Regional Forum Review

[LHDSONOMA@aol.com]

 ******* This is a long file *******

Regional Forum Review

Lenny - I agree that the regional forum achieved its dual mission of
reviewing lessons learned and identifying the needs/ concerns of 
base cleanup constituencies/stakeholders. However, based on the final plenary
session comments, I did not get a sense of a consensus for a coherent action
plan to broaden the role of local community stakeholders in planning clean-up
strategies or choosing/developing innovative technologies which are aligned
with local community interests.

 Many of the suggestions I heard pointed in the direction of expanding local
community power/knowledge/skills relative to other stakeholders. Perhaps the
vocalization at the Forum of these issues/suggestions for greater community
power was simply due to the fact that the Forum intentionally included
community stakeholders in what might be characterized as a
business/technical conference for technology developers, sellers, regulators,
and buyers. Then again, maybe these issue are moving towards the top of
public agenda because the overall base conversion process has now moved along
through the first closure environmental assessment phase towards the phase
of actually preparing for eventual civilian control and management. In any
case you are to be congratualated for facilitating a timely and effective
Regional Forum which served as a sort of Regional RAB meeting and which began
to address many of the same "communication" issues which characterize the
discourse of local RABs. I hope that your final report will focus the
numerous ideas presented and provide a specific plan for action. In the
meantime I would like to offer my own assessment//recommendations for action.

Lets begin with your opening goals statement"... to bring stakeholder
involvement to a new level...to broaden the process of developing and
evaluating innovative echnologies...to build on that broadened process to
eliminate unreasonable obstacles to testing and use of those technologies.
... Our challenge, begining with this forum, is to create a partnership in
which federal agencies and private technology venders seek the advice of the
affected public ... not just in the application of cleanup technologies, but
in choices about development... "

I certainly agree with these goals, particularly the goal of expanding the
role of the public stakeholders. Specifically I wish to transform community
stakeholders to being full participants in the choice of what clean-up/reuse
strategies are appropriate and what technologies should be developed and
deployed.

 To achieve this will require that active community stakeholders
improve their skills in two dimensions: (1) deeper knowledge of the relation
between strategic planning and economic/ technological choices, (The way we
define a problem dictates what solutions make sense) and (2) better skills
development in the education and mobilization of community citizens who are
ultimately the base of community stakeholder political power. (As individual
community stakeholders increase their own knowledge/power and involvement
they often forget or simply lack the resources to both join the learning
curve and continue to mobilize/educate the wider community they represent).

Part of the problem is simply that there is a major inequality in the
relative knowledge/power/resources of different stakeholders. Whereas many
stakeholders are paid and provided institutional resources many community
stakeholders are volunteers without major organizational resources. But even
when this imbalance of relative power is somehow breached there remains the
fact that the underlying decision making criteria for efficiency
(cost/profit analysis) and for effectiveness (cost/value analyis) is
different for different stakeholders in the overall base clean-up and reuse
process.

 What I heard most clearly at the forum was a background buzz which was
seeking to bring some harmony to these underlying differences in the economic
rationalities and reasonings of different stakeholders representing the
interests of different institutional cultures. ( For example; what
constitutes a cost effective innovative technology for community
stakeholders whose priorities are job training and employment is liklely to
be quite different from what constitutes a cost effective innovative
technology to an international firm interested in using a base as a low cost
R&D site or a university interested in conducting basic research.)

 Unfortuneately this background buzz in seach of common ground could only
politely surface in the consensus that "communication" is a major problem.
Although I am a great advocate of information distribution, two way
communication, and discourse I came away with the sense that in many
instances the term "communication" was being used at the Forum as a
wastebasket - a way of avoiding the articulation of differences and thereby
throwing away the potential for discourse and analysis of different
institutional/cultural values and interests. Further, the phrase " a problem
of communication" seemed to be used as a way of avoiding inequalities of
power, money, and knowledge among different legitimate stakeholders. In
short, the general consensus for "better communication" needs to be better
specified in terms of communication of what to whom for what purpose at whose
cost. 

