PRACTISING SUSTAINABLE WATER MANAGEMENT: CANADIAN AND INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCES

Chapter 10

Collaborating Towards Sustainability Together:
The Fraser Basin Management Board and Program

Anthony H. J. Dorcey

On 26 May 1992, federal, provincial and local governments signed a unique agreement establishing the Fraser Basin Management Board (FBMB) and Program (FBMP) with the goal of putting sustainability into practice in the Fraser River Basin of British Columbia. In the first half of this chapter, the origins of the initiative, its distinctive characteristics, and diverse achievements since 1992 are highlighted. The second half assesses this experience in developing multistakeholder collaborative approaches to sustainability in watersheds, and concludes by suggesting lessons for future initiatives, as the first agreement comes to an end and the stakeholders consider what steps to take next. The assessment is based on the experience of the author who was involved in the development of the initiative, served as the Chair of the Board during its first two years, and has since then observed its progress as just one of the Fraser Basin stakeholders.

THE MIGHTY FRASER
Draining an area (234,000 km2) as big as Great Britain and a quarter of British Columbia, the Fraser Basin supports the greatest salmon runs in the world, is home to almost two thirds of the province's population, and produces 80% of the Gross Provincial Product (Dorcey, 1991b) (Figure 10.1). While aboriginal peoples have lived in the Basin for more than 10,000 years and their populations likely never exceeded 50,000, settlement has expanded rapidly towards 2 million people in the short two centuries since Simon Fraser's first voyage down the river in 1807. The subsequent urbanization and industrialization, associated with development of forestry, mining, agriculture, fisheries, energy, transportation, recreation and tourism, have created a classic complex of water management challenges: water supply, pollution control, fisheries management, flood control, hydropower production, navigation and wetlands management. Yet, despite these challenges, there was still a sense in the late 1980s that there was an enviable opportunity in the Fraser to remedy the problems that had been created from its development to that time and to avoid them in the future - if only there would be the will and capability to begin managing the Basin in new ways.

Figure 10.1: The Fraser Basin

AN UNUSUAL BEGINNING
Once before, immediately following the devastation of the second largest flood of record in 1948, there had been a short-lived attempt by the federal and provincial governments to develop a comprehensive management plan for the Fraser River Basin but it foundered under the immensity of the task (Dorcey, 1991b). The renewed effort in the early 1990s had its origins in the newly emerging principles of sustainable development popularized by the Brundtland Report and a remarkable confluence of governmental and non-governmental interests and initiatives (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1993c). In 1991, the federal government announced the long planned, Fraser River Action Plan (FRAP), as part of its national Green Plan, which committed $100 million over five years for clean-up of pollution, restoration of habitats and rebuilding of fish stocks. In the same period, the provincial government introduced its Environmental Action Plan, which included ideas for rewriting key legislation and policies relating to water and environmental management. Beginning in 1990, the B.C. Round Table on the Environment and the Economy had started to advance its proposals for a provincial sustainability strategy. Meanwhile, the local governments formed the Fraser Cities Coalition to focus attention and action on their common concerns in the Basin. First Nations priorities were also receiving greater recognition from the courts and governments. Finally, in 1991, the Westwater Research Centre at the University of British Columbia published two volumes and a video summarizing the results of a large interdisciplinary project that had examined how sustainable development principles might be put into practice in the Fraser Basin (Dorcey, 1991a; 1991b).
   The time was ripe for initiating a unique multi-party program to strive for sustainability in the Fraser Basin. In August 1991, acting on a proposal from the federal government, a 13 member Start-Up Committee was established to provide advice on the development and implementation of an overall management program to meet sustainability goals in the Basin. The Committee included two federal, two provincial and two local government representatives, a First Nations member, and representatives of environmental, industry and general public interests. Based on input from a series of informal public meetings around the Basin, the committee drafted an innovative intergovernmental agreement for pursuing sustainability in the Fraser Basin, which was submitted to the governments in early 1992.

A UNIQUE AGREEMENT
Five months later, with surprisingly little change from what had been in the 40-page draft, the Agreement Respecting the Fraser Basin Management Program was signed by the ministers of the federal and provincial governments and representatives of the local governments, at a ceremony on the banks of the river. In addition to being a tri-level intergovernmental agreement, there were several key ingredients:

• The goal of the Program recognized three dimensions of sustainability - environmental, economic and social.
  
• The Agreement established a multi-governmental and non-governmental, multi-interest Board to provide leadership. The 19 member Board consisted of a neutral chair, three representatives of each of the four orders of government (federal, provincial, local and First Nations) and six non-governmental representatives from economic, environmental and social interests in the regions of the Basin.
  
