LAKE EFFECTS

Researchers look into the determinants of collaboration between groups focused on pollution in the Lake Champlain Basin

Lake Champlain is the 13th largest lake in the United States and - because of both its size and the amount of pollution it has endured - a slew of organizations and government agencies are focused on improving its water quality.
 
In a pair of studies published this spring, researchers sought to figure out when, why and under what circumstances those entities collaborate to try to address the problems plaguing Lake Champlain and the waterways that feed it. Their findings can help inform state and federal regulators as they rework policies and redirect resources to address harmful cyanobacteria blooms in Lake Champlain and Lake Memphremagog in Vermont, largely the result of phosphorus runoff from watershed areas that feed into the lakes.
 
A multidisciplinary team at the University of Vermont working with the Vermont Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, or VT EPSCoR, conducted a survey of 203 "actors" in water governance - public and private entities putting research and resources into care and cleanup of the Lake Champlain Basin. The team's two research papers, one published in Ecology & Society and one in PLOS ONE, suggest that organizations located in close proximity and focused on the same watershed areas tended to work together more and to participate in forums specific to those geographic regions.
 
"What really seems to matter is geography," said Patrick Bitterman, a VT EPSCoR team member who is now an assistant professor of geography at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "These actors in Vermont are more likely to coordinate their activities with others that are nearby in geographic space, that are close."
 
The research can help state regulators figure out strategies they can use to encourage lake-focused players to team up and collectively solve a statewide problem.
 
In 2019, the Vermont legislature passed Act 76, which created a new framework for executing projects that support the state's clean water goals. The law not only provides funding and objectives for phosphorus-reducing projects - such as stormwater management, wetlands restoration and floodplain reconnection - but also establishes regional "clean water service providers" for each watershed in the Lake Champlain and Lake Memphremagog basins to carry out those projects.
 
The new rules intend to give local stakeholders, the people who care most about the waterways near them, some control over how those natural resources are managed, Bitterman said. The VT EPSCoR findings can pinpoint where the state needs to put greater effort to get people and groups to work together.
 
"That can guide them as they try to build out these new institutions," Bitterman said. "I think the new institutions are going to be vital, especially in facilitating outreach and education across the basin."
 
In general, the researchers expected to see more of a connection between common topics of interest – all the groups and state agencies focused on agriculture, for example, or development - and the likelihood that they would work together. "We didn't find much evidence that shared interests actually predicted collaboration," Bitterman said.
 
In the PLOS One paper, the researchers looked at eight "action situations," such as public forums and other gatherings, that aim to bring various water-quality players together to share ideas and goals. Participants with a mutual interest in a general topic had no greater inclination to build working relationships. Again, it was entities' location within the same geographic area or same dedication to that geographic area - such as the Winooski River or Otter Creek - that made the most difference in likelihood of collaboration.
 
Vermont is unique because of its "sheer number of actors" concerned with water quality in Lake Champlain and surrounding rivers, Bitterman said. Many of the state's small organizations are run by, in some cases, just one part-time employee. The researchers suspect the responses they received might under-represent those smaller entities that lacked the staff to respond, Bitterman said.
 
Bitterman and fellow VT EPSCoR researcher Christopher Koliba, who is now a professor of public administration, policy and governance at the University of Kansas, conducted the studies after developing a model to assess collaboration between the state's municipalities. They wanted to see how such partnerships would lead to reductions in nutrient runoff, particularly phosphorus, into the lake and provide insight for the state's distribution of block grants for each watershed area.
 
The two recent studies were part of a larger project called Basin Resilience to Extreme Events (BREE), funded by the National Science Foundation in 2016, to assess Lake Champlain's response to increasingly extreme events and to provide data to assist policymakers and economic development initiatives.
 
The goal of the research is to determine the most effective approach to solve the pressing problem of lake pollution. And the team's findings emphasize the need to bring as many people, groups and ideas to the table as possible.
 
Full articles may be found here:
 
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0282797
 
https://ecologyandsociety.org/vol28/iss1/art44