Just as there is an ecology of the natural biophysical systems of watersheds, so is there a social ecology of the various organizations involved in the manipulation of watersheds. A more standard term for the study of the social ecology of organizations is institutional analysis. This article provides an institutional analysis approach for the examination of collaborative efforts to manage forested watersheds in an environmentally sensitive manner. Such collaborative efforts may include assessment of environmental conditions and planning of mitigation activities.
The framework presented is based in part on my research of, and participation in, ongoing collaborative efforts to address cumulative environmental impacts on the Mokelumne River watershed in the central Sierra. It differs from standard social science approaches to collaborative efforts (such as Mancur Olson's) that examine actors' decisions whether to collaborate based on the distribution of the benefits and costs of collaboration. Rather, the approach presented here examines the actors that have already made the decision to collaborate. This approach can be useful to assess the collective strengths and weaknesses of a group of organizations collaborating in watershed management through arrangements such as the Coordinated Resource Management Plan (CRMP) process or similar processes. Where the framework identifies weaknesses, steps can be taken to secure the resources that are lacking.
The institutional analysis approach suggests that the capabilities and characteristics of the actors involved in collaborative efforts to address watershed management issues--working within more-or-less fixed biophysical, legal, and policy contexts- will in large part determine the outcome that the cooperative effort can be expected to achieve (Figure 1).
Three broad categories of watershed actors can be defined: the resource users who may be harmed by adverse watershed environmental impacts, the resource managers who are responsible for considering the environmental impacts of their land management activities, and the regulatory agencies responsible for preventing significant adverse environmental impacts. On any given watershed, each of these categories may be occupied by several different actors, particularly where watersheds have intermixed public and private lands. Also, these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For example, the U.S. Forest Service plays both manager and regulatory roles, since it is responsible for the management of forest lands, as well as the enforcement of numerous environmental law provisions on those lands.
Each actor has a unique set of capabilities and characteristics that provides both resources for and constraints to collaborative watershed management efforts. Eight factors have been identified to describe these capabilities and characteristics, based on observation of actors on the Mokelumne watershed and examination of relevant literature:
Resource management expertise refers to the range of in-house capacity the actor has in natural resource sciences such as forestry, hydrology, soils, fisheries, and wildlife.
Staff levels is closely related to resource management expertise. This factor emphasizes that it is important to have not only breadth and depth of expertise, but also to have enough experts and other staff, such as regulatory inspectors, to go around.
Harvest planning capability refers to an actor's ability to make long-term timber harvest or resource management plans with some probability that the plans will be carried out more or less as originally intended. This capability is important, given that time and space are critical dimensions for both management planning and environmental impact accumulation.
Liquidity refers to an actor's ability to leverage rapidly new resources or personnel with the appropriate expertise to address watershed management problems. The importance of liquidity should particularly be emphasized, since it is a resource that can be used to acquire other resources that may be in short supply. For example, liquidity can be translated into either greater natural resource management expertise or enhanced management planning capability.
Scale entails the question of whether there are many small actors or a few large actors among whom cooperation and coordination needs to be secured. The assumption is made here that it is easier to secure the cooperation and coordination of a few large actors than of many small actors.
Goal compatibility is concerned with how well the internal goals of the actors mesh with the requirements or goals of environmental protection. Where internal organizational goals are compatible with externally imposed environmental protection goals (e.g., laws and constituent demands), the latter goals should be easier to achieve.
Constituent demands refers to the demands outside groups place on an actor to take steps to address watershed management problems. Are interest groups lobbying regulatory boards and agencies to provide greater protection against impacts, or are they arguing for status quo? Are interest groups suing or threatening to sue regulators or land managers?
Leadership reflects actors' capacity for exercising leadership in the solution of watershed management problems.
When examining potentials for collaborative efforts to address watershed management issues, it is useful to put together the categories of actors and ratings of their capacities and characteristics, as shown in Table 1. Simple ratings of none, low, medium, and high are adequate to express the capacities present in each cell of the table. When completed, the table can be examined row-by-row to see how strongly each capacity factor is represented on the watershed, column-by-column to assess the capacities of each actor, or, synoptically, to see the overall capacity of the actors to address watershed management issues. For the factors with both low and high actor capacities, those actors with greater capacity should take the lead in providing that particular resource to the collaborative effort. For factors where capacity is generally low, steps should be taken to improve the overall strengths of the actors. Those actors with the greatest liquidity may be in the best position to support these steps. Collaborative watershed management processes appear to be a place where the communist maxim "from each according to ability, to each according to need" is quite apt.
In addition to the question of capacity of the actors to collaborate in watershed management is the matter of their tenure and authority. Tenure involves the question of what property rights the actor has to take actions to address watershed management problems. For example, a landowner has the rights to improve the private roads on her property to reduce stream sedimentation. Authority involves the police powers of an actor to take actions to address environmental impacts, or, to require another actor to take such actions. An example of this is the authority of the California Department of Forestry to require timber harvesters to mitigate significant adverse environmental impacts or to require them to repair damages resulting from violations of the Forest Practice Act.
Table 2 extends the analysis provided in Table 1 by bringing together actors' authority, tenure, and capacity to address environmental impacts associated with private timber management, Forest Service timber management, private roads, Forest Service roads, public roads, historic impact sources, grazing, and subdivision. Depending on the management issues present on a given watershed, this list of land management elements could be shortened or expanded. As in Table 1, simple rankings may be used, namely, none, low, medium, and high.
An inherent assumption of this analytical framework is that by working in close cooperation, the actors will have a stronger basis for addressing the environmental protection concerns related to each of the watershed land management elements than if they all worked largely on their own. In some cases, there may be several actors with high ratings for the same elements. Rather than being wasteful and inefficient, the overlaps and redundancies in authority, tenure, and capacity found among the resource users, resource managers, and regulatory agencies in a collaborative effort constitute a source of strength.
The frameworks presented here have several analytical uses. First, in the simplest sense, they describe capabilities and characteristics that are important components in collaborative watershed management efforts to address environmental protection. Second, they can be used to identify potential weak areas of existing collaborative efforts. When these areas are identified, collaborators can attempt to reallocate internal resources to address the weakness, attract new collaborators who have the needed resources, or seek assistance from sources outside of the watershed, such as government agencies or nongovernmental organizations. Third, these frameworks have potential to be used as tools for predicting whether a given collaborative effort will succeed.
The two frameworks described here for analyzing the capacity, authority, and tenure of actors to address watershed management problems should prove useful in other situations, as well. These frameworks, modified as appropriate, could be applied to the analysis of collaborative efforts in many other situations where there are multiple actors, with varying capabilities and characteristics, attempting to address a complex management and/or policy problem.
Acknowledgment: I wish to express my appreciation for the contributions that Fred Euphrat made to the development of these frameworks.
