Track 3-4-1: Social and Educational Issues in Managing Degraded Grasslands

Description

Acute and growing social and legal conflict over regulation of non-point source pollution in Washington State has hampered proactive efforts to improve water quality in streams dominated by grazed watersheds. Livestock farmers caught in the conflict over water quality experience legal risk, reduced quality of life, and financial risk. Nonpoint source pollution is “pollution that is not released through pipes but rather originates from multiple sources over a relatively large area”. This diffuse pollution is notoriously difficult to regulate. Because causality is often not definable, coercing behavior is problematic, and most efforts to address nonpoint source (NPS) pollution rely on promoting voluntary practices. Washington State University Extension, in partnership with the National Riparian Service Team and conservation districts, developed a water quality risk assessment outreach program to focus livestock managers and regulators on the drivers of riparian function and water quality, riparian and upland health rather than sporadically collected water quality monitoring data (Hall et al., 2014). The goal of this long-term outreach has been to influence both regulatory philosophy and farmer behavior. Cooperative Extension has operated as a classic boundary spanner organization (Guston, et al., 2001), (Carr and Wilkinson, 2005), facilitating social interaction in the policy/science/social conflict of water quality in grazing areas. The boundary-spanning role is likely even more critical toward behavior change outcomes in natural resource conflict than the land grant university‟s role as source and interpreter of scientific information.

Boundary spanner organizations and individuals “exist at the frontier of the two relatively different social worlds of politics and science”, interacting with principal actors from both sides of the boundary, in order to create a “site of . . . coproduction, the simultaneous production of knowledge and social order” (Guston, 2001, p. 401). They have three defining characteristics: “1) they help negotiate the boundary between science and decision-making, 2) they exist between two distinct social worlds with definite responsibility and accountability to both sides of the boundary, and 3) they provide a space to legitimize the use of boundary objects” (Cash, 2001, p. 439). Boundary-spanning individuals are called to exercise cultural awareness in order to see past surface words and gestures to the underlying beliefs and values which are the true seat of behavior; they then exercise diplomacy to bridge this cultural chasm toward a mutually beneficial end.

Download

Share

COinS
 

Mediating Socio-Political Barriers to Water Quality Improvement in Surface Water on Grazed Wildlands

Acute and growing social and legal conflict over regulation of non-point source pollution in Washington State has hampered proactive efforts to improve water quality in streams dominated by grazed watersheds. Livestock farmers caught in the conflict over water quality experience legal risk, reduced quality of life, and financial risk. Nonpoint source pollution is “pollution that is not released through pipes but rather originates from multiple sources over a relatively large area”. This diffuse pollution is notoriously difficult to regulate. Because causality is often not definable, coercing behavior is problematic, and most efforts to address nonpoint source (NPS) pollution rely on promoting voluntary practices. Washington State University Extension, in partnership with the National Riparian Service Team and conservation districts, developed a water quality risk assessment outreach program to focus livestock managers and regulators on the drivers of riparian function and water quality, riparian and upland health rather than sporadically collected water quality monitoring data (Hall et al., 2014). The goal of this long-term outreach has been to influence both regulatory philosophy and farmer behavior. Cooperative Extension has operated as a classic boundary spanner organization (Guston, et al., 2001), (Carr and Wilkinson, 2005), facilitating social interaction in the policy/science/social conflict of water quality in grazing areas. The boundary-spanning role is likely even more critical toward behavior change outcomes in natural resource conflict than the land grant university‟s role as source and interpreter of scientific information.

Boundary spanner organizations and individuals “exist at the frontier of the two relatively different social worlds of politics and science”, interacting with principal actors from both sides of the boundary, in order to create a “site of . . . coproduction, the simultaneous production of knowledge and social order” (Guston, 2001, p. 401). They have three defining characteristics: “1) they help negotiate the boundary between science and decision-making, 2) they exist between two distinct social worlds with definite responsibility and accountability to both sides of the boundary, and 3) they provide a space to legitimize the use of boundary objects” (Cash, 2001, p. 439). Boundary-spanning individuals are called to exercise cultural awareness in order to see past surface words and gestures to the underlying beliefs and values which are the true seat of behavior; they then exercise diplomacy to bridge this cultural chasm toward a mutually beneficial end.