Kent Portney's "Our Green Cities" Blog

Civic Engagement and Water Diplomacy

As part of the Water Diplomacy doctoral program at Tufts, I recently put together a once-a-month symposium on "civic engagement and water diplomacy."  The idea behind this symposium is to bring together students, faculty, and practitioners who have experience or interest in the involvement of people other than water engineers in water decision making.  Peter Levine from Tisch College at Tufts is the coordinator, and as one of the world's experts on civic engagement, he has brought a new dimension to the study of water decisions.  The first discussion in September focused on what the great political scientist Elinor Ostrom had to say about the role of ordinary people in overcoming the tragedy of the commons and related common pool resource problems.  The second meeting focused on "integrated water resource management" which, among other things, prescribes extensive public participation in water policy and decision making. Jerry Delli Priscoli from the US Army Corps of Engineers (one of the world's experts on civic engagement in water issues) was our special guest. The third meeting, scheduled for later this month, will likely address collaborative watershed management.  And the final meeting in December will look at mutual gains approaches to stakeholder engagement in water negotiations. Larry Susskind from MIT will likely lead this discussion. For more information, go to the water diplomacy web site.

Non-state actors workshop

I was fortunate to have been invited to participate in a workshop last week on "Social science perspectives on non-state actors in environmental governance" at the National Socio-environmental synthesis center at the University of Maryland in Annapolis.  Many thanks to Carmen Sirianni, Dana Fisher, and Andy Andrews for the invitation and for putting the workshop together. Not all of the presentations had to do with cities, but research by Dana Fisher from the Universty of Maryland and by Suzanne Staggenborg from Pitt focused on local groups of various sorts.  Dana's work is about what she calls local "hybrid" organizations which perform lots of different environmental functions. Her analysis is largely focused on New York City, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. I presented work with my colleague Jeff Berry that looks at how local groups engage in advocacy with local policy makers.  Several papers on this subject are accessible at the ourgreencities web site.