Striking a Balance Improving Stewardship of Marine Areas (1997) / Chapter Skim
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4. Organizational and Behavioral Issues
4. Organizational and Behavioral Issues
Pages 71-86
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From page 71... ...
, environmental monitoring (Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project) , and the distribution and sharing of information (San Francisco Bay Demonstration Project)
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From page 72... ...
Participants in several of the examples (e.g., Chesapeake Bay, Florida Keys, Oregon Rocky Shore, San Francisco Bay Demonstration Project, Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project, Southern California OCS) stated that, in effect, they had had to invent the process as they went along.
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From page 73... ...
In contrast, the MMS in Southern California was free to create new decision forums and processes and to expand stakeholder involvement. As an aside, participants in the Alaska by-catch workshops were nearly unanimous in their conviction that the rigid, confrontational nature of the formal fisheries management process had prevented them from exploring creative solutions to industry-wide problems.
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From page 74... ...
. Successful governance depends in large part on awareness of, sensitivity to, and management of this complex network of gains and losses.
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From page 75... ...
In the Southern California study, it is clear that when the MMS regional director was promoting novel collaborative decision-making processes (i.e., changes in the agency's mission) , he was perceived by the traditional MMS culture as a risk taker or "outlier." A complicating factor is that a whole hierarchy or tangle of missions may be associated with different levels or parts of an organization and/or with a charismatic leader.
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From page 76... ...
In the preceding discussion of organizational missions, the regional MMS director was described as being insulated from the dominant reward system, which might have inhibited risk taking. In the case of the Maine lobster fishery, the bottom-up management regime explicitly strengthened traditionally important implicit rewards (e.g., identification with a specific place, personal relationships among fishermen, a sense of stewardship)
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From page 77... ...
The MMS regional director in southern California and the manager of the Florida Keys NMS have already been mentioned as key figures in the case studies. In these three instances, the "policy entrepreneurs," rather than feeling constrained by the limitations of available governance mechanisms were able to use them and elaborate them to achieve unusual results.
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From page 78... ...
In the southern California OCS, for example, the MMS regional director was perceived as a risk taker who was operating on the edge of the MMS culture. In contrast, innovations in the Long Island Sound case were encouraged by specifying only end goals for nitrogen reduction and leaving the methods up to local treatment plants.
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From page 79... ...
In the Alaska by-catch case, morale temporarily rose as the result of an opportunity for stakeholders to cooperate on shared problems outside the constraints of the normal management arena. In the Florida Keys, a series of ship groundings raised morale in the sense that it energized residents of the Keys and motivated them to address common problems.
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From page 80... ...
, the bureaucratic organization has standardized responsibilities, qualifications, communication channels, and work rules, as well as a clearly defined hierarchy of authority (Mintzberg, 1983~. Classic hierarchical bureaucracies are ill-suited to addressing the complex problems currently confronting governance and management systems.
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From page 81... ...
, given local agency representatives greater autonomy (San Francisco Bay Demonstration Project) , established collaborative decision-making processes within an existing bureaucratic permitting framework (Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project)
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From page 82... ...
In the examples, extreme operational reliability, rapid and sustained innovation, precise coordination of far-flung activities, and rapid, real-time crisis management were rarely needed. The primary shortcomings of the existing marine area governance systems are related to the accumulation of laws, regulations, policies, and practices at the federal, state, and local levels and the array of agencies that try to implement and enforce them operating in many instances with conflicting mandates.
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From page 83... ...
In addition, sometimes the same agency plays multiple roles depending on the stage of development of the governance process or the decision being made. For example, in the larger context of the NEP in Santa Monica Bay, the Regional Water Quality Control Board is a local decision maker.
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From page 84... ...
The apparent contradictions in these statements are only contradictions in terms. Classical organizational structures and functions have fixed hierarchies of elements that act in predictable ways through simple, additive chains of cause and effect.
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From page 85... ...
Perhaps the clearest example of adaptive planning the committee examined was by the regional MMS office in southern California, which explicitly planned for adaptability, even going so far as to train personnel to function effectively in an environment of uncertainty and collaborative decision making. Strong leadership is a necessary prerequisite for adaptive planning.
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From page 86... ...
86 STRIKING A BALANCE and were determined to improve conditions by working together across existing organizational boundaries. A central guiding force was present in most examples the committee examined, but the bulk of the detailed, day-to-day decision making in the successful examples occurred at the local level.
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