Making Collaboration Work: Lessons From Innovation In Natural Resource Managment

by Julia M. Wondolleck, Steven L. Yaffee, Steven Lewis Yaffee

Across the United States, diverse groups are turning away from confrontation and toward collaboration in an attempt to tackle some of our nation's most intractable environmental problems. Government agencies, community groups, businesses, and private individuals have begun working together to solve common problems, resolve conflicts, and develop forward-thinking strategies for moving in a more sustainable direction. Making Collaboration Work examines those promising efforts. With a decade of research behind them, the authors offer an invaluable set of lessons on the role of collaboration in natural resource management and how to make it work. The

280 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

Reviews

[Sarah Clement · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an enjoyable, pleasant read about collaboration that manages to be rooted in empirical evidence while still being accessible and brief. I wouldn't say that much in this book is particularly ground-breaking if you are familiar with the literature on collaboration, but the authors are academics who have contributed to that literature, so it should come as no surprise. You can expect the usual array of platitudes and motherhood statements in this book (as in all books and articles about collaboration), but after these platitudes there is always practical advice.

I would say that this book is best for practitioners from agencies and community groups, rather than academics. However, there are plenty of academic references for scholars to pursue if they want to know more. If this book would have had a tight, clear summary on the conditions required to support effective collaboration, I would have liked this book even more. I think that's merely a product of the messiness of this research space. It's really difficult to make sense of all the noise by looking at all the many different contexts and approaches in which collaboration was successful. I think Wondolleck and Yaffee did a great job of minimising this noise, however, and have created a really useful resource for natural resource managers.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book (and it was required for my comprehensive exams). What I ended up liking were the headings and some of the anecdotes. I wonder, though, if the topic is something one must either experience or learn about through a smaller number of case studies. Instead, the book flitted around between a dozen or more examples of successful collaboration and was not particularly engaging in between. If you make an outline of the headings throughout the book, though, you'll have an excellent start at understanding what makes collaboration an important part of natural resource management and how it can be best achieved.