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Potomac Watershed Partnership
Location:
Maryland, Delaware and metro-Washington, DC area
Case description (read more)
“The Potomac Watershed Partnership is a large-scale restoration and stewardship project. Its mission is to create a collaborative effort among federal, state, and local partners to restore the health of the land and waters of the Potomac River Basin, thereby enhancing the quality of life and overall health of the Chesapeake Bay.”
–Mission Statement,
Potomac Watershed Partnership
The story of the Potomac Watershed Partnership highlights the critical role that a coordinator can play in structuring a collaborative partnership and guiding the interactions of its members. The PWP also serves as a model for other large-scale watershed partnerships in both developing a meaningful strategic plan and adopting measurable goals and objectives that can be tracked over time in order to ensure that the group is achieving progress.
What is fostering progress? (read more)
- The existence of a coordinator is critical; furthermore, housing the coordinator within the Potomac Conservancy instead of a federal agency enabled more flexibility and opportunities to meet individual partner’s needs.
- Bringing a disparate group of people, who possess various skills and resources, to the table to focus upon a common objective in a collaborative fashion: the restoration of the Potomac watershed.
- The PWP has also fostered its progress by drawing on the expertise in watershed monitoring of many of its partners to target priority areas for protection and restoration.
What challenges were faced and how were they overcome? (read more)
- The primary challenge was to bring the four original partners (USDA Forest Service Northeast Area, USDA Forest Service George Washington/Jefferson National Forest, Virginia Department of Forestry, and Ducks Unlimited) together into a working partnership to develop a comprehensive plan and coordinated effort to restore the watershed. At times, distrust, misunderstandings and tensions ran high and the coordinator became a critical link for these groups to build trust and work towards common goals.
- One challenge that the group has been facing involves engaging and accommodating new partners in the PWP.
- Interested federal agencies, such as US Fish and Wildlife Service and the US Army Corps of Engineers have recently asked to join the PWP; however, the PWP is committed to maintaining a balance of state and federal agencies and nonprofit organizations in the Partnership.
What lessons can be drawn? (read more)
- Building trust was essential to enabling the partners to work well together, and the process used in this case (the SPOT analysis) provides one effective model for how to build this trust. This process was also effective at engaging all of the partners to set goals, objectives, and measures of progress.
- This case highlights the importance of having a designated Coordinator for such groups with a diversity of partners. When the group members were at odds, the skills, knowledge, and persistence of the new Coordinator kept the group moving forward.
- Having the coordinator for a largely federal-initiated collaborative partnership housed outside of the agency “brings [the Forest Service] closer to the conservation community".
- “The success of the Potomac Watershed Partnership shows that a nonprofit can take the lead on a Federal initiative and effectively and efficiently administer it in a way that is productive for all partners."
Contact information
Related Links
This site was developed by the Ecosystem Management Initiative through a partnership with the US Forest Service and the US Department of Interior. Read more.
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