| Planners, resource managers, and private citizens are embracing a new approach to water resources management that emphasizes inclusive, consensus-oriented decision-making and uses watersheds as frameworks for organization. The new approach relies on partnerships that involve joint deliberation, cooperative action, and shared resources among natural resource management agencies, nongovernmental organizations, private citizens, businesses, and governments at multiple levels. Despite increasing numbers of watershed partnerships and a growth of incentives for partnership development, the broader planning and water resources management community has a limited understanding of the connections between what individual partners and partnerships do, the settings in which they act, and what they accomplish.; This dissertation explores those relationships by identifying, elaborating and assessing various contextual, procedural, organizational, and strategic elements that enable partnerships to deal with existing social conflicts over resource management. The research involved distilling a set of “critical factors” from a broad literature, assessing partnership accomplishments, explicitly characterizing and measuring contextual and organizational factors that influence watershed partnerships, and exploring connections between partnership actions and accomplishments through a detailed and systematic comparison of each factor (and its components) across partnerships with varying levels of accomplishments. The analysis suggests four categories of factors as well as three major integrating themes that can focus partnership management efforts. The findings indicate the importance of governmental commitment and support as well as watershed plans and partnership scoping activities. The research also highlights a dynamic and non-linear progression of partnership intensity levels and organizational forms over time, an element that has received limited attention in water resources literature. |
