Collaborative partnerships and the challenges forsustainable water managementRichard D Margerum1 and Catherine J Robinson2

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect

Collaborative partnerships are being used around the world to

address complex water problems and integrate diverse

government and non-government perspectives. This approach

views decision-making as a dialog and negotiation involving

stakeholders from government, nonprofit and private sectors,

and deliberation with the general public. In this review we note

the different demands required for partnerships based on

cooperation and coordination. We also review the typical levels

at which partnerships operate, including those focused on

actions, organizations and policies. The resulting matrix of

partnership settings and approaches highlights some of the

different kinds of challenges faced by government sponsors,

participating stakeholders and the public. We suggest that

addressing these challenges is important for delivering

sustainable water management approaches.

Addresses1 Department of Planning, Public Policy & Management, University of

Oregon, Eugene, OR, United States2 Land and Water Flagship, Commonwealth Science and Industry

Research Organisation, EcoSciences Precinct, 41 Boggo Road, Dutton

Park, QLD 4102, Australia

Corresponding author: Margerum, Richard D (rdm@uoregon.edu)

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2015, 12:53–58

This review comes from a themed issue on Sustainability governance

and transformation

Edited by Bruce M Taylor and Ryan RJ McAllister

Received: 6-6-2014; Revised: 11-9-2014; Accepted: 11-9-2014

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2014.09.003

1877-3435/# 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.

IntroductionThe governance of environmental problems such as water

management often involves multiple stakeholders with

different perspectives, capacities, and goals. Collabor-

ation has been promoted as a means of enabling participa-

tion in environmental decision-making with benefits to

process and outcomes [1�,2,3��]. These benefits include

the alignment of effort among stakeholders to promote

more efficient and responsive management; the inclusion

of a diverse range of perspectives to inform decision

making; the management of conflict; the enhancement

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of social and institutional capacity to handle complex

water management issues; and the translation and integ-

ration of knowledge [4,5].

The first modern attempts to integrate water manage-

ment focused on creating large centralized agencies, such

as the Tennessee Valley Authority [6�]. These entities

had significant resources and power, but a very narrow

mission. Sustainable water management today encom-

passes a much broader set of issues, ranging from water

supply to habitat restoration to water quality. Because

these issues cross many jurisdictions and boundaries, a

simple consolidation of power under a single entity is

unfeasible. Instead, government and nongovernment

participants in many countries are looking to collaborative

partnerships to engage the community, resolve conflicts

and sustainably manage water. Collaborative partnerships

have been created for a range of water management

issues, operating at different scales in many parts of

the world, particularly North America, Australia and

Europe [7,8,9��].

Partnerships are a key component of collaboration, but in

practice they are highly complex enterprises that involve

substantial investment to develop and maintain [7]. In this

paper, we draw on existing literature and our own research

to outline the range of collaborative partnership settings

and the types of cooperative and coordinated approaches.

Like other authors, we note the inconsistencies in the

literature regarding the terms collaboration, coordination,

and cooperation [10,11] and utilize examples to illustrate

the differences and their associated challenges.

Collaborative partnerships in watermanagementCollaboration requires a process of joint information

analysis, goal setting and building consensus for imple-

mentation. This can be a significant hurdle, because

different stakeholders have different needs, missions

and mandates. In many basins around the world the risks

of water insecurity have never been greater and this

creates challenges of managing water scarcity, quality,

competing claims and associated ecosystem services (e.g.

[12,13]). Thus, collaborative partnerships confront chal-

lenges related to power sharing and consensus building,

particularly when the issues and context offer more trade-

offs and fewer opportunity for joint gains [4,14].

Consensus building in collaboration is the most intense

and time consuming phase, as it requires significant

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2015, 12:53–58

54 Sustainability governance and transformation

changes to generate a collective response or strategy [15��].Once a collaborative partnership moves into an imple-

mentation mode, the time demands may decrease, but

participants must determine how they will carry out the

myriad of tasks. This highlights two different types of

partnership implementation strategies. Some partnerships

structure implementation around cooperative efforts

where entities are working together through more inde-

pendent decision making processes to achieve the same

goal [9��,10,15��,16]. This common goal may be set

through the consensus building process, the courts or

legislation (e.g. [17]). If conditions are stable, the demands

of cooperative efforts on partnerships are less substantial,

because organizations remain relatively autonomous and

there is less integration of systems and activities [10]. For

example, local non-government organizations (NGOs) in

Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin have a long history of

purchasing and managing water for environmental use,

seeking to maximize the potential for local benefits and

using shared community values to motivate unique part-

nerships of private land owners, public agencies and other

stakeholders [12,14]. The partnership efforts by these

NGOs have been important for identifying regional goals,

raising funds and building critical capacity, but the imple-

mentation of water restoration efforts often requires lim-

ited ongoing interaction.

