Evaluating Adaptive Co-management in the St. Mary's River

St. Mary’s River (the River), a 125 km river connecting Lake Superior to Lake Huron provides important resources for community well-being and growth. People extract water for consumption, industrial purposes, hydroelectric power generation and navigation. It supports a diversity of fish species, aquatic life and wildlife. The indigenous communities rely on whitefish for their commercial fishery. People use the River for fishing, boating and water sports.

Early residents viewed the River as a resource and took advantage of its abundance to advance their socio-economic engine. Their extravagance resulted in lasting changes to the river. Algoma Steel, St. Marys Paper and Northwestern Leather/Cannelton Industries use the River for manufacturing and waste disposal processes exacerbating the water quality problems. Furthermore, to accommodate shipping, natural rapids were removed and the channel dredged to maintaining a navigable depth. Locks were constructed to minimize the River elevation and provide safe passage for ships.

The impacts to the River created an environmental surprise forcing the system’s stability landscape into a new equilibrium of polluted water, damaged habitats, sick people and disappearing fish and wildlife. The River water quality, fishery, and habitat variables, operating at the larger spatio-temporal scales were overwhelmed by the human variable operating at the smaller scale (Gunderson and Holling, 2002). The cross-scale dynamics presented considerable loss of resilience resulting in societal separation from the river.

Governance of the St. Mary’s River

As an international waterway, Canada and the United States share management responsibility in environmental health, navigability and public access. They delegated agency jurisdiction to the International Joint Commission (IJC) in 1909 under the Boundary Waters Treaty. Water quality problems were reported as early as 1912. Contamination from raw sewage led to IJC’s classification which contributed to water-borne epidemics affecting the communities consuming water from the River. Raw sewage contamination overwhelmed the larger scale - slow-moving river system creating an environmental surprise that resulted in transformation into a new equilibrium state of polluted river system. The IJC viewed the system as Nature Balanced and responding to negative feedback from the River by creating water quality control policies to return the contaminated river back to its original clear river equilibrium. Due to the limited technical capabilities of the period, the IJC’s view of the River was limited.

Despite the eradication of the water-borne epidemics, eutrophication persisted promulgating in the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA). The agreement shifted the worldview towards Nature Anarchic relying on positive feedback to create additional modernist precautionary principle-based tools with “take the world apart to understand it” view to restore and enhance water quality. While the IJC was somewhat successful in improving the water quality, the process lacked consistency in identifying and characterizing the water quality problems. Moreover, the IJC failed to recognize society as key in the River’s remediation process. Complex water quality problems require systems-thinking solutions to address complex system problems. Additional amendments to the GLWQA introduced ecosystem perspective and social imperative as part of the solution. The resulting Remedial Action Plans (RAP) provided restoration framework for areas throughout the Great Lakes (Ontario MOE, 1992). Only areas that failed to support aquatic ecosystem were identified as Area of Concern (AOC). The delisting criteria was also created to successful restoration of the beneficial use impairments (BUIs) (Ontario MOE, 1992). According to the 1987 GLWQA (Ontario MOE, 1992), fourteen impaired uses are specified, and the existence of any one could be sufficient to list an area as an AOC. The fourteen impaired uses are:

1.            Restrictions on fish and wildlife consumption

2.            Tainting of fish and wildlife flavour

3.            Degradation of fish and wildlife populations

4.            Fish tumors or other deformities

5.            Bird or animal deformities or reproduction problems

6.            Degradation of benthos

7.            Restrictions on dredging activities

8.            Eutrophication or undesirable algae

9.            Restrictions on drinking water consumption, or taste and odour problems

10.        Beach closings

11.        Degradation of aesthetics;

12.        Added costs to agriculture or industry

13.        Degradation of phytoplankton and zooplankton populations

14.        Loss of fish and wildlife habitat

The River was identified as an AOC in 1987 based on the presence several BUIs. The IJC delegated management to Ontario, Environmental Canada, Michigan and the US Environmental Protection Agency in preparing the RAP. Following several public information sessions, the Binational Public Advisory Council (BPAC) was formalized in 1988 to continue the public engagement process and work closely with the RAP team on all aspects of the planning and implementation processes (Ontario MOE, 1992). According to Ontario MOE (1992), The council consists of fourteen Ontario members and ten Michigan members from the following community sectors:

1.            Environment

2.            Recreation/Tourism

3.            Industry/Shipping/Small business

4.            Labour

5.            Fisheries;

6.            Municipalities

7.            Academia

8.            Elected Officials

9.            Citizens at large

10.        Public Health

11.        First Nation people

Implications to the Sustainability Principles Embedded in the St. Mary’s River AOC

Three decades later, the River RAP has made significant progress in restoring several BUIs. Community participation continued to develop, and shadow networks emerged to participate in the RAP activities. Education programs in schools promote intergenerational knowledge transfer and learning leading to significant paradigm shift from mechanistic to eco-centric worldview with activities including learning from nature and mimicking nature to repair damaged ecosystems. Progress successes however failed to improve social happiness because fish consumption and beach access are still restricted due to contaminated and persistent eutrophication.

The precautionary principle policies ushered in the first-generation sustainability thinking. Policies like Fisheries Act, pulp and paper regulations, Canadian Environmental Assessment Act Code of Practice, and the Environmental Protection Act help to enforce water quality controls forcing industries and municipalities to invest heavily in technology and end-of-pipe solutions and minimize contamination entering the River. However, the solutions failed to contribute to the sustainability of the social-ecological system as they only helped industries to be less bad. Furthermore, the solutions became the costs-of-doing-business along with infraction fines imposed by regulators.

The River RAP team and BPAC exhibited quasi adaptive co-management as they collaborate on RAP implementation. Folke et.al. (2002) defined adaptive co-management as a process by which institutional arrangements and ecological knowledge are tested and revised in dynamic, ongoing, self-organized process of trial-and-error. This led to the second-generation sustainability thinking. The RAP team relies on BPAC to engage with the community on local knowledge and build partnerships with other local community groups and in turn disseminates the information to the RAP team. BPAC contributes knowledge, expertise and experience to develop novel monitoring and habitat restoration programs incorporating learning from reference ecosystem within the St. Marys River system. Local knowledge and learning cascades across scales injecting systems learning for the RAP team to apply in RAP activities leading to emergence of ideas and innovations in problem-solving and decision-making. As a result, BPAC and the River RAP team contributed to system resilience by building capacity so that the River is robust to withstand future challenges. Walker (2004) describes resilience as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change while retaining the same characteristics, function and feedbacks. Building on Walker’s (2004) definition of adaptability, adaptability is the capability of the SES maintain a steady state amid chaos and unpredictability and still tending away from a threshold. Habitat restoration in Little Rapids reach exemplifies building ecosystem-level resilience while teaching students to monitor water quality builds social capacity for socio-ecological resilience.

Challenges and Barriers present in the St. Mary’s River AOC

1. Evaluation Measures

The assessments are characterized as first-generation evaluation with its modernist view that assumes water pollution can be identified using reductionism and rigid scientific method (Capra, 1982; Tierney, 2001; Williams and Sewpaul, 2004) relying on baselines to measure outcomes. Moreover, the assessments use scientific-experimental models (Trochim, 2009) that emphasize using the right tools, accuracy and validity of the outcomes.

The IJC listing/delisting criteria measure compliance of RAP outcomes with existing policies (Ontario MOE, 1992). The baseline used in listing/delisting criteria include ambient water quality important for human consumption and other life. The assessment, considered as second and third-generation evaluation uses judgement-based approach to determine whether the sites are worthy of delisting and objectives met (Guba and Lincoln, 1989 and Morse, 1994). The evaluation process falls within the larger framework of the IJC’s mandate of restoring the water quality of the Great Lakes to sustainable level (Trochim, 2009).