• The Board was required to make decisions by consensus and to encourage consensus - based decision making in all Basin activities.
  
• The Board was to focus on facilitating the development of decision-making processes that were based as much as possible in the regions, communities and watersheds of the Basin.
  
• The Agreement provided the flexibility to enable the Board and Program to evolve with experience.
  Taken together, these key ingredients, along with a wide array of details written into the Agreement, set the stage for a unique multistakeholder collaborative experiment in watershed governance that was designed to begin putting sustainability into practice.

A MULTISTAKEHOLDER BOARD
The Start-Up Committee had concluded that the initiative needed to be led by a Board that, like itself, was constituted of the diversity of governmental and non-governmental interests in the Basin. The Chair should be a neutral party and the author was appointed by the signatory governments at the time of signing. The other 18 members were selected in various ways (Table 10.1).

• The federal and provincial governments each announced their respective three appointees at the time of signing; all were the senior member of immediately relevant governmental agencies.
  
• Each of the 60 local governments in the Basin had the opportunity to sign-on to the Agreement and all eventually did so. They then grouped their communities into three areas of the Basin (upper, middle and lower) and each group carried out a nomination and election process to fill the three local government seats on the Board.
  
• The three First Nations positions on the Board were also filled by representatives from among the eight Nations in the upper, middle and lower regions of the Basin.
  
• The remaining six positions were filled through a process facilitated by the Chair. Nominations were sought by advertising throughout the Basin. The criteria for selection were made explicit in the public announcements (e.g., knowledgeable about sustainability and willing to commit to consensus processes). Over a hundred nominations were received, reviewed in terms of the criteria, and then forwarded to all three signatory governments who eventually reached a consensus on the six appointees, which was not an easy task given a federal Progressive Conservative government in Ottawa, a provincial New Democratic Party government in Victoria, and a diversity of political interests among the local governments.

Table 10.1: The Fraser Basin Management Board, 1992

• Facilitate the coordination of programs and initiatives in the Basin.
  
• Provide leadership in developing improved institutional arrangements and consensus-based decision making.
  
• Foster public attitudes, perceptions and behaviour that support and reflect sustainability.
  
• Audit progress towards sustainability of the Basin.
  
• Make recommendations to the participants and stakeholders in the Program on priorities for programs and budgets.
  The Board will fulfill its mandate by working with and through all stakeholders. This will require developing effective ways of consulting, cooperating, assessing, influencing, facilitating, stimulating, innovating, advocating, guiding, evaluating, auditing, educating, informing and sometimes mediating. The Board's primary role is not to fund, implement, legislate, regulate, enforce or administer. Rather, the partners in the Basin should look to the Board as a network builder and helper rather than an overseer (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1993c).

Figure 10.2: Strategy for Sustainability of the Fraser Basin

Adopting Sustainability Principles
The Board also adopted a set of sustainability principles to guide implementation of its mandate:

• Influence the governments to ensure the fundamental needs and values of the people of the Fraser Basin, present and future, are met while recognizing the Basin's ecological constraints.
  
• Incorporate and support First Nations in a manner that is consistent with the existence of their aboriginal rights.
  
• Ensure renewable and non-renewable resources are conserved and prudently managed.
  
• Foster equal and fair access to information and decision-making processes to reflect all citizens' needs and aspirations for ecological, community and cultural diversity.
  
• Ensure that integrated and innovative approaches occur throughout the full range of planning levels in the Basin by coordinating the collection, analysis and sharing of data and information.
  
• Recognize the need for adaptive and precautionary decision making (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1993c, 19).

These principles were translated into a set of five goals for the overall Fraser Basin Management Program (Figure 10.2) and five strategic programs, each with action plans, were laid out, all designed so as to contribute to the production of a Strategy for Sustainability of the Basin by the end of the first five-year Agreement in 1997. The five strategic programs focused on: (1) Basin management strategies for priority issues, (2) demonstration projects, (3) institutional development, (4) auditing sustainability, and (5) information, communications and education. These programs and their action plans are discussed in later sections.

Beginning to Develop the Sustainability Strategy - Year 2
In the second year of the Agreement, the emphasis was on developing collaboration to implement the action plans (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1994a). The Board employed what was rapidly becoming its trade-mark practice of using multistakeholder committees and processes, involving representatives of each of the relevant governmental and non-governmental interests, in all of its initiatives. During the spring and summer, multistakeholder steering committees were used to develop proposals for each of the strategic programs. Draft ideas were then discussed during the autumn, in a series of two-day workshops, in five communities of the Basin. Nearly 400 people participated in the workshop discussions and hundreds more attended evening open houses at which governmental and non-governmental organizations established displays and made presentations on their activities in the Basin. The workshop discussions focused on how to build on the strengths of existing management activities and how to remedy weaknesses, identifying who should do what, how and when. All the discussions were summarized and distributed in a report, as well as being posted on a computer bulletin board system (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1993a). Out of all the details, a new vision of watershed management was seen to be emerging. It envisioned the old ways of governance, dominated by top-down processes, being replaced by new approaches, ones which would involve local decision making, the diversity of interests and consensus processes. The new dynamic of Basin governance would be one that flows both from the bottom up and from the top down, and it was seen to be already at work.