Other partnerships structure implementation around

coordination, which implies a process of joint decision

making that places greater demands on partnership activi-

ties [10]. The demands are greater due to high expec-

tations for information exchange, more significant

integration of activities and more exchange of resources

[10,11,15��]. For example, the Reef Water Quality Part-

nership (Australia) and CALFED (northern California)

cases were supported by formal high level agreements

involving national and state government, as well as

regional stakeholders. These agreements and manage-

ment committees guided coordinated data management

and decision making across a range of agencies, including

real-time, adaptive implementation teams [4,18,19]. Part-

nerships utilizing a coordinated approach require net-

works that allow those involved to maintain a flow of

information, exchange of resources and capacity to man-

age adaptively [20��,21��].

Understanding the challenges of these different imple-

mentation approaches is important, because the greater

the need for a coordinated approach to implementation,

the greater the demand for commitment, investment of

time and resources, shared power, and co-production of

knowledge [3��,7,21��]. This requires leadership from

individuals and people within organizations who are able

to span boundaries, build trust and relationships, and

develop a constituency for collaboration within their

organizations [13,20��]. However, partnerships that

become too dependent upon individuals may also be

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2015, 12:53–58

vulnerable to dissolution when there is turnover [19].

Therefore, partnerships will also often require formal

and informal networks that build bridges between partici-

pants and organizations to promote information flow and

joint decision making [15��,21��,23]. Building these

bridges is particularly important when the participants

are organizations that may experience leadership changes

and staff turnover [5,24]. Furthermore, many partnerships

operate in complex, polycentric institutional settings

where collaborative approaches to water governance

involves many interlinked networks that compete for

attention and require decision makers to make short term

and strategic choices in complex systems [25��].

Governance levels in water managementThe concept of institutional levels developed by Ostrom

[26] and applied to a range of collaborative governance

settings [15��,23] helps highlight some of the range of

partnership contexts that exist in practice. Although these

levels are presented in terms of distinct categories, they

are effectively a spectrum of settings. Table 1 combines

these levels of partnerships with the concept of coopera-

tive and coordinated implementation approaches to high-

light some key differences and challenges in collaborative

partnerships.

At the action or operational level, water management

often takes the form of government–citizen partnerships

[24]. Many of these partnerships depend on the linkages

and trust that individuals within these groups provide

through member’s capital and social networks [27��].Australia’s catchment management efforts and watershed

management efforts in the United States, for example,

have emphasized the benefits of agencies partnering with

citizens to restore landscapes, improve water quality, and

enhance aquatic habitat [3��,13,16]. For example, the

Long Tom Watershed Council in Oregon has utilized

partnerships to connect community and social networks

to build landowner trust and engagement in restoration

efforts [14,25��]. These groups also confront significant

challenges. When collaborative partnerships lead to coop-

erative strategies, implementation performance often

hinges on the stability of the situation, the quality of

the consensus building process, and the capacity of part-

ners to carry out their activities [15��]. When partnerships

require a more coordinated approach to implementation,

there are more demands on partnership staff and leaders

to maintain the effort. As a result these groups often

confront citizen burnout [14,26] and difficulties in main-

taining leadership [5,28–30]. These issues tend to arise

because groups are heavily reliant on community volun-

teers and local leaders, which may have limited ability to

sustain an ongoing effort [14,26,31,32] or have ongoing

debates about funding goals and priorities [3��,33].

At the organizational level, water management tends to

be dominated by collaborative partnerships utilizing

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Collaborative partnership barriers Margerum and Robinson 55

coordination implementation approaches involving gov-

ernment and non-government organizations. Cooperative

strategies at the organizational level are less common,

because many of the most significant problems require

ongoing adaptation and interdependence [2,10]. How-

ever, cooperative efforts among non-government inter-

ests and organizations have played a key role in some

partnerships (e.g. [3��]). In the western United States,

federal land management agencies, state agencies, water

utilities and other stakeholders have been implementing

coordinated approaches to manage watersheds and eco-

systems on a more holistic basis [32,33]. These groups

tend to have more access to leadership and technical

expertise, but their need for resources to coordinate

efforts and maintain joint functions can create difficulties

for participating organizations. Regional Natural

Resource Management (NRM) Agencies were created

by the Australian Government to help lead partnerships

among government, communities and landowners [34,35]

and provide more capacity than the many locally based,

action-oriented groups that existed previously. Broadly,

the partnership limitations faced by organizational level

groups tends to revolve around transaction costs, organ-

izational commitment, power sharing, knowledge sharing

and co-production and staff turnover

[5,15��,21��,22�,32,33]. Often the issues being addressed

by these partnerships cross jurisdictional boundaries,

which means they are not central to any one organization.

As a result, organizations are often reluctant to commit to

ongoing coordination in the face of competing demands

for time, power and attention [15��,33].

