Leaping forward:
Building resilience by communicating vulnerability
Moira L. Zellner, Charles J. Hoch, Eric W. Welch
College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago
Abstract
The institutional relationships that organize the complex flow of goods and services
required in modern life rely upon trust in the competence, sincerity, honesty and
legitimacy of others. The more complex the flows and the more heterogeneous the actors
involved, the greater the vulnerability to violations of these social habits; violations
become more attractive and they can more easily be hidden in the web of interactions.
When violations occur, they generate ripples of uncertainty that undermine confidence in
the institutions and infrastructure that make the conduct of modern living reliable,
predictable and secure. Lacking social resilience, human systems cannot adapt to either
internal or external disruptions. We believe that purposeful democratic deliberation
provides an important resource for improving the prevention of and the response to
serious disruptions, by helping to identify the vulnerability of social systems to these
disruptions and by harnessing human ingenuity to create innovative institutional and
infrastructure solutions that enhance adaptability.
1
We compare three empirical planning cases that describe how civic deliberation can
improve the grasp of system complexity, the understanding of the link between the
actions of planners and stakeholders and overall system vulnerability and adaptability,
and the long-term social learning of complex problems. The cases include a water
conservation plan, a housing plan for homeless populations, and a farmland management
plan to prevent disease outbreaks. We evaluate the effectiveness of civic deliberation
against adversarial and bureaucratic response strategies to disruptions, identifying the
conditions and incentives that are required to support each approach. This paper frames
the terms for comparison and sets an agenda for testing the social resilience of plans for
different resource and infrastructure threats.
1
Introduction
Rational planning identifies the elements of order in a system and uses this pattern to
predict future behavior of that system. Complicated systems submit to rational planning
because despite the greater number of linked components their behavior remains
predictable. True, if one component fails, the entire system fails; but rational plans
duplicate components to ensure redundancy and avoid system failure. Engineering has
predominated as the discipline of choice to address problems in complicated systems.
Planning becomes challenging, and the scope of engineering limited, when the systems
that we plan for are complex, formed by a large number of components that selectively
interact with other components and with their environment. These selective interactions
enable self-organization and make the system adaptable to external changes, but they also
often make its behavior unpredictable (Amaral and Ottino 2004). Comprehending
2
complex urban and regional systems requires planning and management that prepare the
system to adapt to a range of possible futures, rather than predict the future. People use
cultural beliefs, conventions and rules to make sense of the continuous generation of
novelty and to keep order among all the shifting relationships. But interdependence
among all their behaviors generates precisely the complexity that they try to make sense
of, and that defies any single set of rules and any hopes for social engineering. In order to
avoid chaos and perverse effects, people need to learn collectively, shifting expectations
from certainty about future outcomes to adaptability to future change.
Markets coordinate the exchange of goods and services using conventions and rules of
behavior that privilege private contracts and possessions. As a result markets often fail to
provide efficient levels of public and common goods1 and require sanctions to discourage
private gain at public and community expense. Private, public and community goods rely
upon knowledge and respect for social norms of reciprocity and collaboration. If most
people comply, the markets reduce uncertainty, but we often take this social trust for
granted and uncertainty reigns.
Take for example the problem of cheating where people simultaneously enjoin unfair
contracts (e.g., predatory lending), avoid paying for public goods consumed (e.g., tax
evasion) and deplete common goods for private gain (e.g., aquifer exhaustion). Once a
critical mass of defection occurs, participants abandon the norm and lose trust in one
another. Systems crises flow from cascades of defection tied to breakdowns in trust. The
1
Public goods are defined as those whose consumption is non-excludable and non-rival (e.g. public radio,
defense). Common goods are those where users cannot be excluded from consumption, but in contrast to
public goods, their consumption is rival (e.g. water).
