Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Incorporating stakeholder engagement and collaboration into the environmental management process is an increasingly popular prescription for environmental conservation issues. Among other benefits, collaboration can help incorporate local knowledge and better information inputs into the decision-making process (Anderson & Ostrom, 2008; Reed et al., 2006), make additional resources available to managers (Hill & Lynn, 2013), and lead to more appropriate management decisions (Norton, 2015). While opportunities for issues such as group capture or diluted decision-making can arise (Layzer, 2008), these strategies can lead to better environmental management in the long run (Beierle, 2002). However, the transformative influence collaborative processes have on organizational outcomes is not well understood. While the effects of collaboration on intermediate policy outcomes are well-studied, we know little about the direct environmental impacts such management techniques may yield. Furthermore, our understanding of the organizational implications associated with the integrating collaboration into the management process is not well refined. There is substantial room to improve our knowledge about the impacts collaboration can have on organizations’ focus, motivations, and actions.

In this study, I investigate the implications of stakeholder engagement at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (GDNR). This organization is tasked with managing environmental subjects in Georgia, and in doing so, runs several collaborative management groups out of its Coastal Resources Division. I focus on the Georgia Sea Turtle Cooperative which it coordinates on Georgia’s barrier islands to promote sea turtle conservation. This group engages volunteers and local stakeholders with GDNR managers on each island, performing research, monitoring, and turtle management during the annual nesting season. The long tenure and high popularity of this program make it an ideal subject by which to study how the level of collaborative engagement impacts (A) turtle populations, (B) organizational motivations, and (C) organizational attention and priorities over time.

I employ a mix of GDNR archival and organizational records, including biological data (turtle population), archival state permitting (level of collaborative engagement) and program data (number/funding of programmatic initiatives focused on turtles), and semi-structured interviews (managerial motivations) to investigate these research questions. Using a mixed-methods research design, I will rely on Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) multivariate regression to investigate relationships between annual collaborative engagement and both turtle populations and organizational focus. Then, I will conduct an embedded qualitative analysis to assess organizational managers’ motivations and how they might be influenced by stakeholder collaboration. The results can be have valuable implications both to researchers studying collaborative management, and to practitioners who need to decide whether, where, and when to incorporate collaboration in their management programs.