Four Mile Creek's Collaboration

Introduction The rules for stakeholder collaboration start with planning. A project or problem isn’t going to be solved without a little foresight. It’s important to be able to pull from real world examples and see how previous situations have played out. This is a good way to learn from past misfortunes and work towards successful situations. Knowledge of collaboration tools help facilitate better planning and leads to more effective use of problem solving down the road.
Recruitment Tools
Four Mile Creek is in a relatively centralized area, across Greater Des Moines. It’s flow affects urban residents, agricultural areas, and has great ecological impact on its surrounding environment. Many people may not know how integral the water here is
Mapping out the interests of various groups will identify where tensions may arise. They need an open dialogue, to facilitate an open-minded discourse, on the issues most important to their cases. This will lead to a more thorough look at interests and bring out hidden interests, with less likelihood of conflict arising and halting the process.
The fishbowl exercise, is a way to open up a safe discussion space to a small to medium sized group of people. So, it’d be best if only one to two individuals from each stakeholder group were to come to this type of meeting. It’s generally set up in a round table discussion with observers watching the process. Then later the observers can give feedback on the issues discussed. This type of meeting would be best set-up in space with elevated seating, providing better observation by the onlookers.
Setting up the meeting space and contacting the stakeholders is necessary. Email would be the most cost effective, efficient and professional way to inform stakeholders and individuals. Together the best common time and place for a meeting can be found. Once together the stakeholders interests can be outlined and recorded. Then all groups will have a list of all other interests and
These are ecological and human rights issues in a developing country. Emotional stakes in those issue tend to be higher and produce less thought-out responses, Hopefully, if all stakeholders are in the same room and laying out a history of goals, they’ll find commonalities and work towards common goals. Easier said than done, but not impossible.
Strategic Tools A charrette would be a good step to follow historical mapping in the Belize case. They are easily customizable and work well when many ideas need to be brainstormed to achieve multiple goals. Groups are divided up and given issues to think and try and resolve. This helps work the issues together from various viewpoints. Leading to a solution brought about by all the different stakeholders. Then the stakeholders have the ability to vote as a whole on the final product.
The charrette would help in the strong emotional sentiments of some groups. If the groups are diversified and everyone has to facilitate problem solving, therefore, most people will feel a sense of accomplishment. This is another way to open a dialogue; the most important piece of stakeholder collaboration. Without the ability for all groups to speak and be understood, negotiations will continuously be interrupted or fall through,