"From my place to yours": Communities of open innovation as an approach to watershed stewardship transferability

Background/Question/Methods

Successful Earth Stewardship is dependent upon local landscape initiatives where residents have cultivated a strong sense of place.  Governance arrangements that aim to preserve and enhance the earth’s life support systems can take a number of institutional forms depending on the ecological context and historical social-political contingencies.  It is becoming increasingly recognized that collaborative resource governance offers a stewardship option to sustainable watershed management.  Collaborative approaches are being advocated as a promising mechanism to deal with the complex and contentious nature of natural resource management in ways that enrich local landscapes and livelihoods.  The Blackfoot Challenge, a landowner-based, ecosystem stewardship organization based in the Blackfoot Valley in Montana is one institution that has experienced success working collaboratively at the watershed scale.  Water conservation programs; grizzly-human mitigation efforts; landscape scale public-private land conservation; and species restoration (most recently trumpeter swans) are some examples of notable achievements.  The mission of the Blackfoot Challenge is to “coordinate efforts that will enhance and conserve the natural resources and rural way of life from ridge-top to ridge-top in the Blackfoot River Valley.”    But in order to adequately deal with multi-scale environmental and natural resource issues, successful ‘transferring’ of the place-based model from one context to another is needed. Based on collaborative, participatory research with the Blackfoot Challenge, this paper explores mechanisms of successful watershed conservation and the potential means of transferring the collaborative conservation model to other places.  The data collection and analysis was qualitative, and the fieldwork was conducted during the summer of 2010.

Results/Conclusions

The results of this research have revealed some important social, ecological, and temporal factors relevant in fostering a strong sense of place.  Further, the results support the notion that effective ‘diffusion’ of the collaborative watershed conservation model must be flexible, adaptive, and avoid a ‘cookie-cutter’, top-down approach.  A number of principles can guide the ethos of transferability, including: open source, communities of learning, and open innovation.  This paper concludes by offering ‘communities of open innovation’ as a new mechanism for transferability.  Fostering communities of open innovation is imperative for successful Earth Stewardship so diverse people and places can share the challenges and opportunities associated with stewardship practices.