3
breakdown may start from random actions, purposeful exploitation of system
vulnerability, or from breakdowns in the use and enforcement of rules designed to find
and punish defectors. Distrust erodes the adaptability of the system, which is now
incapable of organizing an effective response to the problem and will take longer to
return to normal functions. When additional external disturbances affect the system (e.g.,
a hurricane or a drought), distrust makes it hard to establish cooperative strategies to
collectively come up with fair and acceptable solutions.
Once broken, trust takes enormous efforts to replace. In this paper we describe some
efforts at collaborative planning that improve social trust and consequently system
resilience, where the temptations to defect might be offset by the promise of joint gains.
Adaptive planning and management relies on time-consuming participation as people
learn together how to replace suspicious self-protection with mutual understanding and
agreement. We believe that a collaborative planning and management activity that
recognizes and acknowledges joint vulnerability to human (e.g., susceptibility to freeriding) and natural (e.g., hurricane) uncertainty2 can increase the level of trust in society
and improve social resilience. Cooperative preparation for future uncertainty can be
improved with attention to diversity of participants and an emphasis on innovation tied to
joint learning.
2
Note that it is understood that natural disasters may also be encouraged by human activity
4
2
2.1
Our framework: Trust, diversity and resilience
Trust
Social trust has many causes. Political scientists measure trust as the level of confidence
citizens have in government with respect to economic, socio-cultural, political and
government performance (Nye 1997). Political shocks, such as Watergate, reduce public
trust in government. In business and economics trust allows efficient market exchange
because respect for contracts enables cooperation among investors, lenders, consumers
and regulators (Blomqvist et al. 2008). Research on risk finds that trust depends on the fit
between competence and authority. People will entrust themselves to group problem
solving if they believe they possess the ability to devise a solution and the power to
implement it (Paton et al. 2008). Sociologists distinguish different kinds of trust—
interpersonal, institutional and generalized—finding that it is possible to trust a colleague
but not the agency they work for (Ahnquist, Lindström, and Wamala 2008; Putnam
2000).
We focus on the social meaning of trust in this paper paying close attention to the
informal ways in which people relate to each other. Trust is best conceived as
“generalized trust…in other people, [which] is related to informal participation” in social
networks, rather than to more formal network structure, which is a hallmark of
institutional trust (Ahnquist, Lindström, and Wamala 2008).
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2.2
Diversity
Page and colleagues have done extensive research on the benefits of diversity in problem
solving (Page 2007), with important implications for communicative planning. Page
categorizes four dimensions of diversity that are relevant to collective problem-solving
abilities: perspectives (the representations of a problem), interpretations (the
classification systems used to understand problems), heuristics (tools or rules of thumb
used to solve problems, which are intimately linked to a perspective) and predictive
models (the connection between cause and effect). The social combination of a diverse
set of perspectives, interpretations, heuristics and predictive models creates powerful
“cognitive toolboxes” for dealing with complex tasks yielding improved joint benefits.
Diversity contributes more to learning about complexity than homogeneity because the
different problem-solvers draw upon perspectives and heuristics that introduce a wider
range of useful responses. Useful participants need to possess knowledge relevant to the
complex situation at hand and they cannot be so many as to undermine deliberation.
Preference diversity may enhance collective problem solving but different perspectives
(values or preferences) may lead to conflicting interpretations that lower the likelihood of
collaboration and agreement. Empirical evidence supports the claim that, overall,
diversity helps solve complex problems (Page 2007).
2.3
Resilience
We distinguish two aspects of resilience: physical and social. Physical resilience
describes the response of physical infrastructure to external shocks, such as an
earthquake, flood, heat wave, or terrorist attack. Two measures of physical resilience
6
include the severity of physical damage to a structure and the length of time required to
return the structure to normal use after the shock. Physical resilience thus depends upon
the design and materials used for constructing a structure and the physical characteristics
of the surrounding environment. Social resilience describes the behavioral response of
individuals, groups, organizations and institutions to external or internal shocks. Two
possible dimensions of social resilience are the severity of adverse outcomes (e.g.,
displacement, injury, death, and crime) and the length of time required for social systems
to return to normal. The extent to which society is resilient to shocks will not only depend
on the characteristics of its actors—income, education, skills—but also on the
interactions of those individuals through social, professional and institution-based
relationships, which in turn may be affected by, and affect, the physical environment and
infrastructure. A more socially resilient population will sustain less severe adverse
outcomes, will be more likely to maintain routine behaviors during an extreme event, and
will return to routine behaviors faster after an extreme event.
