There are many invisible roadblocks to public and private collaboration, said Richard Margerum in a speech Friday.
“I often tell collaborative groups that ‘it took you 18 months, three years, to reach consensus — congratulations — now the hard part begins,'” Margerum said. “They usually aren’t happy with that answer, but that’s been my focus through the years, is what happens after consensus.”
University of Idaho bioregional planning and community design faculty and research scientists sponsored Margerum’s visit to UI.
Margerum, an associate professor and head of the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management at the University of Oregon, spoke at UI as part of the preliminary planning for a collaborative group consisting of regional universities, state and local officials, and local Native American groups, that will work to conserve the Palouse as it becomes more urbanized, said Sandra Pinel, a professor in UI’s Department of Conservation Social Sciences.
“These are places like Spokane to Coeur d’Alene, also Pullman to Moscow, and other corridors like that, across jurisdictions,” Pinel said. “So the problem is governing them, or helping people govern these landscapes through the research we do.”
Pinel said working across Washington-Idaho state lines and between research institutions and city governments poses a problem.
“So Dr. Margerum was here as an expert,” Pinel said. “How do different parties, different stakeholders, reach agreement and then implement those understandings in their own agencies? Basically helping the universities understand how to make their research helpful to local governments and state agencies.”
Margerum said one of the big problems collaborative groups face is deciding who will manage the collaborative group.
“It’s easy to think of adaptive management in a single organization,” Margerum said. “You’ve got people who are collecting the data, is responding back. In a collaborative setting, it’s often an ongoing problem-solving. It’s inter-jurisdictional, interagency, intergovernmental, multiple stakeholders, and you have to think about some sort of a system that will take that feedback loop and make the necessary adjustment to management activities.”
Two other barriers are data storage and time, he said.
“You hear this all the time, whether it’s agencies, wither it’s universities, whatever it is, ‘it’s taking time away from my core business,'” Margerum said. “‘I can’t afford that time to do those things.’ … Do they just go to meetings all day? How do you balance this thing?”
Meanwhile, a government agency may be recording data and saving it in one formant, while a university may be saving it in another, Margerum said.
Jessica Helsley, a UI gradate student in natural resources and environmental science, said the barrier of data storage was a takeaway point for her.
“One federal government organization may use a different database than the other that is managing abutting properties, when they sit down to collaborate — even if they’re willing and able to … they can’t combine it,” Helsley said.
Helsley said the data issue is a problem graduating students joining these organizations could solve, if they are aware of it.
After other issues have been dealt with, Helsley said the post-collaboration process is not to be ignored.
“It’s difficult to build a bridge, but after you’ve all sat down and you’ve built the bridge, it’s really easy to cross it,” Helsley said. “We all need to sit down and make the effort to build the bridge.”