Selecting Demonstration Projects
The demonstration projects, endorsed by the Board, capitalized on the immense variety of initiatives already underway. In response to an invitation, more than thirty proposals were submitted. Using selection criteria based on the principles and goals of the Program, a multistakeholder task force reviewed the proposals and made recommendations to the Board. In November 1993, six projects from various watersheds were endorsed; each was beginning to demonstrate practical solutions to a wide variety of concerns, including environmental conservation, recreation and tourism, restoration of fish habitat, community economic development, and comprehensive management of complete watersheds. The projects were the Salmon River Watershed Management Partnership (Lower Fraser); Nahatlatch Integrated Resource Management Plan (Fraser Canyon); Nicola Watershed Community Round Table (Thompson sub-basin); Prince George Riverfront Trails Project (Upper Fraser); Salmon River Watershed Roundtable (Thompson sub-basin); and Williams Lake River Valley Corridor Project (Middle Fraser). The Board's endorsement constituted a commitment to work with each of these multistakeholder initiatives, half of which had grassroots origins but all of which included governmental and non-governmental participants, in securing the technical and financial support needed to achieve their goals as long as these remained consistent with the sustainability principles of the Program.

Facilitating Institutional Development
To be able to facilitate coordination and institutional development, the Board began by identifying who does what in the Basin (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1994d). An overview was compiled and widely distributed since all of the stakeholders bemoaned the immense difficulty of understanding an institutional system including hundreds of departments, boards, commissions, programs, agencies and organizations each affecting some aspect of the environmental, economic and social health of the Basin and most having different administrative boundaries. In the spring, to further understanding, the first ever intergovernmental workshop on the Basin-Integration of Government Program Delivery and Shared Responsibility in the Basin-was held (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1994b). Eighty participants from federal, provincial, local and First Nations governments discussed the newly emerging vision of watershed governance that flows from the bottom up as well as the top down. To guide assessments of how the institutional system affects sustainability and might be improved, a report was prepared on the criteria that should be employed (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1994c).

Auditing
This report on institutional design, together with one on sustainability indicators (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1993d), was used in conducting the Board's first audit, an assessment of the Fraser River Flood Control Program. Flood control had been identified during the consultations as an issue of great concern, heightened by the imminent prospect of the federal-provincial agreement for flood control coming to an end in 1995. A multistakeholder task force was established to assess the system that had been put in place as a result of the $300 million (1994 dollars) spent on the dyking program since it began in 1968 (Fraser Basin Management Program, 1994). Its overall conclusion was that the Program had done a good job of fulfilling its mandate under the 1968 terms of reference. However, from the 1994 perspective, much needed to be done to improve flood protection, especially for those who now lived in the floodplain and may have developed a false sense of security. For example, most people were unaware that there was an estimated 1 in 3 chance that the greatest flood of record (1894) would be exceeded in the next 60 years and many mistakenly believed they would be covered by insurance if it should happen. The report outlined recommendations on river management, dyke maintenance, new dyke control, floodproofing and integrated floodplain management.

Communication and Education
The Board responded to the immense demands for more and better information about sustainability and management initiatives in several ways. A multistakeholder steering committee was established to identify how the many programs and organizations developing and offering education programs relating to environmental, economic and community sustainability might be better coordinated, particularly at the local level. In response to requests that information be relevant, concise, readable and accessible, The Source Book and a computer bulletin board system were introduced. The Source Book was a loose leaf binder designed to hold copies of the papers, newsletters, profiles, reports and reviews produced by the Board. The idea was that information would always be released in a brief format with references to the relevant fuller documents and designed for insertion in a tabbed sub-section of the binder. At the beginning of the year, the binder would include a summary of the Action Plan. Over the next twelve months, items would be distributed relating to each of its components, culminating in an end-of-year report summarizing achievements and laying out the Action Plan for the next year. All of this information was also posted on a computer bulletin board, which additionally provided a mechanism for feedback and exchange.

