Incorporating Science in Collaborative Environmental Governance

• In Event: The Politics of Collaborative Governance

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened politicization of expert-driven policymaking and laid bare the limits of mandates for addressing collective problems. Success is unlikely if policy makers apply scientific findings in a top-down manner. At the same time, following public opinion may lead to science being ignored or subverted. It is an open question whether and how collaborative governance might incorporate science into policy making.

The politicization of science has long been identified as an impediment to good policy making. From the Republican “war on science” (Mooney 2007) to the “crisis of politicization within and beyond science” (Druckman 2017) and the Trumpian “post-truth” attacks on science (Fujimura and Holmes 2019), political actions to misrepresent or override scientific findings have garnered popular attention. But the use of science can also be diminished in more subtle ways. Policy makers and managers may not incorporate scientific findings in their decisions for myriad reasons related to organizational capacity, institutional fragmentation, communication, fit with local problem context, political filters, and unequal power distribution. Stakeholders in collaborative partnerships may not incorporate scientific findings because they lack capacity to understand them, or the resources and networks to obtain them in the first place, or because they privilege other ways of knowing.

In this comparative case study we examine how scientific research is valued, acquired, evaluated, and applied in collaborative environmental governance. We gather data from three different types of collaborative watershed partnerships in the Puget Sound, Washington (USA): government-based (federal/local), government-based (state), and citizen-based. Analysis of group interviews, meeting observations, and documents sheds light on how collaborative organizations use science for making policy recommendations, and how science affects their implementation.

Federal and state agencies in the Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Everglades, Great Lakes, Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, Gulf of Mexico, and numerous inland regions invest heavily in science and science-based ecosystem restoration plans and projects that are typically collaborative in nature. Yet little is known about the degree to which science is incorporated, directly or indirectly, into such collaborative governance, and how variation in the use of science affects environmental and social outcomes. This paper develops empirically grounded conceptual models of factors affecting the use of science in collaborative governance, and how science affects partnership outputs and the policy making process.

Author

• Tomas Koontz, University of Washington Tacoma