Economics for Collaborative Environmental Management: Renegotiating the Commons

Abstract

A new vision for collective action in environmental and natural resource management arose to worldwide prominence during the 1990s. It was based on a belief that fostering collaboration between the different civil groups and government agencies with an interest in the outcomes of this management ('stakeholders') would lead them to cooperate with one another more voluntarily in implementing the decisions arising from this collaboration. Here it is called the 'collaborative vision'. The impetus for its emergence can befound in growing recognition within both government and civil society that the inherited dominant way of organizing this management, derived from the 'Progressive vision' for collective action, is ill-adapted for coping with the kinds of complex environmental and natural resource problems emerging nowadays with increasing rapidity.The Progressive vision views the world as the sum of its parts, and presumes consequently that the best solution to any given problem will be found by dividing it into parts, solving the parts separately, and then packaging together the partial answers as an integrated solution. This vision was influenced strongly too by fears regarding the irrationality of the 'public', which in common usage includes everyone except those regarded as experts (Owens, 2000). Hence, it favoured collective action problems being assigned to centralized ('monocentric') organizational systems wherein the problems are solved solely by experts assigned to different parts of the problems, and the activities of the experts are all coordinated by a single integrated command structure.