2. Management

The current governance model presents challenges and barriers in transforming the RAP team-BPAC relationship to social-ecological system. The RAP team may seem encumbered by bureaucratic hierarchies that constrains information flows. Being decentralized, the team creates flexibility in working at the community level allowing collaboration.

BPAC members were selected by the RAP team to represent their communities and organization. Furthermore, four members were nominated to work closely with the RAP team on decision-making, negotiation and dynamic learning processes. Delineating roles affects holism, group dynamics and learning. Contribution to the process is fragmented and sporadic limiting full involvement to a select few.

Recognizing that ecosystem perspective and society were missing from the RAP, management took advantage of an emerging window of opportunity for transformation towards adaptive governance. As Olssan et.al (2004) pointed out transformation towards adaptive governance occur in three phases evident in the GLWQA amendments. Incorporating ecosystem perspective in the planning and evaluation processes signalled organizational readiness to transformation allowing the social context to activate paving the way towards adaptive co-management.

The transformation also introduced shadow networks and along with them, alternative management approaches and opportunities for knowledge transfer as well as system learning. Considering that the River AOC is one of 43 other AOCs currently implementing the site-specific RAP, information sharing helps to streamline processes.

3. Leadership

Although leadership came about as a result of jurisdictional delegation, the IJC took on more of management role transferring leadership to Ontario Ministry of Environment (OMOE) who coordinated the development of the RAP and formalized the BPAC. Not only the OMOE demonstrated it ability to reconceptualize and contextualize the issues in integrating the River’s biophysical complexities but it was able to move across levels of governance in coordinating appropriate level of planning to occur. It was also able to bring various stakeholders from diverse sectors to the table in effective engagement producing favorable outcomes. Due to the cumbersome organizational structure and its outcome-focused vision, the OMOE may be limited in its ability to recognize windows of opportunities. It may rely on its relationship with BPAC to enact or promote novelty by combining networks, experiences and social memories (Olsson, 2006).

In time, BPAC emerged to exhibit leadership in supporting the creation of Friends of the St. Marys River, leading the work on compiling programs and projects that helped to minimize duplication of efforts and providing critical information of desired outcomes. BPAC continuously bring a diversity of ideas, viewpoints and solutions to the table as well as engaging across different sectors. This helped to recognize and operationalize windows of opportunity. They not only transcend cross-scale to engage with stakeholders and navigate politics, but they also take advantage of networks to capture experiences and learning to formalize social memory into the process. Moreover, they champion social experimentation at the smaller scale to enhance the capability and collective knowledge benefiting the RAP.

Other smaller-scale leadership included Education and Reporting Task Team who led the coordination and dissemination of information and education programs to the general public; the Munuscong River Watershed Association (MRWA) who facilitated the construction of educational platform for local schools to participate in the RAP activities; and the Sault Ste. Marie High School in Michigan who constructed a wildlife observation platform to facilitate educational opportunities for students to study healthy ecosystems and foster ecological stewardship (Ontario MOE, 2002).

Improvement Recommendations to finalize the St. Mary’s River RAP process

Several BUIs currently remain unresolved which required a systems approach and dynamic learning across spatio-temporal scale. The following improvement recommendations were selected to help transition the River RAP process towards building resilience in the socio-ecological system.

Moving the St. Marys River AOC management towards adaptive governance

Adaptive governance demands the integration of ecology, economic, social and institution arrangements operating as equals at different scales (Ostrom, 1996 and Walker, 2004). The presence of willing social group, window of opportunity and environmental crisis ease the transformation towards adaptive governance.

Although the governance model operating within the River AOC somewhat follows the adaptive co-management approach. The current process can be viewed as being mired by hierarchical bureaucracy prioritizing on managing stakeholder expectations. This may lead to reducing BPAC efficacy in building capacity and local knowledge.

An alternative scenario may include decentralizing the RAP team from manager role to an equal partner sharing the responsibilities with BPAC. The two separate groups collaborate at the same level to produce the plans and reports without duplicating efforts. The group builds trust by creating a mutual vision and a set of achievable and measurable goals. Through open dialogue and discourse, the group designs resilient processes for implementing the RAP to restore the remaining 5 BUIs.

