“They’re Constantly Cycling Through”: Lessons about Turnover and Collaborative Forest Planning

Within forest planning and management, collaboration has becoming increasingly widespread. Many collaborative projects take place over long time periods, and thus personnel turnover is inevitable within these groups. Scholars from the fields of business and organizational science have long studied strategies that organizations can use to prepare for and address turnover successfully. We draw from that literature and use it to examine the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP), a federal program aimed at bringing diverse stakeholders together to address the increasing costs, severity, and prevalence of wildfires in the United States. We conducted qualitative analysis of interviews, archival documents, and memos to explore what strategies are used within CFLRP groups to address turnover. We discuss our findings in light of the existing literature from business and organizational science and present insights about which strategies may be adaptable to collaborative natural resource management and which may require further research to assess their applicability to collaborative groups. Study Implications Successful collaborative natural resource management may require collaborative groups to plan for and address the inevitable turnover of personnel. Previous work demonstrates that personnel turnover threatens trust between members, challenges the longevity of collaboration, hinders accountability within collaborative groups, and impedes the development of relationships. However, studies from the field of organizational science show that turnover may also allow groups to shed toxic members, set new directions, and reduce entrenched conflict. When collaborative groups have the resources and structures to do so, they may benefit from proactively recruiting replacements, developing leadership pipelines, and implementing onboarding practices.

Constitutional Law, Ecosystems, and Indigenous Peoples in Colombia: Biocultural Rights and Legal Subjects

The recognition of rivers and related ecosystems as legal persons or subjects is an emerging mechanism in transnational practice available to governments in seeking more effective and collaborative natural resource management, sometimes at the insistence of indigenous peoples. This approach is developing particularly quickly in Colombia, where legal rights for rivers and ecosystems are grasping onto, and evolving out of, constitutional human rights protections. This enables the development of a new type of constitutionalism of nature. Yet legal rights for rivers may obscure the rights of indigenous peoples and their role in resource ownership and governance. We argue that the Colombian river cases serve as a caution to courts and legislatures elsewhere to be mindful, in devising ecosystem rights, of the complex and interrelated rights, interests and tenures of indigenous peoples and local communities.