatilization of hydrocarbons and other organic pollutants from natural rivers
	Wademed	WAter DEmand management knowledge base for the MEDiterranean.
	Wasamed	Establish a platform for an effective dialogue on water saving in agriculture in the Mediterranean region.

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XIVth IWRA World Water Congress

XIVth IWRA World Water Congress: "XIVth IWRA World Water Congress
DATE: September 25-29, 2011 - VENUE: Porto de Galinhas / Recife, PE, Brazil

Goals
The World Water Congress will highlight emerging drivers of water resources management including climate change; population growth, urban expansion and demographic changes; economic development; water quality degradation, and ecosystem water requirements including to mantain biodiversity. Each of these will alter the way water is managed; together, they will require fundamentally new priorities for technology and infrastructure, management and policy, allocation and pricing, laws and institutions, and above all a new future outlook for water resources professionals.

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Friday, June 3, 2011

The Watershed Approach

Cohen, A. and Davidson, S. 2011. An examination of the watershed approach: Challenges, antecedents, and the transition from technical tool to governance unit. Water Alternatives 4(1): 1-14

This article completed a review of the published research regarding watershed approaches to water governance. Included here is the review of the five major challenges they identified as "boundary choice, accountability, public participation, and watersheds’ asymmetries with 'problem-sheds' and 'policy-sheds'" (Cohen & Davidson 2011, p. 1). This article expands on this review to suggest the watershed approach to these problems have evolved from the watershed technical tool transition into a policy instrument. They suggest the watershed should remain a tool for analysis of the water systems and not also a governance tool with Integrated Water Resource Management.

Beginning with the five major challenges, Cohen & Davidson define each with references to the related literature supporting their assertions. Each will be listed here with the specific references they mentioned. The first regards the problems with watershed boundaries being incongruent with:

other natural systems boundaries (Griffin, 1999)
ecosystems (Omernik and Bailey, 1997; Mollinga et al., 2007)
airsheds (Jaworski et al., 1997; Paerl et al., 2002)/.
groundwater flow (Winter et al., 2003)
boundary defined as political act (Blomquist and Schlager, 2005)

Accountability issues become critical for decision making with regards to water permitting, regulations and other watershed basin specific issues. Political jurisdictions rarely align with watersheds. Thus, the issues and related references Cohen & Davidson define here included:

government participants responding to their jurisdictionally defined electorate (Salles and Zelem, 1998; Sneddon 2002)
failed democracy has "led to elitist policies that have benefits for only the few" (Fischer, 1993)

Public participation issues are equally as problematic as these articles noted these specific references:

"One important political reality is that states do not much like sharing power" (Warner 2007)
higher orders of government have not loosened their grip on their decision-making power and local groups have not been empowered through the devolution process (Norman and Bakker 2009)

The next critical issue discussed by Cohen & Davidson involved the "problem-sheds" which they defined as "geographic area that is large enough to encompass the issues but small enough to make implementation feasible (Griffin, 1999)." Here they brought out the issues about how the "problem-shed" is often significantly different than the "watershed." They referred to the many problems that might affect an area, including social and economical, which usually stretch far beyond the normal limits of a watershed. "For example, individuals may not relate to or identify with a watershed boundary (Brun and Lasserre, 2006). Grigg (2008) argues that the watershed approach presents false boundaries for decision-making since watersheds are essentially non-economic or social units" (Cohen & Davidson 2011, p. 4).

This discussion similarly leads to the issues Cohen & Davidson define as the "Policy-shed." Once again they claimed that regulation issues are not feasible within the watershed since these basins never match national or municipal jurisdictions. Therefore, rules applied to one area are not equally applied to all the area. Or more often, as they noted in their review "'regional, provincial, federal, and international bodies may have different authorities in a given watershed' (Hoover et al., 2007). This scalar mismatch results in policy implementation occurring in a largely fragmented and uncoordinated manner (Schlager and Blomquist, 2000)" (Cohen & Davidson 2011, p. 5). Many of these issues can lead to turf-wars. land disputes and other issues. They continue by claiming their are appropriate times and places for watershed applications, specifically for technical analysis where this framework is suitable as in engineering and hydrology.

