Swimming Upstream: Collaborative Approaches to Watershed Management

In recent years, water resource management in the United States has begun a shift away from top-down, government agency-directed decision processes toward a collaborative approach of negotiation and problem solving. Rather than focusing on specific pollution sources or specific areas within a watershed, this new process considers the watershed as a whole, seeking solutions to an interrelated set of social, economic, and environmental problems. Decision making involves face-to-face negotiations among a variety of stakeholders, including federal, state, and local agencies, landowners, environmentalists, industries, and researchers.

Swimming Upstream analyzes the collaborative approach by providing a historical overview of watershed management in the United States and a normative and empirical conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating the process. The bulk of the book looks at a variety of collaborative watershed planning projects across the country. It first examines the applications of relatively short-term collaborative strategies in Oklahoma and Texas, exploring issues of trust and legitimacy. It then analyzes factors affecting the success of relatively long-term collaborative partnerships in the National Estuary Program and in 76 watersheds in Washington and California. Bringing analytical rigor to a field that has been dominated by practitioners' descriptive accounts, Swimming Upstream makes a vital contribution to public policy, public administration, and environmental management.

Paul A. Sabatier is Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis.

Will Focht is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Oklahoma State University.

Mark Lubell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis.

Zev Trachtenberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma.

Arnold Vedlitz holds the Bob Bullock Chair in Government and Public Policy and is Director of the Institute for Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Texas A&M University.