Recommendations

Overcoming Barriers to Collaborative Planning on State Trust Lands

If interested agencies and stakeholder groups want to engage in collaborative planning on state trust lands on the ground level, they still face broad-scale impediments that arise from the history and context of state trust land management. These barriers include:

  • Lack of participant awareness with the agency mandate and collaborative processes
  • Strain on financial and human resources
  • Limited community connections and inter-agency communication
  • Agency perception that the trust mandate precludes participating fully in process
  • Lack of agency policy guidance on how to engage in collaborative processes
  • Lack of forums for discussion of collaboration
  • Lack of information about collaborative planning

Strategies exist to attack these barriers, so that the environment in which collaborative planning takes place becomes more supportive of effective processes. This section identifies a set of recommendations to overcome these barriers, including:

RESOURCES

1. Ensure that adequate resources are allocated before starting a collaborative planning process because collaboration often entails significant time and money

2. Incorporate the costs of collaborative planning into traditional project accounting.

3. Put a priority on finding funding from outside the agency or pooling funding to hire third party facilitators to help avoid the perception of bias.

KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS

4. Ensure the public is brought up to speed on state trust land mandates and other aspects of land management at the outset of a process

5. Educate organization staff and members about state trust land management to understand how this type of land differs from others.

6. Expand agency communications expertise to better inform audiences about state trust lands.

7. Provide opportunities for training and mentoring in collaboration and hire personnel with collaboration experience.

8. Be open to assigning technical staff to participate in collaborative process or make this staff available for consultation.

9. Access economics expertise to evaluate the costs and benefits of collaboration.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

10. Use local agency personnel to serve as the agency’s representative to a collaborative planning process whenever possible.

11. Improve communication within state trust land agencies.

12. Improve communications between representatives at the table and their respective organizations.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

13. Embrace the discretion and flexibility inherent in serving as a fiduciary of state trust lands.

14. Work to establish collaboration as a standard agency practice for appropriate situations.

15. Recognize that decision-making power can and should be shared, while decision-making authority must be retained.

16. Recognize that participation in collaboration and leveraging other parties’ resources does not necessitate acceptance of those parties’ agendas.

17. Create incentives to encourage staff to engage in collaboration.

18. Celebrate institutional involvement in collaboration.

19. Embrace a participant role in the collaborative process instead of being an observer.

20. Acknowledge and incorporate non-economic resource values associated with state trust land.

21. Find ways to incorporate new business paradigms.

POLICY

22. Adopt the Best Management Practices and guidelines for collaboration outlined in this report.

23. Create methods for monitoring implementation of collaborative outcomes.

24. Incorporate collaboration into traditional federal land management processes.

25. Create policies that increase the range of agency management techniques so that the benefits of collaborative processes are more likely to be realized.

LAW

26. Recognize conservation benefits in the trust mandate.

27. Allow state trust land agencies to engage in negotiated land sales.

28. Encourage state trust land agency representatives to consider local land use policies.

29. Encourage state trust land agency representatives to work with local governments on land use planning that falls within that locality’s jurisdiction.

CONTINUED DIALOGUE AND LEARNING

30. Think about ways to use the opportunity of the Western State Land Commissioners Association Conference and other trust land agency forums to discuss collaborative planning.

31. Hold an annual or biannual state-specific trust land agency meeting.

32. Consider participating in a wider array of forums with external stakeholders to discuss state trust land issues.

FUTURE RESEARCH

33. Conduct more detailed benefit-cost analyses of collaborative planning on state trust lands.

34. Examine current research in valuing ecosystem services and apply it to state trust land management, including collaborative planning.

35. Research the use of total asset management on state trust lands and how it fits into collaboration.

36. Conduct research that explicitly compares collaborative processes to traditional management situations.

37. Conduct real-time research on collaborative processes.