Are collaborative watershed management groups democratic? An analysis of California and Washington partnerships

Excerpt

Since the 1980s, American environmental policy has increasingly been developed using a strategy of collaborative decision making. Collaborative partnerships between government officials, business representatives, environmentalists, interested citizens and others have been formed to serve not merely as advisory committees to policy makers but often as the policy-making institutions. This strategy has been used for the management of a variety of natural resource issues, including water quality and quantity (Leach et al. 2002, Michaels 2001), rangeland use (Keough and Blahna 2006), public land use (Moote et al. 1997), and species protection (Keough and Blahna 2006).

Collaborative partnerships are organizations of people with an interest or stake in a particular policy or management issue who meet regularly to develop and/or implement policy on the issue, often with the facilitation of an outside party. One very important aspect of collaborative partnerships is their use of consensus decision rules, in which all participants hold veto power. The goal of this style of decision making is to avoid potential implementation sabotage by dissatisfied stakeholders who were not included in a decision.

Debate about the relative democracy of different policy-making models has brought about four primary models. The first is the classic electoral model in which…