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Context |
Broadening
Participation in Biological Monitoring: |
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Definition—“Context” is used here to describe the circumstances, events, or environment of a participatory monitoring project. We discuss various aspects of the overall context and how these interact, including: political, legal, policy, environmental, regulatory, procedural, organizational, community, land tenure, economic, and cultural aspects. The overall context of a monitoring project is invariably multi-faceted and each aspect of the context affects the collaborative process and the design of a monitoring project. For example, monitoring of biodiversity on corporate timber plantations could entail political issues for environmental groups and economic or property rights issues for timber companies. Time spent building trust could be especially important in this context and the monitoring project might work better if explicit understandings were reached in advance. Mutual understanding of the motivations to collaborate could lead to win-win situations where species are conserved and timber companies avoid onerous regulation. Collaborative description of the context—Stakeholders can be invaluable in helping to explicate the context of the monitoring project, but not all participatory monitoring projects will merit the same levels of involvement from stakeholders. Time and budget permitting, however, the more opportunities that are created for participants to be involved in defining the relevant context, the greater will be their vested interest in success of the project. All stakeholders have different perspectives on what the important factors are, how important they are, and how they interact. By soliciting and weighing all these perspectives, a more accurate picture of the context of the project will emerge to inform subsequent decision-making. Political context—No natural resource management issues exist outside a political context. Relationships between more powerful stakeholders (such as well-educated, higher income, English-speaking, or politically-connected people) and less powerful stakeholders (such as people with less formal education, low income, or poor English speaking skills) often influence the tactics that such parties employ to influence decisions. For instance, less powerful stakeholders sometimes feel they have few effective choices other than to be obstructive. Political considerations also influence the likelihood that various stakeholders would be inclined to join a participatory project. For instance, because less powerful stakeholders might worry that the project leaders will take advantage of them or that the process will work against their interests, they could fear losing their right to protest decisions that end up being adverse to their interests. Or they might anticipate regulatory reprisals from what they consider inappropriate interpretation and use of results. Addressing the political context often entails paying careful attention, and dedicating sufficient time, to building trust among participant stakeholders. Unless powerful stakeholders (for instance, government agencies) approach participatory projects with integrity and long-term commitment of policy, personnel, and resources; other stakeholders can easily become disillusioned and mistrustful. Making a series of consecutive short-term commitments that are periodically reviewed and renewed is one approach to avoiding broken promises in a changeable world. Legal context—Laws can constrain or expand the options of agency personnel. They also can affect the legal status of participants. They affect safety, liability, compensation, organization, access, real estate property rights, and intellectual property rights. Laws also can provide incentives to collaborate in order to avoid litigation or legislative mandates. For example, collaborative monitoring can be an excellent way to help meet NEPA requirements. Invariably laws are complex. Collaborators might wish to consult experts or lawyers to help them fully understand the legal context and ramifications of a participatory monitoring project. Policy context—Policies drive the relative allocation of resources within an organization to different tasks. If an organization does not have an official policy of encouraging collaborative partnerships, employees might have little official incentive to risk such innovations. The official policy of many federal agencies and other organizations has shifted toward support for collaborative efforts during the last decade, but these policy directions have yet to filter down to managers in many cases. The process of implementing policy can be bureaucratically complex, involving changes in regulations, procedures, forms, norms of behavior, and sometimes recalcitrant personnel. Nevertheless, there is a growing array of collaborative and participatory monitoring projects for air, water, fisheries, and forestry that demonstrate strategic benefits of participation. Policy accords to promote such projects also can be developed between organizations. Policy incentives for such endeavors are likely to continue increasing. Regulatory context—Regulations are the means by which organizations implement policy. Designing new regulations to supplant old ones takes time and team work, and if the results are not clearly communicated, employees can be confused about which regulations apply or are given the greatest emphasis. Regulations regarding use of volunteer labor or contracting authority to compensate participants are several examples. Training is often required for managers to become familiar with new regulations. However, once a system is set up to for volunteers or others to work on monitoring activities, subsequent projects will be progressively easier to implement. Some agencies have developed guidelines for navigating regulations related to volunteer involvement, such as the USDA Forest Service’s Managing Volunteers. Procedural context—Regulations are executed with procedures and documentation forms. Such procedures are often driven by accounting or liability considerations. Although following such procedures can be very time-consuming, they also prevent subsequent problems and serve to make agreements and arrangements