The use of collaborative processes in the making of California water policy: The San Francisco Estuary Project, the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, and the Sacramento Area Water Forum

This dissertation explores an emerging phenomenon in the policy making in the United States—collaborative policy-making—which has shown promise for breaking through difficult impasses and policy gridlock in complex and highly conflictual policy arenas. While most researchers have focused on the agreements from these efforts, this research identifies the broader range of outcomes produced to see if these processes, which involve different patterns of interaction among disputants than they had engaged in previously, were producing other types of change and whether those changes were ones that could be expected from the types of policy processes used previously. The cases include three collaborative processes for making water policy in California—the San Francisco Estuary Project, the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, and the Sacramento Area Water Forum. Together the cases spanned more than ten years, and provided a robust sample of experience with collaborative policy making and the opportunity to trace several outcomes over time.; The findings illustrate that collaborative processes produce outcomes involving continued collaboration among diverse stakeholders, including new processes for information gathering and assessment, and resource management decision-making. In addition these changes can propagate beyond the initial process, producing second- and third-order effects. These types of outcomes are highly unlikely to have resulted from the adversarial processes that preceded them, in which agency staff and leaders, and stakeholders often distrusted each other and relied on the courts to resolve their disputes. Participants' experiences of working collaboratively demonstrated that there were things they could accomplish together that they could not accomplish through independent action. The realization that they could achieve their goals working together opened up a whole new range of possibilities that had not been recognized previously for addressing their interlinked problems. Participants crafted new decision-making and management approaches that entail continued interaction and collaboration. These approaches have and continue to produce tangible decisions and actions that are different from those that otherwise could have occurred, and many of which are arguably better than those that would likely have occurred from the perspective of agency functioning and the meeting multiple demands on a resource system.