2.4
Communicative planning: Supporting trust and diversity to enhance resilience
Communicative planning taps the experience of diverse members familiar with the
causes, conditions and consequences of the current shock, and puts that experience to
practical use by helping others learn from it. For people to participate and listen to others
different from themselves they must recognize their shared vulnerability and
interdependence in the face of the potential shock. They must trust strangers and one
another in ways strong enough to allow for changes in belief about the future and then a
shift in willingness to change their response to the future. A community or society can
improve social resilience to specific types of shock by learning to anticipate and prepare
7
for the unexpected. Purposeful, collaborative planning and management can play an
important role in helping people learn how to anticipate and prepare for complex
uncertainty. In the next section, we explain how the relationship among trust and
diversity contribute to the resilience, collective action and cooperation needed to address
complex common goods problems.
3
3.1
Three cases
Groundwater conflicts in Florida
Water conflicts have emerged in the Tampa Bay region and in East Central Florida as
excessive pumping and export to rapidly growing urban areas threatened the
sustainability of shared ground-surface water systems (Berardo 2005; Dedekorkut 2005).
The conflict in Tampa Bay led to litigation, with the court initially favoring the water
demands of growing urban communities. The conflict also spurred the creation of a new
regional authority, the West Coast Regional Water Supply Authority (or West Coast, for
short), including representation from all counties and cities and charged with managing
the provision of water among the various local governments. The Southwest Florida
Water Management District (SWFMWMD) and the Florida Department of
Environmental Protection (FDEP) established regulations and permits. But still the
development of water supplies remained contentious because the regional authority
favored the water demands of growing communities. The effort to represent the longterm interests of the common good—the shared aquifer and its connected surface water
system—met with mistrust and defection by local governments who refused to contribute
8
with funding for water supply development, while others refused to give up any local
water rights.
The growing communities did not understand the vulnerability of the water system they
all shared. They did not recognize that declining water levels were induced by their
emphasis on urban development and so the depletion just got worse. The conflict
escalated as West Coast and SWFMWMD promoted conservation, and the local
communities resisted, worried about their economic growth. Adversarial actions by
SWFMWMD included signing orders to force local governments to reduce water
demand. Local governments and West Coast responded with further litigation, which
provoked the issuance of an emergency order by SWFMWMD that could only be
overturned by the court. West Coast sued to rescind this order.
The huge expense in legal disputes spurred political intervention by Governor Chiles and
later Senator Latvala to broker an agreement that would ensure economic growth while
protecting the environmental resource. The result of this intervention was a 35-year water
supply plan as well as the withdrawal of the emergency order. Litigation continued,
however, this time organized by concerned citizens and landowners against West Coast
and the counties demanding water. One of these counties filed a preemptive lawsuit,
further promoting mistrust and fueling the conflict, but that ultimately succeeded in
disbanding the citizen organization.
The role of scientists was marginal to the policy process. An expert report was supposed
to respond questions about appropriate levels of pumping, but failed to direct action. The
scientific information was not translated into practical knowledge that policy-makers and
9
water users could use to solve the depletion problem. The complexity of the humannatural resource makes it hard to determine appropriate levels for each user to extract
when users are excluded from the analysis. On one hand scientists cannot appreciate and
offer useful perspectives and tools that address stakeholder water needs, and on the other,
stakeholders do not benefit from the understanding of scientific information about
resource limits (Zellner Forthcoming). The vulnerability to water scarcity in Tampa Bay
could not be effectively communicated among experts and stakeholders because there
was no collective discussion about the environmental and social dimensions of the
problem. This prevented the development of trust and cooperation in the use of the shared
groundwater, and a valuable opportunity was missed for the diverse group to collectively
learn and produce innovative and adaptive responses.
