Wearing my WMC board hat, I was very fortunate to be involved from 1996 through 1998 in a highly stimulating watershed "think tank" that traveled together to the four "corners" of the United States: Florida, Massachusetts, Washington, and California. The Four Corners Watershed Innovators Initiative, as the effort was called, was the brain child of the national nonprofit organization River Network and the Henry P. Kendall Foundation of Boston. With the group's final report recently issued*, I thought it timely to share with readers of The WMC Networker what we learned together from the Four Corners Initiative.
Attempting to identify important common elements among successful watershed approaches at the state and local levels, Four Corners brought together leaders in collaborative watershed management. Two state government and three non-governmental organization (NGO) representatives from each of the four states were selected for this "mission". The effort's premise was that some of the most important environmental management innovations during the next decade will take place at the watershed level and that these innovations will involve the collaboration of state and local governments and a wide variety of NGOs and interests. Through an in-depth evaluation of noteworthy watershed management efforts in four quite different states, it was believed that key issues and critical elements for success to most states would be revealed.
The four state Initiative was appropriately jump-started at a special meeting during the Watershed '96 National Conference on Watershed Management (held in June 1996 in Baltimore, Maryland), when the 20 members and River Network staff began a journey together into uncharted territory. Rules were few. We were asked to host a session in our home state and to commit to participating in a 3 day session in each of the 4 states at about 6 month intervals. With almost no other game rules, the participants gradually unleashed their creative spirits in this fertile environment and fed off of each other's insights and experiences through a round robin of collective brainstorming, questioning, and challenging dialogues. A yeasty facilitator from the Midwest, Dr. Steve Born of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning, kept us churning without bogging down. Moving from defensive postures or static positions to "thinking outside the box" after several of these sessions was like a catharsis for me, if not also for my fellow "shedheads".
First, I want to highlight the lessons that I personally took home from each state.
Florida :
Funding stability for Florida's five watershed-based, regional Water Management Districts, due to constitutional authority given in 1972 to levy ad valorem taxes for water management purposes, has allowed for the creation of a continuous, long-term aquatic monitoring data base that is widely accepted as a basis for watershed management decisions (hence, "science-driven").
Water management district involvement with local restoration groups, such as Friends of Lake Apopka, actively seeks ways for participants to have fun together during their cooperative projects.
A National Estuary Program, such as the Indian River Lagoon NEP, can offer additional sources of funding for watershed education and research and, given the right leadership and personalities, can create positive, new connections for citizens and local government with universities, and state and federal agencies.
Washington:
Concerns and disagreements over proposed state watershed management legislation can be worked out (and an "unawakened legislature" brought awake) when the critical statewide watershed players are involved, willing to listen, and dedicated to developing a mutually acceptable solution. A State Department of Transportation (DOT) can play a valuable role in funding watershed restoration through its need for mitigation credit caused by state highway projects. State resource agency employees can be deployed out to the field from the state office and become "real people", which helps build state-local relationships.
Existing local watershed group(s) can get derailed (with trust broken) by not being successfully integrated into State government's needs & designs for state-local watershed management partnerships.
California:
State and federal agencies need to let go of control and accept a certain level of risk working with local watershed groups, instead of being risk averters.
California's watershed management program needs to reconnect the upper watershed above its many reservoirs with the lower watersheds and to the distant users of exported water. Local watershed groups need a correct definition of the problem(s) and an honest definition of success.
Term limits for State legislators has shortened institutional memories and has shifted legislative focus to local rather than statewide issues.
Massachusetts:
Strong, focused leadership at the top of the State agency hierarchy, with good support of the Governor, is needed to create significant institutional changes within state agencies to directly address watershed management.
Moving state agencies into a new culture and structure is needed to effect real and permanent change in personnel attitude and outcomes. (Example: Secretary directed staff of different departments to locate desks together by watershed, not by agency.)
"Capacity Building Grants" offered by the State can specifically help local watershed groups to become more effective organizationally.
External evaluation report of State's original watershed initiative after four years, plus a three day retreat for state leaders and local partners, provided a remarkable consensus on restructuring the State's program and priorities.
Decisions affecting the watershed's conditions are mostly made at the local level, not at the state or federal due to strong home rule tradition; therefore, the State has even more incentive to work closely with local watershed groups.
Secondly, I gained some Big Picture insights that have helped me to better understand the context of state and local watershed management efforts:
Local watershed groups span a full spectrum of time frames, issues, organization, and composition: from short-term, single issue, informal and exclusive groups of "likes" (e.g., a Stream Team for a one time clean-up project) all the way to long-term, multi-issue, formal and inclusive groups of "unlikes" (e.g., an official watershed council with diverse interests represented); This distinction of local watershed groups as composed of likes (e.g., of environmental advocates, or of landowner advocates) or of unlikes is critical to clarifying what state and local expectations are of such groups, or else we are comparing apples and oranges and even giraffes in our discussions about "community-based watershed groups".
The local watershed movement provides a yeasty environment for innovations in developing: better community relationships due to common needs, alternatives to litigation and other forms of "duking it out" among "unlikes"; new techniques for successful restoration projects; and real buy-in to solving issues and problems together.
It takes years for a community-based process to result in measurable improvement in watershed health, so it is important to find ways to gauge the progress of the process itself. I was sufficiently inspired by one of the Four Corners' sessions to develop a chart showing reasonable steps to success and positive indicators of each step [See article, "Evolution of Broad-based Watershed Initiatives: Measures of Success" by Elder and Sommarstrom in River Network's River Voices 8(3) (Fall 1997); available on River Network website: www.rivernetwork.org/]
State and local initiatives for watershed management will make mistakes, but the key is to acknowledge that everyone is on a steep learning curve and these state and local efforts need to continuously learn from their mistakes and improve over time. Fear of failure should not be an obstacle to initiating state and local partnerships for watershed management, and skeptics need to be patient with the experiments.
Grassroots and volunteer connections help maintain excite ment and enthusiasm for implementing cooperative efforts, while also providing a reality check into what is feasible. Improving state agency performance and relationships will require that resource managers to be accountable for their section's performance, and for staff to be "rewarded" for positive results.
No single model emerged for "ideal" state-local watershed partnerships from all of our discussions. A suggested metaphor was a cookie recipewhile there are some common components to making a decent cookie, each kind of cookie also has different ingredients, blending procedures and baking times. Certain contributions by both state (and federal) government and grassroots efforts are required to achieve successful watershed partnerships.
The dimensions of the state role are described in the final report for these categories:
Lastly, the roles of statewide nongovernmental watershed organizations and networks (e.g., Massachusetts Watershed Coalition, Watershed Management Council) were discussed. Credit goes to Don Elder and Kathy Luscher of River Network, Dr. Ted Smith of the Henry P. Kendall Foundation, and to Prof. Steve Born for their perseverance and vision with this rewarding experiment in critical thinking for and about "shedheads".
* Copies of the Four Corners Initiative's final report, "Exploring the 'Watershed Approach'Critical Dimensions of State‚Local Partnerships" by Steve Born and Ken Genskow (March 1999, Extension Report 99-1), can be obtained for $10.00: from the Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison/Extension, Old Music Hall, 925 Bascom Mall, Madison WI 53706. Phone: (608) 263-2627; email: pacantre@facstaff.wisc.edu (Pat Cantrell); or fax (608) 262-9307. Make check payable to: UW-Extension Urban and Regional Planning and mail to the above address.
