Collaborative governance or private policy making? When consultants matter more than participation in collaborative environmental planning

ABSTRACT

The study of collaborative governance constitutes an established sub-literature within environmental policy and management scholarship. Among the lessons of this literature is that collaborative planning outputs are shaped by the mix of collaborative participants in question and the commitment participants exhibit towards joint planning efforts. This paper argues that a focus on the composition and commitment of collaborative participants ignores an increasingly prevalent actor in environmental planning – private sector contract consultants. We examine the relative influence of stakeholder attendance and the consulting firm providing support and facilitation in the case of integrated water resource management (IWRM) planning in the state of Georgia. Using attendance data derived from meeting minutes for ten concurrently operating regional IWRM councils, we document that neither the strength nor the commitment of collaborative efforts correlate with the content of planning outputs. Instead, the variation observed among regional plans can be largely explained by taking into account the consultant firms that were contracted to advise IWRM councils. Our discussion addresses the practical implications of relying on professional consultant services in environmental policy processes, and the theoretical imperative of incorporating consultant influence when explaining collaborative governance processes, outputs, and outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental planning
• collaborative governance
• consultants
• IWRM

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tyler A. Scott is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis.

David. P. Carter is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Utah.

ORCID

Tyler Andrew Scott http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4214-5895

Notes

1 This overview paragraph borrows heavily from Koontz and Thomas (2006) review article on collaborative management.

2 A point of clarification is necessary: while our data are highly detailed in terms of tracking individuals’ meeting-by-meeting attendance, we are not able to identify the particular interest group or organization each participant represents. We discuss these data with more specificity below, but in brief, we know that the Governor of Georgia appointed 40 individuals to each council, with appointments intended to reflect the breadth of relevant local interests--local governments, utilities, industry, environmental groups, etc. While the inability to link participant names to interest groups prevents analysis of how who participates shapes outputs, we assume that in a more general sense all council appointees represent local interests. Thus, participation can be viewed as reflecting operationalization of local perspectives. This can then stand in contrast with the influence of consultants.

3 Document records show that representatives from more than 50 different firms attended a pre-solicitation information meeting in June, 2008 (http://www.gawaterplanning.org/documents/presolicitation_signin_sheet.pdf, last accessed July 16, 2018) and an even larger number of firms were represented at a subsequent ‘statement of qualitfications’ meetings held in July and October 2008 (http://www.gawaterplanning.org/documents/statement_of_qualifications_october_2008.pdf and http://www.gawaterplanning.org/documents/statement_of_qualifications_july_2008.pdf, ast accessed July 16, 2018). The overall budget over 3 years was $36 M, meaning that around $1.2 M per year per planning council was available (http://www.gawaterplanning.org/documents/supplemental_information_followup.pdf, last accessed July 16, 2018).

4 http://www.gawaterplanning.org/documents/supplemental_information_followup.pdf, last accessed July 16, 2018.

5 The eleventh region designed in the State Water Plan, the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District (MNGWPD) is not included in this study because it followed a different set of procedures; the MNGWPD effectively constitutes the city of Atlanta metropolitan area, and had a regional planning procedure in place prior to the adoption of the Comprehensive Statewide Water Management Planning Act. In terms of the planning commissions included in this study, the omission of the MNGWPD increases the validity of inter-process comparisons since the MNGWPD follows the boundaries of the Atlanta metropolitan area while the other 10 commissions are aligned based upon river basin hydrology.

6 Note that we do not observe any instance where the state required revisions to an adopted regional plan. While this does not rule out the possibility of state control over final regional plans, it does mean that the plans we analyze are what each regional council turned in.

7 It is important to note why this analysis focuses on attendance by council members, and why this is a meaningful gauge of participation. Council members are local actors appointed by the governor and legislature to represent a significant regional economic, citizen, or governmental (a relevant state agency, county, city, or special district government) interest group (Georgia State Water Plan, 2008). Council members are responsible for developing and approving each basin plan; non-members, such as an agency technician or local citizen, might attend one meeting (for instance, to present a study or make a public comment), but do not have any authority in plan development or a role in plan approval.

8 One planning council--Suwannee-Satilla--published a meeting summary for its first meeting that did not include a roster of attendees. Original attendance data were recorded on a per-meeting basis in files accessible at http://www.georgiawaterplanning.com/ (last accessed July 16, 2018); we collated and coded attendance shown in each individual meeting document into a comprehensive spreadsheet that records all attendance information and the original file from which each data point is taken. These data are available by request.

9 One obvious challenge with simply counting BMPs is that some BMPs are likely to be more feasible or consequential than others; while fully evaluating the nature of each BMP is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to keep in mind that the count of BMPs a council adopts for an issue area might overstate or understate actual emphasis on the issue depending on the extent to which councils adopt many BMPs of little consequence or which lack a path towards implementation, or adopt fewer impactful and implementable BMPs. Future work intends to delve more deeply into included measures in order to provide a more complete picture of each council’s management decisions.

10 In brief, the state of Georgia provides shapefiles for all monitored rivers and streams listed on the 305(b)/303(d) report. Each river or stream also has water quality status data associated with it. As the shapefiles provide the total length of each listed river and stream, by overlaying the rivers and streams shapefile on a shapefile of polygons each regional council, it is straightforward to compute the total length of impaired rivers and streams over the total length of all rivers and streams in each planning region. All code and data use for these calculations are available by request.

11 We define high participation frequency as cases where the ratio of average attendance to the standard deviation of attendance is greater than 3, and low participation frequency as cases where the ratio is less than 3. Similarly, we define high attrition as when the predicted decrease in attendees per meeting (i.e. the slopes shown in Figure 5) is lower than −1, and low attrition as when this ratios is greater than −1 (in practice, we observe three councils with attrition slopes below −1, while the other seven councils have slopes greater than −0.80).