More adversarial approaches followed, until legislation was passed that imposed a
deadline for SWFMWMD to set minimum water levels for lakes, wetlands and aquifers
in priority areas and to conduct studies to assess the relative impact of drought versus
over-pumping. Having a deadline was the impetus to resolve the conflict due to the
concern that a solution would be imposed externally by the legislature, affecting those
involved in the conflict in a manner they could not control. Rather than taking collective
action as a consequence of communicating and understanding the communities’ shared
vulnerability with respect to the common resource, an agent external to the communities
in conflict imposed the vulnerability that ultimately motivated collaboration. The result
was an institutional reorganization of West Coast—now called Tampa Bay Water—that
was fairer about the share of development costs and that fostered collaboration and
innovation, and instituted incentives to reduce over-pumping by granting state funding
10
for the development of supply alternatives. Nevertheless, the results were limited.
Conflicts still arise and the risk of depletion still exists. Innovation was restricted to
constructing a desalination plant instead of wells but the goal was the same: expand
supply to meet a growing—and desired—demand. The plans developed did not
incorporate the scientific knowledge necessary to understand the economic and
environmental impacts of the plant, and that a growing demand for water cannot be met
indefinitely. A supply-oriented approach that is fixated on urban development cannot be
adaptive to water scarcity, whether it is human or environmentally induced. Problems
will remain unless Tampa Bay Water members obtain the training to understand the
complexity of the problem, communicate the shared vulnerability, and collectively devise
adaptive strategies.
In East Central Florida, stakeholders were aware of the disputes in the Tampa Bay region
and wanted to avoid them, i.e. the vulnerability was expressed as the prospect of costly
litigation, not of water depletion. Institutions were set to foster cooperation to gain a more
accurate sense of the regional groundwater problem and to ensure an open process that
led to consensus on shared costs and management responsibilities to respond to
environmental impacts of excessive pumping. In this arrangement, players included state
and local governments, utilities and non-governmental organizations. It was not easy to
keep participation, however: “[E]lected officials mainly sen[t] their staff to the
workshops” because they might not have been convinced that there was actually a crisis,
or because cities have interest in maintaining the status quo since they already have
permits and would not want to risk losing their rights to water as these rights are
examined (Berardo 2005). Although these may be valid reasons, it is striking that users
11
(constituents) were not invited to the process. Had they been present, the elected officials
might have had greater incentives to participate more actively and continuously through
the process. The newly formed institution was still able to strengthen the collaboration
ties across scales of government by sharing information about the impacts of groundwater
over-exploitation widely among elected officials, utility companies, the public and the
media. The absence of users raises the question of appropriate stakeholder representation
and cognitive diversity, however.
After the initial identification of issues and goals, the process involved several iterations
of communication that narrowed the focus on developing new sources of water supply
and the link to land use planning. The result was a collaborative effort to produce a plan
that identified priority areas that must be included in each local Comprehensive Plan,
identifying the needs for water and the facilities needed to meet them for at least 10
years. In terms of water demand management, the recommendations were much weaker,
relegated to emphasizing the need for education on conservation and reuse and promotion
of cooperation. It is notable that the plan did not focus on stabilizing both demand and
supply indefinitely. While allocation of water to different uses may vary as societies
change, the amount to be allocated should only vary with new knowledge of regional
flows. Regular monitoring and review would allow adaptation to new environmental and
social realities.
One wonders if the cooperation in East Central Florida can effectively lead to better
outcomes in the absence of users and given the concern over only short-term supply. All
actors contributing to the demand for water need to consider behavioral changes when
12
growth in water consumption is confronted with the reality of limited supply. They are
more likely to change their behavior if they become aware of their increasing
vulnerability and if that vulnerability is communicated among the actors who share the
interest in the resource, building trust and enabling collective problem solving as the
diverse perspectives and heuristics are combined. This communicative planning setup
enhances resilience by anticipating and preventing crises of social trust, also providing
the social infrastructure that will be more readily prepared to respond to unexpected
disturbances.