Developing Management Strategies
The Board's report at the end of the second year summarized the priority issues and more than 50 action items for 1993/94 that had been identified by the four multistakeholder steering committees responsible for water resources management, fisheries and aquatic habitat management, pollution prevention and waste minimization, and community development. The action items identified the organizations involved in the Program which had agreed to take the lead in forming appropriate partnerships and implementing them. In most cases, this was one of the government agencies and only occasionally was it the Board or a non-governmental organization. Some of the action items were already underway but more commonly they remained to be initiated.

Establishing a Presence in the Regions and Taking Stock - Year 3
At the end of the second year, the author stepped down as Chair to return full-time to the university and Ian Waddell was appointed in his place. During the third year, the Board gave major attention to establishing a continuing presence in the regions of the Basin and preparing reports on progress in ensuring the sustainability of the Basin.

Introducing Regional Coordinators
One of the key action items for this year was to establish coordinators in each of four regions of the Basin: the Upper sub-basin down to and including Prince George; the Middle sub-basin down to the Fraser Canyon and including Quesnel, Williams Lake, and Lillooet; the Thompson River sub-basin including Kamloops and Salmon Arm; and, the Lower Valley sub-basin from Hope, through Greater Vancouver, to Georgia Strait. The establishment of full-time regional coordinators, paid by the Board, was seen to be a critical step in moving towards fulfilling the Agreements commitment to foster decision-making processes that are based as much as possible in the communities and watersheds. Until this time, the Board had relied on communications taking place through its regional Board members, regional participants on basinwide steering committees and task forces, the periodic community consultations, and continuing relations with the demonstration projects. The role of the regional coordinators, who are based in the communities, is to supplement and enhance these mechanisms by facilitating coordination among all government consultation and planning processes, and making it easier for all stakeholders to keep abreast of programs and activities in the regions. The coordinators identify key regional stakeholders and establish lines of communication to assist them in monitoring issues and collaborating on solutions. By the end of the year, coordinators were active in all four regions and the Board began to give more attention to the specifics of local situations, including the addition of two more demonstration projects: Baker Creek Enhancement Society (Middle Fraser) and Alouette River Management Council (Lower Fraser).

State of the Basin Reports
Drawing on the work of the various steering committees, the major and immensely time-consuming task in the third year was to produce the first State of the Basin report (Fraser Basin Management Program, 1995). More than 175 people with interest and knowledge in specific areas collaborated in the development of the report. Based on concerns expressed in the earlier discussions with stakeholders, the report focused on eight topics: Population Growth; Water Resource Management; The Basin's Salmon Fisheries; Forests in the Basin; The Basin's Economy; Planning Processes in the Basin; Building New Relationships with First Nations Communities; and Decision-Making. Each of the chapters has four main sections. An Introduction establishes the importance of the topic being addressed and places it in the context of sustainability. The Background section provides key indicator information on base lines, trends and status. The bulk of each chapter is taken up by the Issue Definition and Response sections, which define the component and interrelated issues to be considered and describe government and non-government responses underway to address them. The Conclusions point out areas where progress is being made towards sustainability and areas where more work remains.

The First Board Report Card
In conjunction with the State of the Basin report, the Board prepared a Report Card "which indicates the progress that we, the two million-plus residents of the Fraser Basin, are making towards sustainability" with highlights of "good news" and "bad news" and recommendations for next steps (Fraser Basin Management Program, 1995) (Figures 10.3 and 10.4). Most topics included a letter grade indicating the degree of progress towards sustainability based on the Board's assessment of government and non-government programs and responses of individuals throughout the Basin (Figure 10.4).

High marks were given where measurable results have been accomplished. Middle grades were given where processes are in place to address sustainability issues but no results have been achieved or monitored as yet. Low marks were given where there has been little or no progress towards sustainability and where development of new policies or legislation is a low priority. While greater progress may have been made by certain groups in certain areas of the Basin, the assigned grade is a "net grade" for progress in responding to the issue throughout the Basin as a whole. Grades were not assigned to issues on which consensus was not reached by the Board (Fraser Basin Management Program, 1995, 3).

Based on these grades, the Board concluded that "[a] great deal of progress has been achieved in setting up processes that will bring us closer to sustainability...[however] at this point, there is little evidence of progress in some of the critical areas addressed in this Report Card" (p.27). To get feedback on these conclusions, the Board Report Card also included a Public Report Card, inviting responses from Basin residents on key sustainability issues.

