ABSTRACT
Planning and decision-making involves both formal and informal interactions among stakeholders. More flexible and collaborative approaches to governance can help agencies and other stake-holders to move forward one step at a time in the face of persistent uncertainties, dynamic conditions and unclear institutional arrangements. This chapter discusses how flexibility can be institutionalized into governance arrangements, including how approaches like collaborative adaptive management can marry ongoing fact-finding to ongoing, multi-stakeholder deliberative forums. Collaborative planning takes a variety of forms in practice. The consensus building approach (CBA) emphasizes convening representatives from the various stakeholder groups in face-to-face meetings to identify creative solutions that substantially meet everyone's interests and concerns. Stakeholders are directly involved in framing research questions; working with technical experts to design, and often implement, their research programs; and receive the outcomes within wider collaborative forums. Adaptive approaches to making decisions are no more value free and immune from the interests of different stakeholders than are conventional approaches.
