Organizational Dynamics of Watershed Partnerships: A Key to Integrated Water Resources Management

One of the most significant institutional innovations in natural resources and environmental management over the past decade or so has been the widespread emergence and growth of collaborative and partnershipbased watershed initiatives (John 1994, Griffin 1999, National Research Council 1999, Sabatier et al. 2005). These initiatives vary from traditional approaches and are used across multiple water management scales. Their distinguishing hallmarks are: decentralized and shared, devolved decision-making; collaboration; participatory engagement of a wide array of stakeholders; and expanded goals concerned with broader ecosystem sustainability (Born and Genskow 2000, Weber 2000, Koontz et al. 2004). In many cases, these watershed initiatives form a place-based nexus for multiple actors attempting to address complex natural resource management issues, and they have become governance mechanisms for implementing integrated water resource management. As watershed planning and management evolves to accommodate multiple interests working in partnership to achieve more integrated and coordinated management, challenges have emerged with regard to predicting success and evaluating effectiveness of these initiatives (Bellamy et al. 1999, Kenney 2000, Leach and Pelkey 2001, Lubell et al. 2002, Conley and Moote 2003). We would like to focus attention on one aspect of many watershed initiatives—their highly dynamic organizational character and functioning in time and space. In many instances, the efforts and results related to watershed management are not simply the result of the workings of a singular entity or partnership, but rather are the aggregation of activities within an organizational field or network over time (Godschalk 1992, Alexander 1993, Korfmacher 2000). As noted by Imperial and Hennessey (2000):