Over the past three decades, governments at the local, state, and federal levels have undertaken a wide range of bold innovations, often in partnership with nongovernmental organizations and communities, to try to address their environmental and natural resource management tasks. Many of these efforts have failed. Innovations, by definition, are transitory. How, then, can we establish new practices that endure?

Toddi A. Steelman argues that the key to successful and long-lasting innovation must be a realistic understanding of the challenges that face it. She examines three case studies -- land management in Colorado, watershed management in West Virginia, and timber management in New Mexico -- and reveals specific patterns of implementation success and failure. Steelman challenges conventional wisdom about the role of individual entrepreneurs in innovative practice. She highlights the institutional obstacles that impede innovation and its longer term implementation, while offering practical insight in how enduring change might be achieved.

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.