Cohen & Davidson then discuss the evolution of watersheds as a mapped area to explore flood control, irrigation and power development with dams. This paradigm was later reframed in the 1950s to include more about human use with the development of the concept of a Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) also primarily based on watersheds. Further, they presented the "reinvention and re-emergence of IWRM in the early 1990s included a broadened scope to include both natural and human components (Jønch-Clausen and Fugl, 2001), largely due to the increasing recognition of the need to integrate economic, social, and natural resources under a single framework (GWP, 2000)."

Thus the IWRM became more common in the governance and review of watersheds internationally. This shift allowed IWRM to become more of a governance form beyond only the engineering and hydrology applications as a study tool. This technical transition from engineering tool to governance was the critical issue Cohen & Davidson explored with their key points of "boundary choice, accountability, public participation, and watersheds’ asymmetries with 'problem-sheds' and 'policy-sheds'" become critical. They give an example where IWRM encourage active involvement of stakeholders in the watershed, which complicates decisions which a single municipality might have made previously.

Thus Cohen & Davidson conclude with recommending that the selection or the watershed as a governance boundary should be a careful choice. They encourage it whenever there is already a hydrologic challenge with a strong governance structure in place.

Adaptive Water Governance

Huitema, D., E. Mostert, W. Egas, S. Moellenkamp, C. Pahl-Wostl, and R. Yalcin. 2009. Adaptive water governance: assessing the institutional prescriptions of adaptive (co-)management from a governance perspective and defining a research agenda. Ecology and Society 14(1): 26.

Huitema, et. al, included an analysis of literature reviewing watershed governance. The review discussed the techniques used by professionals to create watershed management organizations which are becoming more and more prevalent in the industry of water systems. This analysis explored the reviews published about different techniques for collaboration and governance.. The research centered on answering three main questions:

Do the institutional prescriptions of adaptive (co-)management resonate with the (water) governance literature?
Are these requirements feasible and effective —can they be adopted in practice, do they deliver environmental improvements, and why or why not?
What are the most salient questions for further research concerning these institutional requirements?

A clear issue that came up regarded the disparity between government boundaries and the associated watershed boundaries. Watershed basin boundary lines often include multiple jurisdictions which may not agree or work together on existing issues already. For example, one of the studies they reviewed (Conca et al. 2006:271–282) found that "many agreements do not include all states in a basin and that transboundary agreements are concentrated in basins with a tradition of cooperation." Thus, they found very little evidence to support the "river-basin" approach for developing watershed management plans.

Fundamentally, the issue with new "watershed" focused plans, organizations and management is that the existing political structures already have established priorities and procedures. These groups have a vested interest in their processes which provide security and comfort to those involved. Adding another authority or requiring existing groups to agree to other priorities can create problems.

The critical issues found for watershed management development include "collaboration in a polycentric governance system, public participation, an experimental approach to resource management, and management at the bioregional scale." There is strong support of polycentric governance however, there is also high transactions costs and issues of true democratic processes beyond the existing political regimes. Public participation has been shown to be very positive and supportive of the processes but not always feasible economically or politically.

The experimental approach has been shown to be sound in the literature, while usually only in small scale applications. Thus, for watersheds this approach is not feasible, since these basins are usually so large. The bioregional scale is appropriate and effective for water issues while the strong leadership necessary proves very challenging for these polycentric governance systems. Huitema, et. al, defined a multitude of issues requiring further research were defined:

