Collaborative Environmental Planning in the American West: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Collaborative, place-based environmental policy-making has been broadly embraced by elected officials, policy-makers and many academics, and some proponents have even argued that its promise of broad participation, greater regulatory flexibility and decentralisation coupled with broad accountability offers a new model for democratic practice. This article seeks to test the claims made for collaborative, place-based natural resource management by looking at three cases of watershed planning in the Pacific Northwest. The conclusion is that the success of such efforts is impressive in some areas, while in others is limited by the collaborative movement's difficulty in confronting, or developing institutions to resolve, core conflicts over equity, the distributive effects of natural resource planning, and competing visions of nature and the goals of watershed planning. This is especially true in the (many) cases that concern migratory resources and 'nested watersheds', which test the viability of 'community control' when both the causes and effects of environmental problems reach beyond local boundaries.