The Politics of Localness: Scale-Bridging Ties and Legitimacy in Regional Resource Management Partnerships

Abstract

Building on research on identity and representation in collaborative resource management (CRM), this article compares individual stakeholders' uses of multiple affiliations representing different scales and ways of knowing in regional CRM partnerships. Researchers have critiqued regional resource management partnerships for being “too regional” and “too organizational” to engage communities effectively. Using intensive interviews and document analysis in two partnerships facing resistance to regional-scale resource management, I find that stakeholders in each partnership use multiple affiliations to construct hybrid professional and volunteer identities. Active advertisement of these scale-bridging ties, or individual affiliations with organizations of different scales, enhances the legitimacy of regional-scale partnerships by demonstrating their grounding in place-based social networks and collaborative action. This finding should enhance researcher understandings of mechanisms of “localization” in regional partnerships for resource management.

Keywords:

• community-based collaboration
• localism
• organizational affiliation
• participation
• process design
• regionalism
• representation
• resource management partnerships
• scale
• social networks
• ties

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Allison Alexy and the Society & Natural Resources reviewers for their insightful comments, and the interviewees who participated in this project for generously sharing their time and experiences. Support for this project was provided by the Social Science Research Council and the Miller Center of Public Affairs.

Notes

Note. Membership at time of investigation (2003); the Great Bay Partnership has since undergone a reorganization of the Community Partner category into Associate Partners and Community Partners. Asterisk indicates pseudonym.

Note. Each column represents one individual associated with the partnership, with representing primary affiliation. In this table and in Table 3, “regional level” denotes an intermediate scale between local-level jurisdictions such as towns and state-level jurisdictions, including greater metropolitan regions, coastal regions, or watersheds. Such “regional” scales indicate that the organizations or groups cover geographic areas that encompass more than one community or town, but are smaller than states or multistate geographic areas such as the “Western United States” or the “Southeastern United States.” That the regional-level organizations in the Great Bay Partnership represented a larger scale distinct from the local level was apparent in the change in designation, after research was conducted in 1993, of the partners I designate here as “regional level” to “Associate Partners” from “Community Partners.” Regional and local organizations are represented by pseudonyms.

^a Even though Cooperative Extension is a part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it is run in a federated system of offices based in individual states' land-grant universities and is a Community Partner in the GBRPP.

Note. As in Table 2, each column represents one individual associated with the partnership, with representing primary affiliation. Multiple shields indicate a case of dual or triple primary affiliations. Regional and local organizations are represented by pseudonyms.

In a comparison of 36 different partnerships, Margerum (2008) found that of 21 partnerships addressing regional-scale problems, 18 were “organizational collaboratives” and three were “action collaboratives.” This represented 100% of the organizational collaboratives studied.

Both operationalizations emphasize the importance of partnership members' self-assessments of the ways in which they actively negotiated their affiliations and the legitimacy these were thought to convey. Just as community-based conservation emphasizes attention to the constructed and contingent nature of local cultures, this study emphasizes that for organizational, regional actors, scale-based social networks were actively constructed in terms of these actors' nuanced assessments of the legitimacy challenges peculiar to local contexts. Inasmuch as regional resource management stakeholders' own efforts to reduce organizationalist and regionalist perceptions are understudied, an empirical focus on these participants' self-reports is warranted here. While such an approach does not attend to outsiders' assessments of this legitimation work, the larger research project included extensive interviews with nonparticipating stakeholders, and found the legitimacy of regional, organizational CRM uncontested in these cases.