Does collaboration affect the duration of environmental permitting processes?

Abstract

While collaborative governance has many benefits for environmental planning and management, those benefits are not politically feasible if they impact on process efficiency. This study assesses collaboration's effect on the duration of water permitting processes, specifically the United States’ Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's hydropower relicensing process. Collaboration was measured using a survey of participants in 24 recent hydropower relicensing processes. A Cox proportional hazards model with mixed effects assessed the relationship between collaboration, regulatory framework, hydropower facility characteristics, and relicensing process duration. Collaboration was not associated with time to license. Instead, process duration depended on the regulatory framework (especially the switch to the Integrated Licensing Process and presence of endangered species) and facility characteristics (generating capacity and facility type). The results suggest that agencies should consider engaging collaboratively during planning and permitting, given that collaboration's benefits to decision quality do not incur a cost on overall process time.

Keywords:

• collaborative governance
• water resources planning and management
• process efficiency
• FERC hydropower relicensing

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences and the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University, as well as the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Stanford Graduate Fellowship Program and the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship Program. The author thanks C. Brooks, A. Cravens, D. Reineman, and A. Siders for feedback on early drafts, and two anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the term ‘resource agencies’ to encompass non-FERC government agencies involved in the process. These generally include land management agencies (e.g., US Forest Service), fish and wildlife agencies (e.g., California Department of Fish and Wildlife, National Marine Fisheries Service), and water quality agencies (e.g., Oregon Department of Environmental Quality). Under the Federal Power Act, some agencies have ‘mandatory conditioning authority’ over a project, meaning that they can mandate specific measures in the license; others submit comments that FERC reviews like any other public comment.

2. FERC does encourage consensus because it generally accepts consensus-based settlements without modification; thus, the utility and other stakeholders can be more certain of what FERC will decide if they reach an agreement. Without an agreement, FERC weighs the various submissions and issues a license it deems to best balance between power and non-power interests.

3. In general, a Cronbach's α above 0.8 is considered to represent sufficient reliability for use in statistical tests.

4. The survey was approved by Stanford University's Institutional Review Board [Protocol #26261]. For more information on the survey development or administration, see Ulibarri (2015b).

5. Species listed as ‘threatened’ under the ESA are not included. The analysis was tested for both all endangered species and just aquatic endangered species; however, very few cases had no endangered species present and the effect was larger for aquatic species.

6. Importantly, this approach could overlook some stakeholders’ interests.

7. While the small sample size in this analysis did not permit use of interactions, assessing an ILP*Endangered Species interaction would provide insight into whether the ILP indeed speeds up agency review. Specifically, are projects with aquatic endangered species faster under the ILP than ALP?