Wrap up Chap. 10, "Human Communities"

• Interviews: get to know stakeholders thru personal interviews, learn their needs, knowledge and power. Helps anticipate their role in your project, bu also helps you know what might e coming in terms of opposition.

• "local office"—store-front: this is a tool for getting material out into communities and places instead of making stakeholders come to the Forest Service office or county courthouse. Often used by planners (Not used by the Vorgon Constructor Fleet that, in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Universe, arrived at earth and announced that it was to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace by—pass. The plans had been on display at Alpha Centauri for several years)
• E-mail/chat/conferencing/e-kiosks: there is new potential for electronic communications, but you have to decide how it will serve the groups and does not leave any out.
• Exhibit, kiosks: exhibits at local events, like a county fair, etc..
• Informal mtgs w/ community groups: This is pretty common: such meetings need to be held early in the EM planning process or stakeholders will surely sense that the plans are already in place and will complain about the plan being a "done deal."
• Focus groups: a detailed way to get reactions to various elements of a plan—a method pioneered by marketing experts who realized they weren’t getting enough useful information from classic opinion surveys. Also picked up by politicians.
• Workshops: a form of meeting where you arrange for the particicpoants to work on issues: everything from brainstorming to drawing maps exporessing what they know about species and habitats to what they’d like to see in terms of "desired future conditions." Especially useful when stakeholders are sophisticated NGOs and have knowledge to offer.
• Public meetings/hearing: This is the classic, most common approach, typically required by law. The tools above have evolved partly out of a frustration with the formal public meeting or hearing, where issues seem always to get polarized. Many an environmental and natural resource professional has come home form these with a big headache.

A few thoughts about the complications of collaborative Ecosystems Management (not mentioned or glossed over by the text):

Who decides??????: there typically is legal responsibility in this matter—for federal and state agencies this is usually constitutionally mandated. So, you cannot give away the decision-making, and this can frustrate collaborative approaches. Stakeholders advise, but they do not decide. Furthermore, there is a "Chain-of-command" so that a decision at one level can be reversed at the next level up, also possibly frustrating local collaborative efforts, especially as issues get more political as they work up to the governor’s office or the Whitehouse.

Who implements/monitors?: Sometimes stakeholders can become partners in implementation and monitoring, which can be helpful especially with budget limits, but can also get messy, if they do not have the proper skills.

Relationship to professional staff: this is not mentioned in the text, but my experience has been that professional staff sometimes chafe when stakeholders are given larger role in decisions, implementation and monitoring.

We’ll cover just a few basics here. Starting with the simple model of strategic planning, Fig. 11.5

• Inventory: status; assessment of resources, conditions, etc. problems, and look for knowledge gaps. This step is often given short-shrift, but can also be used to avoid making decisions, so it is important but avoid getting bogged down in assessment.
• Strategic Thinking/Planning: setting goals and objectives, and designing projects. This step is often easy, creates "feel good" vibes, but can also create plans that are unrealistic or even essentially un-doable.
• Implementation: putting projects in place on the ground—a big problem is too much time and energy spent on planning and not enough on actual implementation. Some stakeholders that Ok’d the plan may try to block the actual implementation.
• Evaluation: often neglected—there’s a tendency to avoid accounting for success or failure of projects or objectives. As professionals we need to get past this, only post-audits and outcomes assessments can tell us if we’re accomplishing anything.

A useful planning concept and ecosystems-centered concept emerged from the "Committee of Scientists" – a groups of experts put together in 1988 to improve Forest Service management. (CU Law Prof Charles Wilkinson was on the committee).

We’ll go over Box 11.5 in class.