Analytics and Beliefs: Competing Explanations for Defining Problems and in Choosing Allies and Opponents in Collaborative Environmental Management

The rationale for collaborative environmental management often hinges on two factors: first that specialized training creates biased analytics requiring multi-disciplinary approaches to solve policy problems; and second, that the normative beliefs of competing actors must be included in policymaking to give the process legitimacy and to decide trans-scientific problems. We test these two factors as drivers of conflict in an analysis of 76 watershed partnerships and find that: (i) Analytical bias is a secondary factor to normative beliefs; (ii) Depicting the primary driver of conflict in collaborative environmental management as between experts and non-experts is inaccurate; (iii) Compared to the “life” and “physical” sciences, the social sciences and liberal arts have the stronger impact on beliefs and choice of allies and opponents; and (iv) Multiple measures are needed to capture the effect of analytical biases. The conclusion offers lessons for public administrators, limitations, and generalizations to other governing approaches.