Figure 10.3: Fraser Basin Report Card--Salmon Fisheries: Fish Habitat

Figure 10.4: 1996 Board Report Card: Grades Summary

Drafting BasinPlan - Year 4
A Second Report Card delivered the following year not only indicated through generally higher grades that progress was slowly being made but also expanded the reporting coverage by adding two new topics - Agriculture and Transportation, nine new issues, and regional information and sustainability measures (Figure 10.4) (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1996b). Multistakeholder Regional Reporting Teams, under the leadership of the Regional Coordinators, were established to develop the more specific regional and local information. However, while other existing Board activities continued and expanded (e.g., Demonstration Projects, a World Wide Web site and Integrated Flood Hazard Management Strategy), a major focus of new activity during the fourth year was the development of BasinPlan (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1996a).
The draft BasinPlan released at the end of 1995 was based on all the work in the preceding four years, including the results of a two-day workshop in which representatives of 80 of the partners in the Program addressed the question of what should happen when the first five-year Agreement ends in 1997. The draft was presented as a Workbook within a framework putting forward a five-point challenge to the residents of the Basin.

Our Vision - Sustainability Together

  5  Five point challenge to implement the BasinPlan to:
     Every individual
     Governments
     Business and industry
     Non-government organizations
     Educators

  4  Four directions that must be taken in order to work towards the goal:
     Understanding Sustainability
     Caring for Ecosystems
     Strengthening Communities
     Improving Decision Making

  3  Three sustainability elements
     SOCIAL Well-being
     Supported by a Strong ECONOMY
     Sustained by a Healthy ENVIRONMENT

  2  Two principles
     Everything is connected
     We are all responsible and accountable

  1  A single goal
     To achieve sustainability of the Fraser Basin

(Fraser Basin Management Board, 1996a)

Specific targets were proposed for each of the four directions along with strategies for pursuing them and proposals for who should take the lead in implementing them. A five-year action plan was identified for addressing some of the more pressing sustainability issues. Recognizing that many initiatives were already underway, the draft BasinPlan stressed the need to build on them. Some of the proposed strategies were recognized as already being addressed in part by various organizations. Others required the assistance of new government institutional mechanisms such as legislation, strategies and programs. Many strategies, however, lacked a structured approach to facilitate their implementation. Just as the Board invited stakeholders to fill in the Workbook and give comments and suggestions on each of its specifics, it also asked for input on overseeing the implementation of BasinPlan.

The Board expects that a significant portion of the BasinPlan will be self-implementing through individual actions and those arising from Cooperative Agreements for Action. The Board is working to determine whether or not there is a need for an organization or coalition of organizations to oversee implementation of BasinPlan and would like your input and comments on whether there is a need for such an entity.... If an organization or coalition of organizations oversees implementation of the BasinPlan, some of its important CHARACTERISTICS might include:

• Involving the federal, provincial, and local governments and First Nations with non-governmental interests.
  
• Adding value through coordination and integration of efforts.
  
• Not being solely dependent on governments for funding.
  
• Being structured to allow for contributions on a not-for-profit basis (Fraser Basin Management Board 1996a).

During the summer and fall 1996, when this chapter was written, these proposals were being discussed and the Board established a Transitions Committee to bring forward proposals for the final version of BasinPlan.

LEARNING TO COLLABORATE FOR SUSTAINABILITY
It is readily evident that the Board and Program initiative in the Fraser Basin is driven by a sustainability ethic and principles of water management that incorporate all of the broad components of the Sustainability Principles for Water Management in Canada adopted by consensus in 1993 by the Canadian Water Resources Association (Table 1.3 in Chapter 1). The Fraser initiative, in particular the specifics included in the draft BasinPlan, also illustrate how each of the seven trends in reorienting and restructuring water management for sustainability, identified by Mitchell and Shrubsole (1994), are manifesting themselves in one of Canada's major river basins: developing comprehensive water policies, adopting an ecosystem approach, increasing the attention devoted to groundwater management, forging new partnership arrangements for water management, evolving relationships with First Nations, putting greater emphasis on water pricing and demand management, and prohibiting water export by interbasin transfers. In particular, the initiative exemplifies the over-riding and fundamental importance of the trend towards building new partnerships and collaboration among the diversity of stakeholders in water management. The second part of this chapter therefore focuses on the challenges to collaboration that were recognized from the beginning as being fundamental to success in putting sustainability principles into the practice of water management in the Fraser Basin (Dorcey, 1991a; 1991b).
   The initiative was hugely ambitious and presented classic challenges to successful collaboration (Gray, 1989). In the first half of the 1990s, there has been remarkable experimentation in Canada with the use of collaborative and consensus processes in pursuing sustainability goals; the Fraser is just one of many experiments (Projet de Société, 1995). Major catalysts for this innovation were the Brundtland Report and the national, provincial and local round tables that became Canada's distinctive response to Brundtland's sustainable development imperatives. Out of these varied experiences has begun to come an improved understanding of the ingredients critical to success in collaboration and consensus processes (Canadian Round Tables, 1993; Commission on Resources and Environment, 1995). However, recognizing principles is one thing, putting them into practice is entirely another matter, as has been the worldwide experience for decades with implementation of contemporary "water management principles." At the time that the Fraser Basin Board and Program were being designed in 1991, it was still early days in the experience with newly emerging collaboration and consensus processes. While benefiting from the first 18 months of work by the B.C. Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (1991b), the designers of the Agreement and the Board that came into operation were, to a large extent, learning along with everybody else. It is thus not surprising that the Fraser initiative has encountered some of the classic challenges in designing and implementing successful collaboration.