3.1.1 Implications for communicative planning for groundwater sustainability
The Florida cases illustrate how participation per se is not a sufficient condition to ensure
successful learning, adaptive decision-making and resilience. The solution of complex
common goods problems requires innovation to adapt to disturbances or novelties like
groundwater decline. Innovation, in turn, depends on a diversity of interests and skills
and the ability to communicate and work within a group, thus developing the trust,
accountability and transparency that support cooperation and that can reinstate it when it
fails, i.e. social resilience. The diverse set of perspectives and skills needs to be relevant
to the problem, in terms of appropriate training and knowledge. This implies that
stakeholders need to be carefully selected and/or trained to contribute to collective
problem solving. The use of artifacts (e.g. models, scenario building) can be helpful in
developing effective collective problem solving to harness diversity and minimize the
emergence of disagreements or confusion (Page 2007). While the number of participants
must not be too small to satisfy these conditions, the expectation to have all parties
represented to ensure appropriate representation and credibility (Ruhl 2005) is not only
13
unrealistic but may also be detrimental as the diverse perspectives (i.e. preferences,
values) increases the likelihood of conflict and of confusing understanding of the
problem.
3.2
Blended management in a supportive housing non profit
The poor carry a greater burden of uncertainty than the prosperous. Consider the problem
of the homeless. The central issue is not simply the lack of shelter, but the uncertainty
about the possession and use of a dwelling place. Homeless people in wealthy urban
societies in North America and Europe can find an empty building, a transit stop, a rail
car or other unclaimed place to spend the night, but their hold is precarious and security
severely limited. The homeless are vulnerable to the elements, social predators and the
police. Most will find their way into the homeless shelter system, obtaining a place to
sleep in a dormitory setting.
Practical efforts to remedy homelessness include the provision of shelter and social
services. The two-solution approach flows from the longstanding economic and social
division of labor between real estate and social work. The care takers for the homeless
organize their response in relation to the occupational specializations and hierarchy from
each domain of employment.
Social workers at an emergency shelter for the homeless may admit a person for a one
night stay (or longer), offer a referral to an addiction counseling agency, food pantry,
financial assistance resource—including public funds and other social supports. The
social worker judges need and seeks direct remedy from different government and
14
philanthropic resources. The homeless person or family do not inhabit the shelter, but use
it as a service. The shelter offers little privacy and a short stay.
Housing providers focus less on persons and households and more on the provision and
care of dwellings. On the front end are the housing developers/builders and at the tail end
the property managers. In the affordable housing arena these building developers and
managers expect the dwellings to be inhabited by low income needy households, but that
is not the focus of their work. They use their skill to provide physical dwellings and
associated utilities and amenities that meet high quality standards and pass the test of
economic viability. The developers produce subsidized rental dwellings for the
possession and use of needy inhabitants. Property managers ensure the long term
economic stability of the rental dwellings (usually a building with many dwellings). They
expect the clientele to pay rent on time and properly maintain the unit.
The growth of social service and housing agencies has accompanied the persistence of
homelessness over the past twenty five years. Reformers, advocates and policy makers
have for decades recognized the importance of developing a coordinated response
between services and housing provision. The most promising program response was the
development of supportive housing: affordable rental housing that includes an on-site
mix of social services geared to the needs of the resident clientele. But the ideal of
coordinated and integrated provision proved difficult to accomplish. How do you
combine economically focused housing provision with socially focused service
provision?
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Mercy Lakefront Housing started out as a neighborhood-based housing developer
designed to acquire and rehabilitate the few remaining single room hotels in Chicago’s
Uptown neighborhood to provide affordable permanent rental housing for homeless
people. Started by advocates and organizers, the organization emphasized the creation of
affordable units. The organizers had snapped up the dilapidated Moreland Hotel because
it offered to provide a lot of small units in a single development. But more important was
the learning that ensued as the project took shape and the new social worker, tenant
organizer executive director took charge. The rehabilitation kept the hotel structure using
the 24 hour desk clerk to monitor the public entrance and provide security. Additionally,
the property managers and social workers were expected to work together to find ways to
both screen applicants and find ways to help tenants stay whether they had social
problems (e.g., a return to drinking) or economic problems (e.g., spent rent money). The
leadership and staff together developed a community-focused approach that blended
social and economic management (Butzen 1996).
