Collaborative Solutions to Watershed Management

Title: Collaborative Solutions to Watershed Management

Discussion Group Leader: David Brain

• The goal is to talk about collaborative issues focusing on the science policy disconnect. It is often misdirected, because our ideal version (the best all of circumstances) is perfect science to communicate to policymakers. This assumes unconstructive ideas about how democracy works, that if we give people good information they will be good voters and select good decisionmakers. That model doesn’t represent how things actually work and creates unconstructive environmental politics.

• The history of environmental movement focuses on top-down policy and we don’t get the results we want to see; it creates a lot of gaming the system, people trying to get around rules, unintended consequences of regulation, but also institutionalized an adversarial politics; science can’t actually solve our policy issues, changes in how our communities live.

• What are the conditions we need to work on to come up with solutions that create bottom up cooperation? Something everything gets to participate in. Not just about education, political education, being given responsibility, getting people to understand they need to limit their own self-interests to find what’s in the best interest of the community; Politics can be a positive thing, about positive decision-making through autonomous choices?

• In watching land-use decisions, there has to be public participation, and we hope that would bring people to come together to make a decision and feel like democracy has been done. However people only get more frustrated and angry at people in power, and the more they’re convinced that there’s a conspiracy going on.

• It’s not that participation is bad, but getting people involved in the wrong kind of process (timing at public meetings), is harmful, and it ends up getting channeled into adversarial directions.

• People get information through their social networks and go along with people that they trust.

• Collaborative solutions means processes of knowledge creation and decisisonmaking, being involved in that decisionmaking process, and feeling like they made a difference in it that they were listened to and they contributed to the debate. It means they can understand the reasoning behind the decisions that were made in the end and they could even accept defeat under those circumstances.