The Start-Up Committee (SUC) Collaboration
In developing its Green Plan, the federal government had concluded that building partnerships would be critical to ultimate success. The Department of the Environment (DOE) and Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), had recognized that this would be particularly important in the Fraser. However, although each of these agencies had for some time been developing in-house their own component plans for the Fraser River Action Plan (FRAP), there had been severe restrictions placed on discussion of them outside of their organizations before they were to be announced. The creation of the SUC by DOE and DFO in the late summer of 1991 was intended to remedy this situation by initiating a collaborative process of building partnerships.
   The Regional Directors of DOE and DFO sent a clear signal as to the importance they attached to the initiative when they indicated they would jointly chair the SUC. This undoubtedly influenced others in responding positively to invitations to participate on the Committee: Assistant Deputy Ministers from the B.C. Ministry of Environment and B.C. Ministry of Economic Development, the mayors of Vancouver and Prince George, two senior members of the fishing and forest industries; two people from the B.C. Environmental Network, an aboriginal person from the Lheit Lit'en Nation, and a broadly interested citizen from Quesnel. The Committee's proceedings were assisted by a facilitator, who also prepared minutes, and a team of three civil servants (two federal and one provincial), who worked on drafting the agreement based on the results of members' discussions. Numerous people (including the author) were invited to make presentations to provide background information and advice. In addition, the Committee held its meetings in several of the Basin communities in order to give informal opportunities for input from stakeholders.
   The Committee made relatively quick and surprisingly substantive progress, in large part because of the drafting work that was done by the three governmental staff people between meetings. Two existing initiatives were strongly influential: the B.C. Round Table on the Environment and the Economy for its proposed principles of environmental, economic and social sustainability and emphasis on consensus-based decision making (B.C. Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, 1991a) and, the Fraser River Estuary Management Program, as a promising model for intergovernmental planning and management that could be applied throughout the watersheds of the Basin (Dorcey, 1993). There was a remarkable willingness among the participants to entertain an increasingly comprehensive and ambitious proposal. The difficulties and disagreements that arose did not appear at the time to be great. They primarily related to the SUC's decision-making process, in particular the position taken by the participants from the B.C. Environmental Network (BCEN), who argued that they could not make any decision without first taking it back to their membership. Under pressures for closure to meet the federal government's FRAP time schedule, this issue did not ultimately prevent the Committee reaching substantial consensus on a draft agreement.
   Establishing a multistakeholder committee that included non-governmental stakeholders was a major innovation in approaches to drafting inter-governmental agreements. Further, drafting a far-reaching agreement in some seven meetings and only six months was a significant achievement. All the more so, considering the governments committed themselves to implement the draft agreement substantially unchanged. However, what arose as relatively minor difficulties in the drafting process presaged more significant difficulties that were subsequently to challenge the Board.

The Fraser Basin Management Board and Program Collaboration
The experience with the Board is instructive for both the approach that it took to collaboration and the consequences that stemmed from the earlier approaches employed in the prior SUC collaboration to draft the Agreement. The design of collaborations, such that they proceed productively not only in themselves but also in advancing constructively from one to another, is of the utmost importance; it will make or break the sustainability strategy being pursued in the Fraser Basin, and in other watersheds (Chrislip and Larson, 1994; Huxham, 1996).

