Collaborative Conservation: Building Habits of Democracy

One Fall some years ago, I hiked a stretch of trail in Glacier National Park. I then hiked another stretch in Waterton National Park in Canada. I savored the magnificence of these two places—the vistas of craggy peaks, the aquamarine glacial lakes, the wetlands rich in wildlife, the meadows golden and shimmering in the wind. I saw golden grizzlies—far off across the hillside.

Later, after my hikes, I visited ranchers, firefighters, bear biologists, community leaders, and First Nation peoples whose lives and livelihoods are linked to lands and waters along this Crown of the Continent. All these people were engaged in distinct, yet increasingly linked social, environmental, and economic endeavors to enhance—not merely sustain—lands, waters, wildlife, communities, and economies.

These efforts are not easy, but over the past two decades such collaborative conservation ventures have multiplied. While I served for nearly 8 years at the U.S Interior Department—first as Assistant Secretary, then as Deputy Secretary—I met with folks along the Duck Trap River in Maine, at Las Cienegas in Arizona, the Swan Valley in Montana, and so many other places. In subsequent years during my tenure at The Nature Conservancy, I experienced many more endeavors in collaborative and large-landscape conservation. At each of these places, I met people clustered in constellations of collaboration to conserve places and enhance communities.

As I contemplate this efflorescence of actions, this emergence of organizations, and their interconnection into larger networks, I am reminded of the words of former US Secretary of the Interior Steward Udall as he described himself. I am, he said, “a troubled optimist.” As I contemplate communities, conservation, and landscape-scale collaboration, I guess I, too, am a troubled optimist. I am troubled because the issues are increasingly complex. Their scope transcends jurisdictional and property boundaries. The pace of change quickens. Climate change and its effects on land, water, wildlife, and people are vast and varied. Land fragmentation, invasive weeds, water quality and availability, the quest for energy, extreme fires, and the travails of succeeding in a global economy, even the survival of languages and stories and cultures all challenge us.

Above all, and perhaps most challenging, these efforts unfold in an increasingly divided political context—one characterized by shrill commentaries and political chasms, distrust, a frailty of governing institutions, fragile foundations of reliable information, delicate democracies. Despite this context, in the efforts of collaborative conservation lie the foundations not only of conservation but of democracy itself.  Therein lies my optimism.

It is tempting to reduce the concept of democracy to acts of voting—and, certainly, voting is important. Yet functioning democracies, as U.S. Founding Fathers and early commentators like Alexis de Tocqueville observed, flourish when undergirded by civic and governing characteristics that include, among other attributes, inclusive participatory decision processes, transparency and accountability, individual responsibility, civil discourse even amid dissent and disagreements, equal application of rules, and generation of and access to relevant information.

Tocqueville described “habits of the mind.” Voluntary organizations captured his attention for their shared social and economic enterprises. As I have interacted with communities engaged in collaborative conservation, seeking shared problem solving often despite deep disagreements about, say, grizzly bear management, or water rights, or resource extraction, I have come to see how these efforts nurture the “habits of mind”, the governing and social qualities envisioned by architects and scholars of democracy.

As efforts in collaborative conservation have broadened and endured, their success has depended on sustaining processes and decision structures that coordinate action and nurture cooperation. They depend upon what author William Isaacs, in his book Dialogue, described as conversation with a center, not sides.

A few years ago, I joined people from around Nation to discuss landscape-scale conservation and collaboration. Those assembled identified characteristics they perceived as important to sustaining structures and networks through which people can pursue shared values and actions to sustain places and communities. In many ways, these characteristics are the bedrocks of democracy.

The first characteristic is the need for governance—whether formal or informal—that provides accountability and resilience. Put another way: who’s responsible for doing what? And how can decisions and actions adjust to new circumstances?

A second theme is the imperative of inclusivity in collaboration. Governance structures and processes must give expression to multiple values and points of view. Those processes require, too, some shared agreement on decision processes and rules. How much consensus is enough? When can an idea become a decision? Jim Stone of the Blackfoot Challenge often refers to the 80-20 rule—strive for agreement on what’s possible, not for agreement on everything. Fundamentally, this is the essence of decisions within flourishing democracies.

I have been in the world of policy and politics for over four decades. The ability to navigate deep divisions has hinged on building knowledge, respecting diversity, listening, building relationships, searching for workable solutions, and engaging with a strong dose of humility. Collaborative conservation, dependent on these qualities, establishes the building blocks for the politics of problem solving.

This framework doesn’t mean all folks line up behind all solutions. But it allows conversations to happen—and that is an essential step toward durable success in conservation, as well as for a healthy democracy. A central challenge for all public lands management within a democracy is how to provide a rich context for expression of many values—and a means of generating acceptable solutions. This is what Clinton Administration strived for in collaborative watershed management efforts, and the GW Bush era sought through its Cooperative Conservation Initiative. The Obama era advanced this context through Landscape Conservation Cooperatives. Not a cornerstone of the first Trump Administration, collaborative conservation reappeared in the Biden Administration in the America the Beautiful initiative and their guidance on landscape-scale conservation.

I don’t know how and whether on-the-ground experiences in collaborative conservation can ladder up to reorient state, provincial, and national politicking away from fierce feuds and we-they narratives. But they are a starting point for reinforcing the “habits of mind” conducive to healthy democracies. They offer contexts for appreciating shared values and that actual problem-solving requires understanding complexities and eschewing bumper sticker symbols.