A Typology of Catalyst Events for Collaborative Watershed Management in the United States

Abstract

While much has been written about the benefits of collaborative watershed management to address nonpoint source pollution and other water quality concerns in the United States, few scholars have addressed the catalytic nature of events that generate these collective action responses. Further, because equivalent catalyst events in different communities do not always lead to collective action, it is critical to understand the interaction between a community's baseline conditions and the catalyst events that lead to collective action. This article presents a conceptual framework that illustrates the relationship between baseline conditions and events that lead to collective action. In this article a theoretical typology of catalyst events is presented that includes both intentional and nonintentional types of events. Understanding these types of catalyst events can help water quality advocates create and/or seize opportunities to nurture a collective action. This article concludes with a call for future research into catalyst events.

Keywords:

• catalyst events
• collaboration
• focusing events
• non-point-source pollution
• trigger events
• water quality
• watershed management

Acknowledgments

This article emerged out of conversations with a multistate Hatch group, formerly NCDC221 and now NC1190. This group consists of several social scientists from primarily land grant universities in the United States with an interest in the social dimensions of watershed management. We are grateful to this group for their ideas and support over the years it took us to develop this typology. We are also grateful to undergraduate students in Purdue University's Natural Resource Social Science lab, who helped review 10 years worth of journal articles.

Notes

^a Funding opportunities can come from multiple sources, and so they are included in the typology twice.