The nation s approach to managing environmental policy and protecting natural
resources has shifted from the national government s top down, command and
control, regulatory approach, used almost exclusively in the 1970s, to
collaborative, multi-sector approaches used in recent decades to manage problems
that are generally too complex, too expensive, and too politically divisive for
one agency to manage or resolve on its own. Governments have organized
multi-sector collaborations as a way to achieve better results for the past two
decades. We know much about why collaboration occurs. We know a good deal about
how collaborative processes work. Collaborations organized, led, and managed by
grassroots organizations are rarer,