The Collaboration Trap

The collaborative model promised common ground. In practice, it has weakened public lands advocacy, sidelined grassroots voices, and helped industry keep its grip on the West.

Photo by Ambre Estève on Unsplash

For the past two decades, the dominant approach to protecting public lands in the American West has not been litigation, direct advocacy, or aggressive congressional campaigning. It has been “collaboration” — convening “stakeholders around the table” to negotiate deals that interested parties can live with. Land management agencies promote it. Influential conservation groups embrace it. Universities teach it to their students. Politicians like it because it outsources the difficult work. And promoters herald it as proof that bitter adversaries can work together and find common ground.

But here’s the reality: The collaborative model consistently produces outcomes that favor resource extraction and industry over ecological protection, and it does so while neutralizing voices that might otherwise push back. Collaboratives have never represented the national interest, nor were they intended to.

The collaborative model in public lands management traces its formal origins to the mid 1970s when it was first promoted by The Keystone Policy Center, who began promoting facilitated stakeholder consensus on natural resource disputes. Collaboration went mainstream when the Clinton administration began promoting stakeholder-based processes as an alternative to what officials characterized as gridlock caused by litigation and political conflict over western lands. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management increasingly used these groups to guide land management decisions and official planning processes, giving the process an air of official sanction while attempting to insulate agency decisions from legal challenge by pointing to the broad stakeholder buy-in the process had generated. Congress followed suit, with individual legislators using collaborative outcomes as the basis for wilderness and public lands bills.

Member composition is the most fundamental problem with conservation collaborative processes. The majority of collaborative memberships consist of people who represent the resource extraction industry or their sympathizers. Public lands belong to all Americans and everyone should have an equal say in their future management, yet participants are heavily weighted toward local interests, particularly the same traditional profit-making “customers” who have always dictated the agency’s priorities — ranchers, county commissioners, snowmobile clubs, and timber operators — who have specific economic stakes in what happens to the land. Conservation collaborators are selected for their willingness to set aside litigation and hard advocacy in favor of a go-along-to-get-along ethos and compromise.

The broader public that cares about wildlife, clean water, and intact ecosystems is typically unrepresented, or represented weakly by a token sprinkling of conservation group staffers who face enormous pressure not to blow up the consensus. So while large majorities of the public might support protecting old growth or saving endangered species or reining in oil and gas development, the industries that oppose these positions – while employing an infinitesimally small percentage of the population – wind up with most of the seats at the table.

This dynamic is currently playing out vividly in the ongoing fight over Montana’s Gallatin Range, the largest unprotected roadless area in the northern Yellowstone Ecosystem. The range contains an estimated 230,000 to 270,000 acres that qualify for wilderness designation under the 1964 Wilderness Act. Yet the local collaborative, the Gallatin Forest Partnership, has proposed the protection of just 100,000 acres, in large part to accommodate mountain biking and motorized recreation in remaining roadless areas. The collaborative’s starting premise is not, “How do we protect this landscape?” but, “How do we keep all user groups happy?” Those are fundamentally different questions, and produce fundamentally different outcomes. Grassroots advocates pushing for wilderness protection of the entire wild Gallatins have been effectively sidelined, while well-funded groups operating inside the collaborative have settled for a proposal designating less than half the eligible acreage.

Former Montana senator Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, first introduced in 2009, is the canonical example of what collaboration delivers when it reaches the legislative stage. The bill emerged from negotiations between conservation groups, the timber industry, and rural counties, and what it proposed was a straightforward transaction: wilderness designation on roughly 637,000 acres in exchange for congressionally mandated logging on 100,000 acres of national forests, and the “release” of roughly 1 million acres of irreplaceable wild roadless lands for logging and other industrial activities.

The collaborative work behind the bill fractured the Montana conservation community, with former board members and officers of a prominent statewide wilderness organization publicly breaking with their own group over a bill they believed degraded the quantity and quality of some of America’s most important wildlands. If it had passed into law, it would have sacrificed large portions of Wilderness Study Areas (“WSAs”), congressionally set aside in 1977, removing their protective status and opening them up to road building and logging.

Idaho’s Owyhee Initiative followed the same pattern. The multi-year collaborative process produced a package that designated over 500,000 acres of wilderness, but simultaneously released 200,000 acres of WSAs to multiple use, opened cherry-stem roads into designated wilderness, and embedded ranching preferences so deeply into the legislation that the land management agency later approved motor vehicle use by ranchers inside designated wilderness — in direct violation of the Wilderness Act. Advocates had to return to court years later just to enforce protections the original legislation was supposed to guarantee.

Collaboration functionally empowers the veto of individual interests. If a proposal seems hard for an interest group to swallow, they can simply block consensus, and hold the process hostage. That means that it’s easy to defend the status quo. When the status quo is problematic, collaboration tends to produce results that extend the problems rather than solving them.

Large, well-funded environmental organizations can be lured into a pattern of producing deals, instead of holding the line. Their funding often depends on demonstrating legislative wins. Their access to congressional offices depends on being seen as “reasonable” partners. Over time, many conservation representatives inside collaboratives have come to identify more with the grievances of rural communities and user groups than with the ecological values of the land and wildlife they are appointed to represent. Grassroots groups that refuse to participate — and that continue to advocate for maximum protection — are chronically underfunded and frequently undermined by the larger organizations whose compromise positions they are working against.

The alternative to collaboration is not obstruction. It is what worked before: science-based proposals for the maximum protection the land deserves, broad public organizing to build the constituency those proposals need, legal tools deployed aggressively to defend existing protections, and the willingness to refuse bad deals rather than accept them simply because a deal is on the table.

The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act — a proposal to designate 23 million acres of wilderness across five states, connect them with biological corridors, and protect nearly 2,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers — represents this vision. It has no logging mandates, no land transfers, and no motor vehicle exceptions. It defines what the landscape and wildlife actually need, which is where any honest advocacy should begin, not where it ends up after years of compromise. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the River of No Return Wilderness, the Absaroka-Beartooth, the North Cascades — none of these protections came from collaborative deal-making with the industries that opposed them. They came from advocates who fought for them and lawmakers who were willing to work for the public instead of Big Industry.

The conservation movement did not protect our greatest wild places by sitting in rooms with county commissioners and agreeing to log half of them first. Congress is elected and paid to do the compromising. Wildland advocates should take a page from history and get back to work advocating for the wild. If we are to rebuild the public lands and wilderness movement, it must start with an honest accounting of where we have failed. Until members and funders start holding large conservation groups accountable, nothing will change.

Adam Bronstein is the Oregon director for Western Watersheds Project.