Selection of the Members
Relative to the approaches taken in selecting the members of the SUC, a much more explicit and transparent process was used in identifying the members of the Board. For the most part, the selection processes for the various positions on the Board worked quite well and produced a diversity of membership that was generally acceptable to Basin stakeholders. Nevertheless, two significant difficulties arose. First, the environmental interests represented by members of the BCEN believed that they, just as the governments, should have three seats on the Board and, indeed, believed that they had obtained a commitment to this from the federal organisers of the SUC. Even though several of the non-governmental individuals appointed to the Board did represent environmental interests, the BCEN consider this to be an inadequate alternative. It took more than a year and a great deal of effort to restore good working relations with members of the BCEN and to obtain their participation on the Board's multistakeholder committees. The problem was not completely resolved until one of the BCEN's members became a Board member when a vacancy arose in the third year of the Agreement.
   The second difficulty related to selection of the First Nations members of the Board. Subsequent to the drafting of the Agreement by the SUC but before its signing, the federal and provincial governments decided that First Nations should also have three seats on the Board. This was done so as to be consistent with these two governments' emerging recognition of First Nations as a fourth order of government. However, the First Nations were not involved as signatories to the Agreement and the aboriginal member of the SUC was not recognized as having been a formal representative by First Nations in the Basin. Since there was no organization that represented all the eight Nations whose territories included parts of the Basin, there was no readily available mechanism for selecting their three members. After extensive discussions with the Chair throughout the summer of 1992, three members of First Nations agreed to join the Board at its inaugural meeting and to serve until they could complete their own internal selection processes. This agreement temporarily resolved the difficulties that had arisen from First Nations not being formally represented on the SUC and ensured their participation from the outset of the Board's activities. Although the highly complex issues relating to First Nations selection of representatives and their accountability have never been completely resolved, two of the three original participants continue as the Board appointees to this day. Thus, the difficulties that arose with regard to the representation of both environmental interests and First Nations, while not unusual in such processes, do illustrate how failure to ensure appropriate representation of stakeholders at the beginning of collaborations can cause substantial difficulties later on and, in the context of these two major stakeholders in the Fraser Basin, have the potential to seriously undermine progress.

Differing Knowledge of the Members
A potential strength of the Board was the appointees' rich diversity of knowledge and experience about the Basin, its governance processes and the management issues. At the outset, however, major challenges arose in exploiting this diversity to advantage. While the civil servants were familiar with the administrative processes of government, this was not the case for many of the non-governmental members. Although individuals knew parts of the Basin where they had lived and worked, no member was well acquainted with all its vastness. Each of the non-aboriginal members had a great deal to learn about the First Nations in the Basin. While some Board members had expertise in environmental issues, the comparative advantage of others was in the economic or social issues. The elected local politicians brought experiences that the other members had never had and, likewise, the business members. The lack of common knowledge and differing perspectives made communications very challenging in the early discussions, and the potential strength in the members' diversity only gradually began to be harnessed as people got to know each other and the Board was informed by briefings and travelling together to different communities of the Basin. In facing these difficulties, the Board was no different than most other multistakeholder processes, except in the remarkable diversity of its members and huge breadth and complexity of the task it faced.

Understanding of and Commitment to the Agreement
From the inaugural meeting of the Board, it soon became evident that there were widely varying interpretations about what the Board was required and authorized to do. Lengthy as the Agreement document was, it turned out to be contradictory in some important regards and silent in others. The four members of the Board who had been involved in the SUC tried to elaborate on what they each perceived to have been the intent of the drafters but, adding to the complications, they did not necessarily each see it in the same way. In addition to these difficulties, the fifteen new members to the Board brought their own varying perceptions and interests. The questions raised were wide ranging and fundamental, and included: Should the sustainability focus be on environmental issues and not the economic and social? Shouldn't the focus be on the water and not all the land issues? Was the Board to provide leadership or only coordinate? What was the difference between the Board and the Program?
   Through the early meetings, the Board members struggled to reach agreement on the concepts and language that ultimately resulted in the statements of vision, mandate and goals in the Strategic Plan (Figure 10.2). In the process, not only did the differing interests of the Board members become clearer but also it became evident that they had come to the initiative with varying ideas about what it was intended to do, how it would operate, and what it might deliver. For the federal government members, the Board was the essential mechanism for building the partnerships, in particular for getting cooperation from the provincial and local governments and involving large numbers of stakeholders, that were going to be crucial in delivering on their ambitious goals for the FRAP. For the provincial government, it was an opportunity to influence where and how the $100 million in the federal FRAP would be spent. For the local governments, there were hopes of obtaining funds through the Board to meet their own growing costs for building water supply and sewage treatment systems. For the First Nations, the Board was an opportunity to be recognized as one of four orders of government and bring forward their claims and, in particular, their immediate concerns about fishery allocations. Finally, in their varied interests, the non-governmental members were looking for new ways to influence the governments and hold them more accountable.
   These were only some of the strong interests that became evident and led to questions about the nature of the parties real commitments to the initiative. In developing the Strategic Plan, substantial progress was made during the first year in shaping a consensus among the members of the Board that included these differing interests. What remained, however, was the enormous and still ongoing task of bringing all of the other governmental and non-governmental stakeholders in the Basin into this consensus. What has never gone away, as is to be expected in such collaboratives, are the tensions created by the differing interests of the people sitting at the Board table. The Fraser Basin experience illustrates the major problems that can arise if great care is not taken to ensure that when agreements are reached all of the parties understand and are committed to the intent and language of the consensus. The rapid drafting of the SUC agreement and its swift passage through bureaucratic and political approvals of three levels of government were misleadingly impressive; they could have been and could still prove to be disastrous.

