Implementing Innovation: Fostering Enduring Change in Environmental and Natural Resource Governance (Public Management and Change)

About this book

Over the past three decades governments at the local state and federal levels have undertaken a wide range of bold innovations often in partnership with nongovernmental organizations and communities to try to address their environmental and natural resource management tasks. Many of these efforts have failed. Innovations by definition are transitory. How then can we establish new practices that endure? Toddi A. Steelman argues that the key to successful and long-lasting innovation must be a realistic understanding of the challenges that face it. She examines three case studiesland management in Colorado watershed management in West Virginia and timber management in New Mexicoand reveals specific patterns of implementation success and failure. Steelman challenges conventional wisdom about the role of individual entrepreneurs in innovative practice. She highlights the institutional obstacles that impede innovation and its longer term implementation while offering practical insight in how enduring change might be achieved.