Making Collaboration Work: Lessons From Innovation In Natural Resource Managment [Hardcover]

Julia M. Wondolleck (Author), Steven Lewis Yaffee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2000

Across the United States, diverse groups are turning away from confrontation and toward collaboration in an attempt to tackle some of our nation's most intractable environmental problems. Government agencies, community groups, businesses, and private individuals have begun working together to solve common problems, resolve conflicts, and develop forward-thinking strategies for moving in a more sustainable direction."Making Collaboration Work" examines those promising efforts. With a decade of research behind them, the authors offer an invaluable set of lessons on the role of collaboration in natural resource management and how to make it work. The book: explains why collaboration is an essential component of resource management describes barriers that must be understood and overcome presents eight themes that characterize successful efforts details the specific ways that groups can use those themes to achieve success provides advice on how to ensure accountability Drawing on lessons from nearly two hundred cases from around the country, the authors describe the experience in practical terms and offer specific advice for agencies and individuals interested in pursuing a collaborative approach. The images of success offered can provide ideas to those mired in traditional management styles and empower those seeking new approaches. While many of the examples involve natural resource professionals, the lessons hold true in a variety of public policy settings including public health, social services, and environmental protection, among others."Making Collaboration Work" will be an invaluable source of ideas and inspiration for policy makers, managers and staff of government agencies andnongovernmental organizations, and community groups searching for more productive modes of interaction.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: Island Press; 1 edition (May 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559634618
• ISBN-13: 978-1559634618
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,289,209 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thorough but not persuasive, July 2, 2007

By 

Arthur Digbee (Indianapolis, IN, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Making Collaboration Work: Lessons From Innovation In Natural Resource Managment (Paperback)

As the title suggests, this book examines success stories in the area of collaborative management of natural resources. The cases vary, but all involve a national forest because of the intellectual history of the two authors.

The book is constructed in outline form with chapters, sections, and subsections. Each subsection essentially consists of its own list of forms of collaboration. Around this outline the authors have built a sort of narrative, using pieces of cases as illustrations for each point in the outline. As a result, a particular issue - - such as collaboration to protect the Kirtland's warbler in the jack pine forests of the northern lower peninsula of Michigan - - may be spread among many different sections instead of being presented coherently in one place.

This structure has its advantages by pulling out analytical points, whereas presenting a bunch of cases would emphasize facts instead of concepts. Yet their stories are so short that the reader never feels that he is getting the full story. Including some fuller, in-depth cases would have helped.

A more important challenge is that looking only at successes is a strong selection bias even in large n or quantitative studies. It's possible that a collection of failures would exhibit the same collection of features that the success stories have. When looking only at successes in a collection of case studies, you don't really know what's driving the successes because you don't know how the successes differ from the failures. Perhaps each success reflects some unobserved luck and there are no lessons to be drawn from anything.

As this suggests, the book is not so useful for improving our understanding of collaborative problems - - the authors haven't systematized their knowledge or tried to explain the pattern of successes and failures. In other words, the book eschews theory.

However, the book would be most useful to people who are involved in practical problems, since you might be able to get some ideas from the successes of others. If that describes you, this book deserves four stars as a kind of checklist when considering community-based collaboration on environmental questions - - "Have we thought of doing X?" Most of the ideas in the book probably won't be relevant for solving your problem, but whatever ideas end up working will be worth the price of admission.