 Obviously the recognition that there is a problem of commmunication is
better than the old simple win/lose power games in which one frame of
reference dominates and sets the rules regarding what is or is not within the
scope of legitimate discussion. However, recognizing that there is a problem
of communication does not go far enough. The next step ( which several
panelists mentioned as a lesson learned) is to engage in a discourse which
is specifically focused on the clarification of different underlying frames
of reference and related interests. This type of discourse legitmates
differences and often serves as a prelude to the construction of a new and
prevously unthought common frame of reference which serves as a new ground
for cooperation. ( Unfortuneately the participants in this type of frame
restructuring process sometimes fail to make the effort to transfer their new
understanding back to their home base and therefore find themselves
alienated from their own constitutency and subject to the charge of having
"sold out.")

By contrast, when we stop the discourse at the point when we recognize that
there is "a problem of communication," we essentially revert to a more subtle
form of win/lose which privileges the interests of the most powerful
stakeholders. Let me demonstrate how this seems to have played out at the
Regional Forum. 

First lets look at five specific objectives you established for the forum and
then compare these objectives with your preliminary statement of the action
items identified by
the Forum:

Your specific objectives: 

 (1) to improve sharing of information;
 (2) make it easier to approve innovative technologies , 
 (3) reduce obstacles/ create incentives to use IT for site characterization
And cleanup, 
 (4) make it easier for affected communities to benefit economically from
clean-up activities, 
 (5) enhance incentives for tech transfer from base clean-up to non-military
markets. 

Now compare this with your prliminary summary of the Forum's action items:
(which I have listed and attempted to characterize as follows):

1) standardized innovation technology (IT) evaluation protocols
 ( I characterize this as a funding & regulations & marketing issue)

2) Increased resources for IT demonstrations ( a funding & marketing issue)

3) Need for IT "champions" (a risk/commitment/incentive & marketing issue)

4) Wider use of existing tools for overcoming regulatory, contracting &
market obstacles (A funding & marketing issue)

5) Better communications ( a marketing issue)

That is, in one way or another the Forum's answer to the issue of
improving the use of IT's seemed to boil down to the issue of how to
increase public funds/power/resources to assist the marketing of IT's. A
rough analogy would be that the developers of IT's are finding it difficult
to penetrate the military market for many of the same kind of
cultural/institutional " old boy" closed system reasons that American
corporations find it difficult to penetrate Japanese markets. If this rough
analogy is accurate then one approach to action would be to ask our federal
trade negotiators to take a look at the market barriers in our
governmental/EPA/military procurement system. This approach will expose the
institutional barriers to trade and be of great value to both the developers
of IT's and those "Japanese" who are sincerely working from within their
own institutional culture to assist "foreigners" to do business.

But this will do little to address the Forum's objectives of 
 (1) assisting local communities to benefit from clean-up activities,
 (2) engaging community stakeholders in choices regarding which technologies
are to be developed, or
 (3) assist community stakeholders to enage in a broader sharing of
information with
other stakeholders or with less involved members of the community.
 To achieve these community objectives will require a much different
allocation of public
power/resources such as (1) adding community values criteria to the public
buyers cost/effectiveness analysis; (2) investing in the technical
education and training of community members; and (3) investing in community
educational processes which teach cross cultural communication and conflict
resolution.

To obtain the resources required for advancing these type of community
stakholder interests it is necessary to create a three way partnership which
links marketing support with private investment in local economic
development. Since the private sector is in effect arguing that the
existing system or infrastructure obstructs trade and profits it would seem
pragmatic for community stakeholders and governmental authorities to
politically assist in the reformation of that infrastructure provided that
the new infrastructure which is put in place meets community needs and is
financed to a great extent out of the profits it makes possible for private
interests. Changing our rules of play in this way meets the criteria of
social and environmental justice without sacrificing the motivational value
of material incentives. It does not, however, reward greed or sloth.

Larry Davis, Skaggs Island Foundation