How to facilitate collaboration in polycentric governance settings, resolve or prevent coordination problems, foster trust, and keep transaction costs manageable, while ensuring democratic legitimacy?
How to organize practical public participation in polycentric settings, including participation in any experiments that may be undertaken or any other research, and how to organize a follow-up to the participation?
[How to establish] the effectiveness or the ineffectiveness of the different institutional prescriptions[?]
How to organize experiments in polycentric settings and promote an “experimental approach” to management that recognizes our limited understanding of socioecological systems and that maximizes learning from experience?
How to implement the bioregional approach for water management and cope with the multiplicity of relevant natural, social, and administrative boundaries?
How to manage transitions toward adaptive (co-)management and how to ensure that transitions are going in the right direction?
Moreover, we think that this theoretical work should not be undertaken as a stand-alone project, but in conjunction with empirical work on practical applications of adaptive management. This can improve the practical relevance of the theory and ensure that it does not remain only a theory.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Uncertainties in International Water Treaties

Drieschova, Alena; Fischhendler, Itay and Giordano, Mark (2011) The role of uncertainties in the design of international water treaties: an historical perspective. Climatic Change. 105:387–408 DOI 10.1007/s10584-010-9896-4

The initial point of disparity is the significant difference between political boundaries and watershed basin boundaries. This included questions about watershed basin boundaries themselves. The issue was more about the human interpretation beyond the factual science involved. The problems with interpretation created issues for governance and operation beyond the political structures. These uncertainties inbred in the system made agreements for management and future direction difficult. Thus, progression to agreement for management over water systems that are naturally in flux became extremely difficult.

More specifically, "the dangers of resource degradation, water scarcity and of an inequitable distribution of the resource" create such a level of uncertainty where treaty design and implementation becomes questionable. Thus, the final ratification and subsequent effectiveness of such a treaty becomes even more unlikely.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Cash Crops Under Glass and Up on the Roof

New York Times;(Late Edition (East Coast)).; New York, N.Y.: May 19, 2011. pg. B.5

This article discusses the seemingly sudden convergence of intelligent design, hydroponic technologies, greenhouse structures and consumer desire for fresh, locally produced organic vegetables. A local entrepreneur in Canada created a 30,000 square foot greenhouse on a buildings vacant roof. Lufa Farms is now selling directly to consumers through their new co-op in Montreal, Canada.

The article discusses similar designs including vertical gardens being developed in skyscrapers. Another farm built a greenhouse on a grocery store roof in order to sell produce below. This provides fresh produce and reduces spoilage and transportation costs. For example;

TerraSphere, a unit of Converted Organics with offices in Surrey, British Columbia, and Boston, designs and builds vertical farm systems and sells its lettuce and spinach through Choices Markets, an organic grocery chain in western Canada.

The critical question becomes whether they can be profitable. The cost for greenhouse construction on a roof can be $1-$2 million per acre while the operation and maintenance can be considerably less. Greenhouses do not require tractors or heavy equipment to farm, nor do they need as much fertilizers and pesticides. The hydroponic systems function without any soil at all. Currently, New York city is estimated to have 14,000 acres of rooftop space available for farming, which could grown enough produce to feed as many as 20 million people.

BrightFarms has contracted with supermarkets to build multiple greenhouses. They found with the higher gas costs that the greenroofs' produce usually requires little or no travel. The reduced travel often drops prices 50%. Thus, the CEO of BrightFarms, Paul Lightfoot, anticipates "$100 million in revenues by the end of 2015 and $1 billion by the end of 2020."

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Why Not the Humanities

Nussbaum, Martha C.. Not for Profit : Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press, 2010. p 7. Copyright © 2010. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.

Martha starts off talking about how the world's education systems are moving to drop art and history since they are useless for the profit driven economy. Everyone is focused on the science and technical education and nothing else. I'm reminded of the quote from American philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) who said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Thus getting rid of the history classes will make it easy for the power that be, no one needs to be creative, but only keep doing the "same-old same-old."

