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WHAT'S THE C IN CBAT
Citation:
Galloway, W B., G G. Pesch, Morreault, L. Smith, AND W. W. Barchard. WHAT'S THE C IN CBAT. Presented at National Watershed Coalition Annual Meeting, Austin TX, May 16-19, 1999.
Description:
Community Based Environmental Protection (CBEP) has the intention of making environmental protection spring from the needs and values of the community of interest. Real community involvement in protecting the environment requires a process in which the environmental needs of communities and ecosystems are heard and delineated in a way meaningful to both the community of interest and those government agents whose decisions impact the ecosystem. Actions must be coordinated and integrated among government agencies; private enterprises; and, most importantly, the people for whom services are being offered and provided (i.e. the stakeholders). Too frequently the job doesn't get done at the ground level. At either the beginning or the end, or both, the translation of needs and actions between government and people is perfunctory, forgotten or ignored. We propose a process which follows the steps of Data Collection, Information Management, Synthesis, Analysis, Integrated Assessment, Translation, and Delivery to achieve the goals of CBEP. Key to this process is working with decision makers to determine data needs and delivery of products that are useful. This must happen at the ground level. We are testing this process in the Pawcatuck Watershed Partnership, a CBEP effort to manage the Pawcatuck Watershed in Rhode Island and Connecticut. We will present ways used in this effort to engage different interests. These include producing a State of the Watershed Report, which drew from many stakeholders in many ways to produce a document useful to a broad audience, and the use of a Technical Advisory Committee as a mechanism to respond to a specific threat to the watershed raised by the folks on the ground. As an example of working with the community of interest at the ground level (basically to model the model) we will include a short interactive session to identify possible next steps from the collected wisdom of the session participants. In doing so, we hope to offer useful perspectives on truly putting the Community in Community Based Environmental Protection.