At the policy level, water management partnerships typi-

cally reflect a mix of cooperative and coordinated

approaches. These are characterized by large-scale sys-

tems involving complex, international and cross-govern-

ment relationships and policies [18,36–38]. Examples of

partnership efforts at this level include the International

Joint Commission (Great Lakes, US–Canada), the

Columbia River Basin (US–Canada), CALFED (North-

ern California, US), and the Reef Water Quality Partner-

ship (Australia) [6�,18,39–42]. These partnerships face

some of the most significant barriers to sustain their

activities during implementation because they tend to

Table 1

Decision-making type and levels of collaborative water management

Governance level of partnership

Cooperative implementa

Policy level: focus on policy

and its interpretation

� Murray–Darling water purc

for environmental benefit [3

Organizational level: focus

on organizational programs

and resources

� Queensland Regional natu

resource management Grou

Collective [51]

Action level: focus on specific,

on the ground actions

� Environmental water acco

reservoir in Nebraska [37]

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involve such a complex array of participants. State and

national political leaders are often important champions,

but this reliance on political support leaves them vulner-

able when leaders leave office [38,39,41]. In some cases,

these efforts rely on a negotiated agreement or settlement

to govern a cooperative strategy. In other cases, the

complex and dynamic nature of the setting requires

ongoing coordination, which in turn demands high trans-

action costs and a high level commitment among the

participating organizations. The result is a need for

extensive staffing and resources to support implementa-

tion, which is often sustained by formal structures and

governance mechanisms that have been called collabora-

tive superagencies (Great Lakes, Murray–Darling)

[4,16,40–42].

ConclusionsThe growing interest in partnerships to sustainably man-

age water resources reflects the growing complexity of

management issues worldwide. The challenge facing

state and national governments is to determine the gov-

ernance strategies that will respond to partnership needs,

while also confronting declining capacity and budgets.

The review of the challenges facing collaborative partner-

ships working on water management issues has two

implications.

First, participants need to determine the nature of the

water management issues and whether implementation

efforts will require ongoing interaction and adaptation.

Collaboration is required to determine joint goals, objec-

tives and actions, but ongoing interaction requires a

greater investment in network structures, time and

resources to support a coordinated approach [20��].The joint decision making required under this approach

demands staff and robust networks to support the flow of

information and consultation [43–46]. These networks

need to be clearly organized and structured to operate

properly [10,20��,22�,44,47].

Second, understanding the level at which partnership

activities need to operate is important for designing the

systems to support them. A study of action-level partner-

ship efforts in Oregon found that for every dollar of state

partnerships

Examples of partnerships

tion Coordinated implementation

hases��,42]

� Australia’s Reef Partnership [19]

� United States CALFED Bay-Delta Program [18]

ral

ps

� Rogue Basin Coordinating Committee [15��]

� Albermarle-Pamlico Estuarine Study [17]

unt for � Long Tom Watershed Council [28]

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2015, 12:53–58

56 Sustainability governance and transformation

investment in watershed group support leveraged

US$1.32 in additional state grant funding and

US$3.72 in funding from other sources [48]. Thus, these

action-level partnerships are extending the ability of

governments and communities to address critical water-

shed issues — often into areas in which agencies do not

have capacity or legitimacy. However, there must be

financial support, government commitment, and infor-

mation sharing to sustain these groups over the long

term. In many places, funding has been sporadic, com-

petitive and insecure, which belies the expectations

placed on these types of efforts to help solve important

watershed problems.

Partnerships operating at the organizational level require

networks that support the flow of information and de-

cisions across agencies [10,15��,43]. These types of efforts

offer better decision making, long-term efficiencies and

better outcomes, but there are high transaction costs and

the benefits are often not accrued until the long term

[3��,5]. This requires leaders willing to make long-term

investments and organizations willing to change their

culture and reward structures to support partnerships

[49,50]. This is a difficult challenge when the pressures

tend to favor short-term results, individual performance

measures, and a focus on core organizational goals over

shared goals [51].

Partnerships operating at the policy level confront some

of the most significant barriers, particularly when there is

a dynamic policy environment that requires ongoing

adaptation and coordination. The political nature of these

partnerships makes them highly vulnerable to political

trends and leadership turnover. Policy level partnership

efforts require significant political attention, which is

often spurred by a compelling problem, significant crisis

or legal pressure [4,18,41,42]. Furthermore, they are

addressing some of the most complex and difficult

resource problems, and require considerable investment

of resources to understand the science and management

options. Their vulnerability and substantial up front

investment of time and resources make them some of

the riskiest partnerships. Yet these types of partnerships

are also some of the most important to address some of our

most significant water management problems.

In conclusion, the increased complexity and competition

over the management of natural resources is demanding

more collaborative partnerships. Our review of these

partnerships highlights not only the range of challenges,

but also the important factors related to partnership types

and management levels that are likely to define the types

of barriers that collaborative partners will face.

Acknowledgement

Cathy Robinson’s contribution was supported by a CSIRO Payne Scottaward.

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2015, 12:53–58

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