Collaboration has become a popular approach to environmental policy, planning, and management. At the urging of citizens, nongovernmental organizations, and industry, government officials at all levels have experimented with collaboration. Yet questions remain about the roles that governments play in collaboration--whether they are constructive and support collaboration, or introduce barriers. This thoughtful book analyzes a series of cases to understand how collaborative processes work and whether government can be an equal partner even as government agencies often formally control decision making and are held accountable for the outcomes. Looking at examples where government has led, encouraged, or followed in collaboration, the authors assess how governmental actors and institutions affected the way issues were defined, the resources available for collaboration, and the organizational processes and structures that were established. Cases include collaborative efforts to manage watersheds, rivers, estuaries, farmland, endangered species habitats, and forests. The authors develop a new theoretical framework and demonstrate that government left a heavy imprint in each of the efforts. The work concludes by discussing the choices and challenges faced by governmental institutions and actors as they try to realize the potential of collaborative environmental management.

How communities can collaborate across systems and sectors to address environmental health disparities; with case studies from Rochester, New York; Duluth, Minnesota; and Southern California. Low-income and marginalized urban communities often suffer disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards, leaving residents vulnerable to associated health problems. Community groups, academics, environmental justice advocates, government agencies, and others have worked to address these issues, building coalitions at the local level to change the policies and systems that create environmental health inequities. In Bridging Silos, Katrina Smith Korfmacher examines ways that communities can collaborate across systems and sectors to address environmental health disparities, with in-depth studies of three efforts to address long-standing environmental health issues: childhood lead poisoning in Rochester, New York; unhealthy built environments in Duluth, Minnesota; and pollution related to commercial ports and international trade in Southern California. All three efforts were locally initiated, driven by local stakeholders, and each addressed issues long known to the community by reframing an old problem in a new way. These local efforts leveraged resources to impact community change by focusing on inequities in environmental health, bringing diverse kinds of knowledge to bear, and forging new connections among existing community, academic, and government groups. Korfmacher explains how the once integrated environmental and public health management systems had become separated into self-contained "silos," and compares current efforts to bridge these separations to the development of ecosystem management in the 1990s. Community groups, government agencies, academic institutions, and private institutions each have a role to play, but collaborating effectively requires stakeholders to appreciate their partners' diverse incentives, capacities, and constraints.