The blending emerged out of egalitarian beliefs for establishing a residential community
within the building. But these beliefs were disciplined by the economic realities of
managing the economic value of the housing asset. The leadership and staff recognized
that the successful provision of each individual room required careful attention to the
management of the common resources. The principles of need and efficiency that guide
conventional service and housing provision were recast as reciprocity tied to the shared
vulnerability of the tenants and the mutual team work of the social workers and property
managers. The security of the building was not the result of professional systems of
provision acting in parallel, but jointly merged practical judgments tied to the
16
collaboration of social workers and property managers. The common good features of the
hotel-type building fostered the innovative merging of functions (Hoch and Slayton
1989). The 24 hour desk clerk monitors the entrance to reduce the risk of predatory
strangers. Residents rely on informal social networks among the diverse clientele on
different floors to leverage their position in the hotel community and the geographic
location of the building to access resources. For instance, the handicapped old timer
shares gossip on the hallway neighbors with the young newcomer in return for running an
errand. The professional blending improves the social capacity of residents to cope with
unexpected disruptions, whether the fire drill or the drug dealer. The chaotic vulnerability
of the streets is replaced with the complex vulnerability of managed supportive care in a
vertical neighborhood.
As Lakefront expanded, it exhausted the supply of hotels available for rehab and started
to develop new buildings. The growth in scale required more sophisticated development
practices and more systematic ways to foster the blended management collaboration as
new employees were hired. An important policy shift in compensation proved important.
Property managers usually earn more than social workers in conventional occupations.
The egalitarian conception of collaboration at the center of blended management
encouraged a change in compensation. Property manager and social worker positions
receive equivalent compensation at Lakefront that reduced resentment and fostered trust.
The employees take pride in their collaboration because they are rewarded for doing it.
Plus it works better in coping with the vulnerable clientele. The joint learning across
function, focus on tenant outcomes and respect for economic and social vulnerability
17
foster a residential community that helps very poor tenants overcome their many
handicaps not as passive recipients, but active community partners.
In the most successful instances previously destitute tenants recover from addictions and
illness, enter the job market and participate in civic activities that include voter
registration, art work and theater groups. The vulnerability of the tenants as individuals
becomes a resource for collaborative community building with the application of blended
management. Ironically, individual autonomy and security increased as housing and
service providers found ways to overcome the division of knowledge and skill using
reciprocity with each other and tenants.
3.2.1 Implications for communicative planning to combat homelessness
The plan to end homelessness misses the profound vulnerability of the homeless. The
mainstream approaches imagine social workers and housing providers doing their
respective work as specialized professionals using organizational schemes to help
individuals move from the insecurity of the streets to the security of an apartment. The
continuum of care remains a central guiding strategy for this coordination. Ironically, the
response does little to remedy the uncertainty of the streets for most homeless people.
The Lakefront case illustrates a very different approach, one that focuses on creating
collaborative communities as a basis for developing permanent improvements in
individual autonomy and security. The Lakefront projects use blended management to
create what Susan Saegert and Jackie Leavitt (1990) termed community households—
buildings whose residents shared social and economic resources to reduce their
vulnerability and improve prospects for individual development.
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3.3
Adoption of whole farm plans to prevent disease outbreaks
Skaneateles Lake is the water supply for Syracuse, New York. The lake is located some
distance away from Syracuse and is nestled at the base of approximately 45 small farms,
many of which raise cattle and other farm animals. These animals are carriers of
protozoan parasites, such as giardia and cryptosporidium, that are considered to be a
potential public health threat (AWWA 1998). Because there is limited understanding
about the conditions under which outbreaks occur, the level of uncertainty and the
potential hazard related to these parasites is relatively high.