The group can also design resilience-based evaluation framework to monitor progress and evaluate outcomes. The groups are prepared to embrace interventions and create a safe environment for reflections and safe-fails. The group embraces dynamic learning and cascades experiential learning and knowledge up and down scale to ensure growth continues. By doing so, the group becomes resilient to changes and are capable of countering small-scale revolts and recover easily. They are aware of which phase of an adaptive cycle the system has reached and identify thresholds to avoid (Olsson, 2006). They also know how to create efficiency when planning the front loop actions while relying on resilience on the back loop (Olsson, 2006).

They build networks and relationships. Through open dialogue and discourse, the group builds capacity for conflict resolution and develop windows of opportunities from conflicts. They also can turn conflicts into opportunities and build caches of potential projects for future implementation when the right situation comes along.

Evaluation Framework for Sustainable Livelihood

The First Nations peoples traditionally fished in the River and established a commercial fishery livelihood before water quality issues rendered the fish stocks unsafe for consumption resulted in industry collapse. Although the representatives of the First Nations community participate in the BPAC, it was not clear whether the First Nations Commercial Fishery sector was represented. The workers lost their livelihood. The remedial works to remove the Restriction on Fish and Wildlife Consumption and Fish tumors and deformities from the BUI listing are ongoing.

Evaluating the outcome for the commercial fishery collapse is critical to highlight social impacts of economic exploitation of the River. Information on the livelihood assets would indicate the extent of the impact to not only the local community but also the regional socio-economic wellbeing and whether governance interventions were required to assist the displaced workers and their families. The outcome of the evaluation may be used to inform the RAP team and BPAC to prioritizing the RAP activities and funding towards improving the fishery and explore the following windows of opportunities:

• Design fishery population study to better understanding natural capital and ecosystem services
• Capacity building for impacted communities and community resilience to future economic shocks
• Explore social capital that currently exists for the commercial fishing communities
• Explore alternative uses for the physical capital and assets the commercial fishing companies current hold which may led to emergence of
• Explore alternative financial resources to ignite entrepreneurship

Evaluation Framework for Adaptive Co-Management Governance of the River AOC

Adaptive co-management approaches require ongoing assessment and reflection to respond to environmental, social and economic feedback in order to be able to respond appropriately (Holling, 1978). The evaluation framework should be sufficiently robust to capture the information and learning from across the spatio-temporal scales. Parameters from the slow- and fast-moving variable from the ecosystem conditions, socioeconomic and livelihood outcomes as well as processes and institutional conditions should be incorporated (Armitage et.al., 2009).

The critical aspect of the evaluation process is to gain a better understanding of the relationship dynamics making up the working group. The evaluator needs to develop a list of questionnaires that focus on acquiring information on the group’s capacity for learning and motivations for learning including capacity building through personal/group development. Furthermore, the framework should also include observations on social interactions and concerted efforts to builds trust through open dialogue and deliberation (Armitage, et.al. 2009).

Conclusion

Water quality problems has been the focus of the River RAP for more than 30 years. Several BUIs were successfully restored with a few more currently in progress. Much of the success was attributed to the collaboration for the government-based RAP team and BPAC, community representative selected to work on the RAP. The working group exhibited adaptive co-management in their continuous dynamic learning, capacity building and building system resilience through their remediation works. As a delegated leader, the RAP team tended to maintain an arms-length relationship with community groups. BPAC’s leadership qualities manifested with its support for the emerging shadow networks.

The current evaluation methods are characterized as being the first three generation evaluations promoting the mechanistic worldview of taking the world apart to know it. The challenges and barriers in evaluation may have contributed to persistent poor fishery condition.

The report presented three recommendation to help improve the remediation process and help the group navigate transformation to adaptive governance. They are as follows:

•     Moving the St. Marys River AOC management towards adaptive governance

•     Evaluation Framework for Sustainable Livelihood

•     Evaluation Framework for Adaptive Co-Management Governance of the River AOC

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