The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's paradigm shift: A grounded theory analysis of law enforcement officers' receptivity toward collaborative problem solving

This dissertation utilizes a grounded theory approach to understanding in the exploration of the opinions and attitudes of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) law enforcement officers' regarding their agency's effort to accomplish a "paradigm shift" toward collaborative problem solving to gain compliance with resource-protective regulations. While a laudable and timely goal, such a paradigm shift faces numerous internal and external barriers to successful implementation by the WDFW law enforcement division.; By way of general context, over a century of natural resource rule-making and regulation by the federal government has angered many citizens in the American West, and this resentment creates difficulties for the WDFW and similar natural resource regulatory agencies as they attempt to utilize collaboration in the field. Although the use of collaboration has been on the rise in the United States since the 1970s, it is generally not yet the preferred method of natural resource conflict resolution. Additionally, paradigm shifts of the sort being dealt with here in American law enforcement agencies have been historically difficult to implement. In recent history, the effort to implement community-oriented policing (COP) has been confronted by numerous internal obstacles---among the most important being officer resistance to change.; The 43 WDFW law enforcement officers interviewed for this research study revealed that there remains a general lack of rank-and-file commitment to make use of collaboration to resolve contentious natural resource problems on the part of the officers. This lack of commitment would seem to result from two principal sources: the current reward system does not give due recognition to officer efforts to use collaboration, and very little communication takes place between veteran and rookie officers concerning the utility of collaboration in natural resource law enforcement work. To the extent that the WDFW is typical of other natural resource regulatory agencies, the lessons learned from this research study should be of interest to the many other public agencies seeking to make the paradigm shift from feared "regulator" to a trustworthy "collaborative problem solver."...