The Office of the Legislative Auditor just released a report in January 2007 looking at watershed management in Minnesota. They concluded that "a complex system of multiple local, state, and federal entities with a mixed record of performance at the local level and inadequate oversight from the Board of Water and Soil Resources (BWSR)." Their recommendations really seem to hone in on BWSR. Anyway, I encourage you to look at the final report (http://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/ped/2007/watersheds.htm)

It might be helpful if we could agree on a working definition of "Governance" (or "Water Governance" if that's what we mean). There is an interesting article on the United Nations ESCAP web page titled "What is Good Governance?" Here is an excerpt...

"Since governance is the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented, an analysis of governance focuses on the formal and informal actors involved in decision-making and implementing the decisions made and the formal and informal structures that have been set in place to arrive at and implement the decision."

It also defines "Civil Society" and other related concepts, has a couple of useful charts on Good Governance and lists out important characteristics of Good Governance. You can read the full article (about 4 pages )at http://www.unescap.org/pdd/prs/ProjectActivities/Ongoing/gg/governance.asp

To simplify I would say...

Governance is the "who" or the people/entities involved in water resource management and the way they are arranged in relation to each other (from a power and responsibility standpoint).

Policy is the tool, the "how" or agreed upon course of action by which governance takes place.

As we converge on ideas about vision and principles at the next meeting, the next task will be get information from surveys, interviews, etc.

But, who to ask? We can't very well reach large numbers of folks in agencies, and a public survey would be expensive.

Here are a few ideas:
1. Opinion leaders - former legislators, heads of nonprofits, etc. Gene would be a prime example!

2. The county water planners, county-level administrators of soil and water conservation districts (who sometimes double as county water planners), and watershed district/WMO administrators. We could readily get an email list of all these folks (roughly 120). These folks are as close to "on the ground" as you can get, and are often caught in between state/federal mandates on one side, and local units of government, on the other. Because 100% can be reached by email, we could easily deliver a survey by "Survey Monkey" - essentially free.

Survey Monkey not only lets you design and email a survey, it compiles results automatically. Very slick!

We might also be able to contact members of various environmental organizations, such as MN Waters or the MN Environmental Partnership (which actually represents a large number of smaller organizations), keeping these surveys separated from the survey of administrators.

Another group of course, could be CL members, also kept separate.

Perhaps others too - any group with an email membership list can be surveyed by Survey Monkey.

Doing a broad representative survey of the citizenry using mail or phone would be very (prohibitively) expensive.

Just thinking ahead about the possibilities.

To all: Since we have talked a bit about land use planning in the context of water quality, I thought some of you might be interested in this lecture on citizen-based planning (Annie: please remove this blog after next Monday):

David Hulse
Philip H. Knight professor and former chair in landscape architecture, University of Oregon
Envisioning Alternatives: Working With People To Conceive And Map Future Land And Water Use
Monday, October 27, 6 p.m., 100 Rapson Hall
H.W.S. Cleveland Lecture

Life teaches us early that today's choices affect tomorrow's opportunities. Scenario-based alternative futures studies are ways to explore plausible options for the future of a place, an organization, or a community, and to see what effects each option has on things people care about. These types of studies are being used in a widening array of situations in which people seek choice in their future and evidence that the future they are achieving is one they will want when it arrives. These approaches offer the promise (but less so the proof) of policies and patterns that are sufficiently robust against future surprise that they can seize unexpected opportunities, adapt when things go wrong, and provide new avenues in forging consensus regarding the facts and values that steer landscape change. Where the focus is on anticipating trajectories of change caused by human use of land and water, scenario-based approaches provide a framework for effectively incorporating science into a community-based decision-making process and for fostering a more sophisticated dialogue of the facts and values that underpin informed landscape change.

Using geographical information systems and related tools, the Pacific Northwest Ecosystem Research Consortium depicted Historical (pre-EuroAmerican settlement, ca. 1850), current (ca. 1990) and three alternative future (ca. 2050) landscapes for western Oregon's Willamette River Basin. During a thirty month period, Hulse worked with lay and professional citizen groups to create, map, and refine a set of value-based assumptions about future policy in three scenarios concerning land and water use. This presentation shares lessons learned in the process of working with people to map and evaluate future patterns of land and water use.

Hulse is a founding member of the University of Oregon's Institute for a Sustainable Environment. His expertise is in the area of geographic information systems and the use of computer-based tools for facilitating land use planning and natural resource decision-making. He has worked extensively as a landscape planner in the US and abroad. Current efforts include work with colleagues at the US E.P.A., the National Science Foundation and Oregon State University on development of spatial decision support systems for creating and evaluating alternative land and water use futures in the Willamette River Basin and elsewhere in Oregon. Hulse is a graduate of Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, a Fulbright Scholar, and a recipient of the US Chapter of the International Association for Landscape Ecology's Distinguished Landscape Practitioner award.