This non-point pollution problem is typically solved by installing a water filtration plant
designed to remove parasites from the water supply. In this case, however, a cooperative
approach to hazard mitigation was preferred. The New York Department of Health
granted Syracuse “filtration avoidance:” they would not need to install a filtration plant if
farmers would agree to develop whole farm plans that altered their farming behavior in
ways that reduced the risk of nonpoint pollution of cryptosporidium from animal wastes
into the water supply. In 1994, the Skaneateles Lake Watershed Agricultural Program
(SLWAP) was established, in a non-regulatory effort to: 1) gain trust of heavily regulated
farmers, 2) learn about solutions to mitigate the potential of water-borne human health
disasters and, 3) adopt new farming practices that would enhance the level of water
quality.3 The SLWAP is best described as a small interagency pollution prevention
program set up to work with watershed farmers on a cooperative basis to develop whole
3
Note that the cooperative approach was substantially cheaper than a filtration plant.
19
farm plans that integrate best management practices that reduce the potential for parasite
outbreaks. It was made up of eight to ten individuals from a variety of different
government agencies that provided farmers with technical assistance related to planning,
engineering, construction management, and on-going implementation. While the
individuals represented different organizations, their loyalty was to the watershed and in
enabling farmer lead revisions to farming techniques that would reduce the potential for
parasite outbreaks. It was physically located near to the farmers to enable visibility and
ease of interaction. From the outset, the SLWAP was to work with farmers to negotiate
how farm plans would be developed and implemented on a one-to-one basis. Farmers
would be responsible for supervision of whole farm plan activities on their farms, while
the SLWAP was to provide a regulatory buffer between the farmer and other traditional
regulatory agencies, such that interactions and negotiations could be trusted. The
approach that farmers, scientists, agricultural experts, economists, and regulators took
was to engage farmers in an open and transparent process that would build trust in what
was a traditional regulatory community into one that incorporated a variety of
perspectives and constraints. Additionally, the flexible and negotiated integration of
farmer perspectives and interests were fundamental assumptions to the viability of the
program (Welch and Marc-Aurele 1999).
Initially, the program received little attention from the farmers. This may have been due
to the complexity of the information and the newness of the communication channel
between SLWAP and the farmers. It may also have been due to mistrust of what appeared
to be just another new local government agency. Early on, a few farmers, those who
depended most upon the farm economically, adopted the whole farm plan approach.
20
Possibly, these farmers were most exposed to traditional regulatory agencies and they
perceived the greatest risk to ignoring SLWAP. Nevertheless, actions by these few
farmers did not result in a bandwagon effect in which the rest of the community joined.
The SLWAP was faced with the possibility that the cooperative whole farm plan
approach would not succeed as intended.
While the adoption decision was voluntary, the SLWAP did promise some benefits to
developing a whole farm plan. Farmers were held economically harmless; any
improvements on their land would be paid for by the SLWAP. In addition, farmers were
told that adoption and implementation of a whole farm plan would result in less
regulatory oversight by external government agencies. It is possible that in the early
stages of the program, these promises were neither well understood nor proven to the
extent that farmers were willing to engage in the cooperative option.
Over time program members continued to interact and gain the trust of several of the
leaders of the Skaneateles farming community, eventually gaining the confidence of a
few. These leaders were less dependent upon farming for their incomes, but they were
also more suspicious of regulators: they believed that they had not been fairly treated by
regulators in the past. As a result, they may have been less trusting of the SLWAP and its
promises. However, once community leaders agreed to engage in a cooperative process,
most of the other members of the farming community also established whole farm plans.
The SLWAP model is still considered to be a successful cooperative effort to reduce the
environmental risk related to non-point source pollution and it has been replicated statewide.
