Cultivating change: An ethnographic case study of community-based environmental stewardship in a coastal California watershed

Grassroots action to coordinate management of environmental uses, restore degraded environmental productivity and implement resource conservation practices in the Morro Bay watershed region of Central California, has effectively resulted in restructuring environmental governance to implement ecological management strategies in the watershed, estuary and bay. Organized by the Morro Bay Task Force over a ten-year period (1986–1996), community members with diverse interests and goals successfully established a consensus-based environmental planning process, initiated a forum for public debate, and produced a formal management plan to guide cooperative environmental protection efforts. This dissertation is based on ethnographic research conducted between 1999 and 2001, to investigate the historic involvement of local residents, members of community-based nonprofit environmental organizations, resource agency managers and environmental specialists. Field research focused on critical cultural processes that have fostered new social and political relations among traditional resource users and others in the community concerned with solving environmental problems. Research findings suggest that nonprofit environmental organizations play an essential role in creating a legitimate voice for local values and priorities within institutional and political decision-making processes that directly implicate local responsibility for managing adverse human impacts that are occurring in the watershed. Additionally, grassroots leadership continues to play a critical role in ongoing cooperative agency/public management efforts. Study results also explore the importance of public education and outreach organized by grassroots nonprofit environmental organizations to instill environmental stewardship values across different resource user groups and constituencies within the watershed communities. This study demonstrates how education and outreach generates awareness and support for community-based environmental problem solving, and also provides opportunities to gain technical understanding of environmental problems through direct involvement in restoring degraded environments linked to adverse human impacts. Grassroots participation in environmental restoration action also provides opportunities for local citizens to develop skills and knowledge that supports direct participation in formal political decision-making processes that help to infuse institutional environmental management processes with local values and priorities.