The envelope please. The winner of the Oscar for Most Appropriate Collaborative Process is “ENGAGEMENT.”
The BLM is choosing to engage with other agencies and the public because it has not been able to find a solution on its own. Its resources are inadequate, and it needs to look outside the agency for help.
Collaboration is not appropriate because the BLM will retain control of decision-making. It is vested with the statutory authority to implement the resource management plan for the area.
Furthermore, all the stakeholders have the same interests – to stop mudbogging – so there is no need to negotiate among competing interests to arrive at mutually acceptable solutions.
If there were a way for the BLM to share its decision-making authority, it would have more flexibility in combining forces with environmental groups and local citizen groups. It would have more resources at its command. In that case, collaboration would be more appropriate.
Informing and consulting are not appropriate because there are heavily invested stakeholders, whose active participation is required.
When the BLM field manager states her desire to let the participants know that she has heard their complaints in the past and to enumerate to them the steps taken to date, she wants to inform them. I feel it would be more efficient to inform the participants by means of a written narrative distributed ahead of time. Then our meeting time could be concentrated on engaging together to generate new ideas. I will mention this at our next planning meeting. However, at that point there will only be 10 days before the meeting, which is not much time to prepare and distribute a narrative history.
Introduction to Collaborative Governance 
Engagement is not a truly collaborative process. It is another form of taking input, then making the decision. I understand you are being caught in the dilemma of the federal agencies in trying to respect the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). We will have a particular module on that act later. However, I am surprised that BLM is taking this stance of not being able to engage in collaborative decision making because of FACA as they have been one of the primary agencies engaging in collaboration under an interpretation of FACA that allows them to participate with other stakeholders in trying to solve problems as long as they are not in control of the collaborative process. (This is a touchy issue with Federal agencies, and we do not want to go against their interpretation. However, we do urge managers to consult with their agency ADR representative to get some advice on it.)
That being said, you should be clear that the “engage” model is not normally structured in a way that brings people to consensus on the outcome. It usually requires consensus of the stakeholders who are needed to implement the solution in order to get them to support the decision. Thus, you would normally want to structure the process for consensus decision-making.
I also wonder about those who are doing the “mudbogging.” Are they simply willing to give it up? Do they need to be involved in the process somehow? How would they be “engaged” in this process? Would they have the ability to stop or tie up implementation of a solution that did not meet with their approval?
Right you are. I was hired by my client to facilitate engagement rather than collaboration, and the reason she states for her position is that she does not want to convene a FACA-chartered committee. Why does she not want to pursue a collaborative process? She didn’t explain to me. Perhaps she wants to avoid the expense and time of pursing a FACA charter, and of managing a “structured, transparent and inclusive” advisory committee. Perhaps she does not consider that the issue is “long-standing, and [requires] a formalized, lengthy commitment by and involvement of the BLM.” which would argue for a collaborative process. http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/more/adr/natural_resources/faca/key_considerations.html Perhaps as an interim manager, she does not want to commit her replacement to a direction. Perhaps this meeting is as much about convincing the environmental groups that she has heard their complaints and that she has done as much as she can as it is about achieving a collaboratively-derived solution.
Clearly, you are right that those who mudbog can frustrate any possible solution. The difficulty is that no one has identified any mudboggers, and they would be unlikely to step forward and admit to illegal behavior. If it were possible to engage with them, a new universe of solutions might emerge. I am reminded of how David Kennedy engineered the Boston Miracle by engaging with drug dealers:
“Kennedy’s homicide-reduction program, called Operation Ceasefire, brought gang members into meetings with community members they respected, social services representatives who could help them, and law enforcement officials who told them that they didn’t want to make arrests — they wanted the gang members to stay alive, and that they planned to aggressively target people who retaliated. The interventions worked to reduce the homicide rates.” https://www.npr.org/2011/11/01/141803766/interrupting-violence-with-the-message-dont-shoot
Kennedy and the Boston Police had one advantage; they could identify the criminals with whom they wanted to engage.
Just so you know, I just realized that the wrong “tool” had been posted in blog 5-3 to help you analyze the choice of public processes. I have now corrected that. However, Fred has obviously been looking at the differences.
Fred, you might want to take this situation as your project and work it through all the steps we propose. It will be interesting to see if apart from the FACA issues this would be a good candidate for a true collaborative process. We find that government agency managers often confuse collaboration with “consult” or “engage” and it frequently inflames the stakeholders who think they have been invited into a collaborative decision making process. So one of the key points is to be clear about which process people are participating in. This is one of the primary reasons we offer this course to public agency managers. They don’t always recognize what has caused the “inflammation”.