21
3.3.1 Implications for communicative planning for the prevention of outbreaks
This case suggests that it is possible that the Skaneateles farming community leaders
have two effects on the acceptance of cooperative norms of interaction. First, they are
gatekeepers who pass judgment on the trustworthiness of external social actors—in this
case the SLWAP—and they control the community’s entry into a collaborative
environment. Second, as leaders, they may hold strong central network positions in which
they are linked to other farmers who either trust their judgment or are pulled along
through community pressure to adopt new cooperative norms and institutions. The
greater homogeneity of actors that is evidenced in rural areas may have lowered the
threshold for collaboration to occur. Either way, the SLWAP provides some insight into
processes that establish cooperative action of different stakeholder groups that may be
necessary for the establishment of resilient social structures and processes that are more
likely to prevent or recover from exogenous shocks. This effort provides an example of
how the establishment of mechanisms for interaction and understanding among
individuals and groups with diverse bases of knowledge and different interests can take
place. As it relates to resilience, the establishment of a context that builds trust could
have two effects: 1) it serves to reduce the probability of future shocks, such as a
cryptosporidium outbreak, and 2) it creates an environment that puts a premium on
learning and trusting the perspectives of diverse others in ways that better enables future
problem solving to prevent future shocks
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4
Synthesis and future directions
The unexpected burdens imposed by aquifer depletion, homelessness and water pollution
impose vulnerabilities that prove difficult to describe and communicate in ways that
contribute to reduced uncertainty and improved remedies. In each case we describe how
current popular responses to each complex problem fall short and how purposeful
collaborative planning and management work better. In each case the participants
adopted perspectives that changed the interpretation of the problem from something that
shed responsibility to one that shared responsibility. The recognition of shared
vulnerability not only inspired joint deliberation, but helped fuel learning among diverse
people generating practical remedies. The participants moved from fixed positions as
antagonists, victims or experts to empathize and comprehend the consequences of
alternative actions for others who shared the same common good. They both found and
fostered trust as they invented and adapted institutional conventions and roles to serve
new purposes. In each case collaborative planning helped tame complexity to different
degrees. We recognize there is room for improvement as the narratives raise important
questions for future research.
For innovation to come forth from cooperation, the collection of participants must be
diverse. In traditional participatory planning processes, the goal is consensus building.
This focus can be problematic because the “desire to conform” to the main ideas in a
group may lead to everyone adopting the wrong perspective and consequently making
bad decisions (Page 2007; Zellner Forthcoming). The desire to reach consensus is also an
incentive to leave those players with different mindsets out of the discussion. If the focus
23
is instead on solution building, diversity should be actively sought out to increase the
ability of the collective to generate innovative solutions and understanding. The greater
the number of relevant skills and perspectives represented in a group, the greater the
chances of finding globally optimal solutions to real world problems.
In the interaction of diverse actors around complex problems, scientific knowledge is
essential. The need to trust this knowledge is equally essential. This can only occur when
stakeholder are exposed to expert technicians and vice-versa. Humans have the ability to
communicate across perspectives by using artifacts, “physical representations of
solutions,” which reduce communication errors (Page 2007). What we value and notice
depends on our perspective. Training, therefore, has a significant effect on what will be
included in the collective representations.
Power imbalances can hamper the collective process by undermining trust and the
collective ability to find globally optimal solutions. Crowds can be manipulated,
distorting the problem-solving abilities of the group, making the crowd more prone to
error (Page 2007). This is why power imbalances need to be counteracted. This
introduces an interesting dilemma: leadership can encourage trust, but can also eliminate
the benefits of diversity in promoting collective problem solving.
The downside of diversity is that when fundamental values or preferences differ, they
often lead to greater conflict, but these can be countered by the increased capacity of the
collective to generate good solutions (Page 2007), and by the trust that is developed over
repeated interactions over time. In the absence of trust, the threat of external control may
still spur action towards collaboration.
24
In sum, resilience and robustness can be achieved through diversity and through the trust
of informal ties, supporting the creation of innovative solutions and the incorporation of
these solutions into practice, i.e. through collaborative social learning.
5
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