In a democracy that is perfect for the elite who want more war mongering, more greed and more sickness and disparity to promote the first two. Why else would they promote the machine education to create more mechanical sheeple who engage in production and vegetation. How appropriate to see Martha go on to issues of the soul, where people are programed to see objects and means to their ends and not people any more. This goes along with the latin phrase: divide et impera: "Divide and conquer" (from Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great)

First it was the development of "divorce" to destroy the nuclear family. No family then, there is no stability or social structure at all. How can a community develop without families? And if there is no sound community then the "Holy Box of Oz" can insure the little sheeple do what they are told to do, just vegetate in front of the holy box:

(((time to 630 is perfect on this video)))
Not my cup of tea... Martha states this clearly:

"These abilities are associated with the humanities and the arts: the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a 'citizen of the world;' and, finally, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person"

She goes on to discuss how democracy can not survive without full citizens. This is really so true. For decades the US has survived, but it's not a democracy. People still believe it is, but it really isn't. Votes are collected and counted, but also separated and burned. Now it's done with technology, while when the counties in Florida first started it was standard procedure to have a dumpster burn on election night. That has happened for generations here, and everyone in the system knew it, and laughed about it. "Dam Yankee's can't get elected here." Course the Bush Gore fiasco made it obvious to everyone across the world, but still nothing was done about it. SO what can you do? Go to court? But all the judges are appointed or elected too, do you think they will allow anyone to rock the boat they are in?

Not likely. But again Martha in this article does make the clear statement that "cultivated capacities for critical thinking and reflection are crucial in keeping democracies alive and wide awake" which is precisely my point about sheeple - - lost people following each other around, not very conscious, no idea where they are going, but content and happy to just be sheep vegetating in front of the boob tube!

Monday, May 23, 2011

Making Watershed Partnerships Work

Leach, William D. and Pelkey, Neil W. Making Watershed Partnerships Work: A Review Of The Empirical Literature. Journal Of Water Resources Planning And Management / November/December 2001 378-385

This article reviewed 37 empirical literature studies on watershed partnerships between 1990-1999 within the developed English-speaking Nations of Australia, US and Canada. These studies identified 210 "lessons learned" which were grouped for review into 28 thematic categories that were then divided in 4 main factors for analysis which included: 1—resources and scope (eigenvalue 3.5; 24%) 2—Flexibility and Informality (eigenvalue 3.1; 21%) 3—ADR theory variables (eigenvalue 4.9; 33%) 4—IAD theory variables (eigenvalue 2.5; 17%).

The two main goals were first to assess the partnership policies used and second to make recommendation for new partnerships. As many know in this field, the US National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA: 42 USC §4321 et. seq 1969) initiated the requirement for Environmental Impact Assessments for all major federal actions. This included a minimal level of public input. As other research has shown the engaged citizens improve the community support of major water works projects (Borton, Warner, Wenrich, Havlick, & Frost 1970). In this case the Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) first sponsored a “groundbreaking” study to explore public involvement in New York’s Susquehanna River watershed in 1969. Similarly, this current article pointed out that watershed partnerships have been more and more common in the last decade.

28 thematic categories
The article defined Watershed Partnerships as "assemblies of stakeholders who periodically convene to discuss or negotiate the management of streams, rivers, or watersheds (Sommarstrom in Born and Genskow 1999)" (Leach and Pelkey 2001). Such meetings can be highly formal or informal providing only general guidance and direction to the more formal legislative bodies. Partnerships have been shown to engage stakeholders in active communication and build consensus to avoid costly delays and litigation (Manring 1998).

The article continues with listing several other major studies which determined other key facts regarding partnerships. Leach and Pelkey (2001) references included:

watershed partnerships distribution and function (University of Colorado 1996; Kenney 1999)
social and environmental factors that promote new partnership formation (Leach and Pelkey 2001a)
threats and opportunities that partnerships create for representative democracy (Kenney 2000)
watershed groups involving a shared common vision from the start (Cook 2000)
partnerships as an egalitarian alternative to agency-dominated management (Griffin 1999; Kenney 1999).
watershed partnerships as combinations of theory and evidence (Born and Sonzogni 1995; Margerum and Born 1995; Toupal and Johnson 1998; Bellamy et al. 1999; and Griffin 1999)

For Leach and Pelkey current analysis the criteria for selection of studies to review included:

Empirical studies
Analytical studies with factors for success, including data.
Only in Australia, Canada, or the United States.
only long-term "Partnerships" with the planning and/or implementation of projects.
‘‘Watershed’’ is defined liberally to include natural issues at the scale of watersheds or ecosystems.