explicit. All stakeholders should understand the procedural requirements of the participating organizations so they can comply as needed and appreciate the work that others need to perform. Although using the workbook portion of this manual to document a participatory monitoring project will add an additional layer of paperwork, much of the documentation might already be required by an organization and can simply be incorporated as part of the project plan. Organizational culture context—Organizational culture is too often one of the largest barriers to effective collaborations. Reasons vary but include lack of support for personnel who wish to experiment with collaboration or recalcitrant attitudes on the part of key personnel. Lack of support can take the form of not listing collaboration among job duties, performance evaluations that do not value such efforts, lack of training opportunities, and frequent personnel transfers. Negative attitudes toward collaboration on the part of managers might be the result of previous negative experiences; lack of training or experience with collaborative processes; fear of the process due to perceived lack of control over the situation; lack of appreciation for the opinions, needs, and abilities of others; avoidance of controversy or additional work; and inherent complacency. Environmental context—Every project has an environmental context that consists of temporal and spatial components as well as the structure, function and process of the ecosystem. Temporally, relevant questions might include: At what stage of succession, decline, improvement, trend, or risk are the environmental conditions? Is the goal of the project to detect early warnings of change, or to determine trends in improvement or decline? Spatially, possible questions include: Where in the landscape will this project occur? What is the relationship of the project site to surrounding properties? To help define how a monitoring project relates to issues of ecosystem components, functions, or processes; participants might help create a conceptual map or model of critical species, benefits derived from the local forest, and how forest conditions respond to human activities. Community context—Many successful collaborative projects in recent years have been community sponsored. Such efforts typically arise from the lack of local resource-related jobs or land-use controversies. Some collaborative efforts arise in response to resource threats (such as the spread of invasive species or development of forest stands susceptible to catastrophic fire) and community groups join managers to address the problem. To the extent that such endeavors offer forest managers unique opportunities to accomplish their monitoring goals in a context of declining budgets, such individuals are becoming increasingly willing to work with community groups. Many successful collaborative monitoring projects have resulted from managers remaining open to community-based leadership and initiative. Land tenure context—Land ownership is a human concept. Organisms will occupy available forested habitat whoever owns the land so forest biodiversity issues cross all ownership boundaries. Land ownership, management goals, and forest practices do, however, have a great deal of impact on habitat availability and quality. Public lands typically have different management goals than tribal or private lands, resulting in varied forest management practices and concerns. For any given participatory monitoring project, land tenure will influence issues such as access rights, relative support for the project, allowable monitoring procedures, interactions with other land users, and publicity. Economic context—The economic context of collaboration can be exceedingly important to some stakeholders and secondary to others, often depending on factors such as each participant’s employment status. Recognizing and accommodating these differences is critical to a sense of fairness, full participation on the part of all stakeholders, and appropriate benefits accruing to each. Stakeholder groups might have economic interests, for instance in rural economic development through sustainable natural resource use. Some participants in a collaborative monitoring project might have a vested interest in the harvest of the particular natural resource that is being monitored, such as a water resource or a nontimber forest product like wild mushrooms. Whenever participants that favor a particular outcome are involved in a collaborative project, safeguards to insure accurate data and nonbiased interpretation (such as thorough training or third-party auditing) become more important for producing results that all parties accept as credible. Cultural context—The cultural context involves the norms of the participants, stakeholder groups, and the local communities. Such norms can be as simple as when people like to start work or where they are comfortable meeting. People often use different modes of expression or entirely different languages. Planning with these factors in mind will greatly improve the experience and efficiency of a participatory project. Organizations in turn, whether public or private, have their own “culture” that might be very foreign to participants from outside the organization. Often individuals from different cultural backgrounds can have fundamentally divergent epistemologies (ways of understanding and viewing the natural world). Such differences often result in divergent opinions about, and conventions regarding, the rights and responsibilities of humans as they interact with nature. For instance local ecological knowledge (LEK) or traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) are terms currently being used to describe the ways that local cultures come to understand their world through long experience interacting with nature in a specific place. The knowledge and experience that local people contribute can be a valuable asset to the design and implementation of a monitoring project. Meshing these ways of understanding the natural world and our place in it with scientific perspectives can be challenging and involves mutual understanding, respect, and open minds. Clear communication is essential to bridging cultural divides.
Checklist—
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