In collaborative environmental policy and planning, it is generally assumed that use of higher-quality information will lead to more effective and durable decisions. High-quality implies that information used is relevant, considered valid, and accessible to and understood by all participants. Ideally, all stakeholders are involved in the collection and analysis of data. However, whether and how “higher quality” information affects the decisions made in—and by extension the environmental outcomes of—collaborative governance processes remains inconclusive.

This study explores the collaborative development and interpretation of scientific information in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) process for licensing hydropower facilities in the US, to see how that information feeds into policy outputs and whether it aids or interferes with collaboration. FERC hydropower licensing is a five-year process in which an electrical utility, federal and state agencies, local governments, NGOs, tribes, and the public decide on the license terms needed to balance the power and non-power impacts of a project. To develop these terms, licensing participants determine what technical studies are needed to assess the hydropower project’s impacts on resources ranging from fish habitat to recreation; carry out and interpret the results of those studies; and use that technical information to negotiate required management and mitigation practices. This paper traces the ways that collaboration drives the production and interpretation of scientific information, how that technical information in turn affects collaboration, and how collaboration and science interact to shape the contents of the negotiated license application.

We use a comparative ethnographic study of two relicensing processes in California, which vary substantially by level of collaboration. Data include 2.5 years of participant observation of stakeholder meetings; interviews with facilitators, electrical utilities, technical consultants, and relicensing participants; and analysis of documents including technical memos, official comments submitted to FERC, and the draft and final license applications. Preliminary process tracing shows promise for exploring whether the joint development of scientific models affects stakeholder use and interpretation of model results, and in disaggregating ways that collaboration in science affects larger negotiations about the decision-making process.

This research will add to understanding of how scientific information is mobilized in collaborative processes, especially how that information feeds into the quality of decisions made, which has implications for scholarship and practice. It expands our view of science from being an inert ingredient in a decision-making process to an active variable that can dynamically affect the process and its outcomes. Exploring how decisions about the joint development of science affect overall collaboration and the use of that information by stakeholders provides valuable information for the design of collaborative processes.