Another, key element discussed in the article was that all the selected studies included measures of the partnership success based on written stakeholder perceptions, surveys or other actual partnership activity documentation. However, none of the studies included an analysis of any possible socioeconomic or ecological watershed impacts.

However, Leach and Pelkey analysis of the existing research was substantial. I have summaries the top ten identified "lessons learned" for "watershed partnership success" include:

1	Adequate funding	62.2%
2	Effective leadership	59.5%
3	Limited scope	43.2%
4	Inclusive diverse participation	43.2%
5	Creative, cooperative & committed participants	43.2%
6	Good interpersonal skills & mutual trust	43.2%
7	Begin with completing low conflict tasks	37.8%
8	Active professional staff participation	35.1%
9	Well-defined decision rules or process rules	32.4%
10	Emphasized scientific information or understanding importance	29.7%

These lessons learned provide one dimension of how to create watershed partnership successes (see 10-20 below). However, to get a better understanding of how these different issues affect each other, and how certain factors compliment each other, the authors completed a factor analysis.

4 main factors for analysis
To begin this review the "factor analysis" procedures used include:

Factor analysis is a commonly used "exploratory technique" (Harman 1976). The analysis was carried out using "Sorensen’s similarity index" (Greig-Smith 1983). "MVSP software" calculated Sorensen’s index. "NCSS software" performed the factor analysis with principal axis extraction and varimax rotation. [[[direct quotes to look up and link]]]

The factors are defined:
Factor 1 - Resources and Scope - This first factor accounted for 24% of the variance. This included resources such as time, legislative support, agency support, funding and complimentary other resources. Gordon and Jones (1998); Born and Genskow (1999) claim hydrologic watersheds are best because corresponding to the "problem shed" which is contrary to Thomas (1999) who claimed large watershed resulted in too many issues and distance barriers to stakeholders.

Factor 2 - Flexibility and Informality - This factor accounted for 21% of the variance, including issues of operation rules, authority, federal, state and local balancing as well as other governance and decision making processes. Studies indicated that strength lies in the partnerships ability to provide a "flexible, informal, and relatively egalitarian alternative to traditional forms of resource management"

Factor 3 - Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) - This factor resulted in 33% variance, which included the levels of effective communication, well-defined rules, consensus building, open membership with clear membership rules, high levels of trust, manageable goals and effective leadership.

Factor 4 - This factor had a 17% variance using the IAD framework of a "rational factor model" with well-defined rules and transparent stakeholder rights and responsibilities.

These factors do represent how some studies specifically used the ADR and IAD methods, but over all the final conclusions for successful partnerships seemed a bit elementary. First they determined that funding and management were critical to success. This included that a skilled facilitator was a first step for successful partnerships, and this improved with a facilitator who was neutral to the process, followed clearly defined rules with free sharing of information. Next in importance was the creative adn cooperative stakeholders ready to compromise and find consensus instead of simply fight for the party-line. This lead to a recommendation that future research explore removing "intransigent members without creating new problems."

Reerences

Born, S. M., and Genskow, K. D. (1999). ‘‘Exploring the watershed approach: Critical dimensions of state-local partnerships.’’ The Four Corners Watershed Innovators Initiative Final Rep., River Network, Portland, OR

Borton, T. E., Warner, K. P., Wenrich, J. W., Havlick, S. W., & Frost, J. (1970). The Susquehanna Communication-Participation Study: Selected Approaches to Public Involvement in Water Resources Planning. Alexandria, Virginia: U. S. Army Engineer Institute for Water Resources.

Manring, N. (1998). ‘‘Collaborative resource management: Organizational benefits and individual costs.’’ Admin. & Soc., 30(3), 274–290.