One focus of work at the William D. Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources is on exploring ways to integrate collaborative learning and problem solving into the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

NEPA, adopted by the U.S. Congress in late 1969 and signed into law by President Nixon on January 1, 1970, is considered by many to provide the foundation for environmental protection in the United States. In three short pages, NEPA sets out a comprehensive national environmental policy "...to use all practicable means...to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony..." (42 USC 4331), and requires the Federal Government to establish and follow procedures to assess the environmental impacts of proposed major federal actions (42 USC 4332). NEPA has been very successful in focusing the attention of federal agencies in considering environmental impacts of proposed actions and in providing a vehicle for public involvement in federal decision making.

But on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the passage of NEPA, the President's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) set out to examine NEPA's effectiveness and to identify factors critical to the success of the NEPA process. The report of the CEQ's findings, "The National Environmental Policy Act: A Study of Its Effectiveness After Twenty-five Years" was released in January 1997. As an outgrowth of this study, CEQ launched a series of efforts to identify how NEPA implementation could be improved, to make it more efficient and to realize the national environmental policy set out in the act.

As part of this effort, former CEQ Chair Kathleen McGinty commissioned a set of activities related to NEPA by both the Institute for Environment and Natural Resources (IENR) at the University of Wyoming and the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West (CRMW) at The University of Montana. Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer, Senator Craig Thomas of Wyoming and Senator Max Baucus of Montana also added their endorsement of the NEPA-related work of UW's IENR and UM's CRMW.

NEPA was originally passed 30 years ago during a time of intensive legislative efforts centering on environmental statutes and rules. Within the last ten years, however, the practice of collaborative problem solving has been developing and emerging as an approach for improving natural resource management decisions. The traditional "rule-based" approach to NEPA implementation provides an important structure and is still needed, but can be frustrating. A new collaborative approach would focus on building trust and would not be as structured. There is considerable interest in figuring out how to use the trust and common ground developed through collaboration to help overcome the cumbersome and litigious processes that have developed around statutes such as NEPA. Such collaborative approaches could be particularly applicable for helping resolve environmental policy issues that often arise in federal land and natural resource management decisions in the western United States. We believe that the best way to proceed is not to drastically overhaul the existing NEPA process, but to create a parallel track through a series of projects demonstrating the use of collaborative problem solving.

To explore the use of collaborative and consensus-based strategies for improving NEPA implementation, IENR and CRMW co-hosted a workshop on March 20-23, 1999 with invited NEPA experts and practitioners representing federal and state agencies, industry, environmental organizations, and academia. Attendees included people who have extensive experience with both the traditional and the new decision-making approaches.

The specific objectives of the IENR/CRMW NEPA workshop were as follows:

• Review the historical and successes and failures of NEPA implementation, particularly for land and resource management issues in the western United States.
• Review collaborative and consensus-based decision models and methods as they have been applied to non-NEPA and NEPA issues, including elements of success and failure, barriers to application of these models, and possible future application for NEPA issues.
• Recommend implementation strategies for testing the use of collaborative and consensus models in actual NEPA projects, including criteria for selecting candidate demonstration projects, resolving legislative and legal barriers, and methods for judging success or failure of outcomes.
• Transmit workshop conclusions and recommendations to legislative, agency and public leaders.
• Publish a workshop report for rapid dissemination to CEQ, workshop funding sources, interested parties and the public.

Workshop participants identified barriers to using collaborative problem solving in NEPA processes, and strategies for overcoming those barriers. The full report from the workshop, entitled Reclaiming NEPA's Potential: Can Collaborative Processes Improve Environmental Decision Making? is available. Click here to read the Executive Summary. To obtain a copy of the report, please send a check or money order (payable to University of Wyoming - IENR) for $12 to:
Institute for Environment and Natural Resources
University of Wyoming
Dept. 3971
1000 E. University Avenue
Laramie, WY 82071-2000

For credit card purchases, please call the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West at 406-243-7700.