Customer Reviews

Making Collaboration Work: Lessons From Innovation In Natural Resource Managment

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.