New Relations and Empowerment
The structure of the Board was novel and created both new opportunities for collaboration and unique challenges. In its diverse composition, the multistakeholder Board provides an unusual and valuable mechanism for exchange, and for developing understanding of widely differing interests and cooperation. Without it, this kind of opportunity is not readily available to such a breadth of interests. By establishing a forum in which senior members of major federal and provincial government agencies meet on a regular basis, it provides a venue for collaboration on issues that go beyond the immediate business of the Board. The inclusion of local government, First Nations and non-governmental members likewise creates comparable and expanded opportunities for each of them.
   Associated with the potential advantages stemming from diversity of membership are the challenges in making it work productively and fairly. Around the table are members who perceive each other as having widely varying seniority, authority, legitimacy and resources. At the onset, this could have presented major challenges in building the trust that is critical to establishing constructive relations. It is a tribute to all who were involved in the initiative that these perceptions did not cause any significant difficulties in getting underway. However, as time progressed, a number of related difficulties did arise. While attendance at the Board meetings, which were monthly in the first year and afterwards bimonthly, was generally very good, the senior members of the federal and provincial governments sometimes had to be absent because of other urgent demands. This led to the question of alternates for these government members, which at first was resisted but over time successively resulted in agreements to permit observers, then later alternates who were the appropriate number two (e.g., ADMs for DMs), and most recently to formally making the alternates (i.e., ADMs) the federal and provincial governments Board members. While it is now generally felt that these changes have worked to everybody's overall advantage, they did cause great disquiet and doubts about commitments in the early days when there was less trust and understanding.
   Related to this were concerns by the other members that they were at a disadvantage in relation to the governmental members who were paid to participate as part of their job and the federal and provincial members who had access to all of their own departmental staff for support in reviewing and preparing materials. While members were reimbursed for expenses incurred in undertaking Board business, they were not compensated for lost income. In general, the Board members had to rely on their own devices and the assistance that was provided to them by the small staff to the Board. These kinds of imbalances are common in such collaborative multistakeholder processes and because they can undermine their potential for progress have led to various approaches to "levelling the table." In this instance, relatively little was done to remedy these inequities. However, the Board has been extremely fortunate in having members who were able and willing to forgo income and volunteer very considerable effort to avoid this problem crippling the process.

Consensus Process
In the early meetings, the explicit use of consensus processes was a relatively new experience for most of the Board members. For those who were accustomed to imposing decisions by virtue of their positions and authority or by quickly calling for a vote, the process initially seemed to be time consuming and inefficient and caused them considerable frustration. As time went on, however, most members came to recognize the strengths of the consensus process and the group began to be much more efficient in using it. This acceptance was hastened by the experience of successfully dealing with a major challenge that arose at only the Board's second meeting. It took the better part of an intense day of discussions to reach agreement on the wording of one sentence and thereby avoid the First Nations members threat to vacate the Board: "The Board recognizes four orders of government sitting at this table." This was wording that all members of the Board could live with and this early success in averting a major setback by using the consensus process gave the new decision-making approach some credibility and the Board a boost of confidence.
   A second major step forward occurred in 1993 when the Board had to make its first decision about taking a public position on an issue relating to one of the participating governments' activities. The occasion was the opening of hearings to be conducted by the B.C. Utilities Commission into Alcan's Kemano Completion Project. The issue was politically very controversial and there were extremely strong and differing views among the Board members, but through a task force of the members a consensus was gradually reached on the position to be taken (Fraser Basin Management Board, 1993b). This not only piloted a general approach for dealing with difficult issues of consensus but also set a precedent for how the Board would handle issues when a governmental member of the Board had potentially conflicting responsibilities as a member of the Board and as an employee and officer of the government. From these early successes, the Board's use of consensus processes has continued to progress and, as yet, the Board has not found it necessary to develop and adopt formal consensus procedures, in contrast to many other multistakeholder processes (e.g., B.C. Round Table and CORE). While this can be seen as reflecting the good working relations that have evolved, it also can be viewed as a reflection of relatively weak commitments being made at the Board table (i.e., even though there may be differing interests, unless members are being pressed to make substantial commitments for which the Board will then hold them accountable, there are not going to be significant stresses and strains on the consensus process).

Staff, Budget and Resources
A director and staff of four or five professionals and two or three office staff have supported the Board members and been responsible for implementing the Board's initiatives and facilitating coordination among all of the many stakeholders involved in the Program. Beginning in the third year, the staff capability based in Vancouver was supplemented by the addition of the regional coordinators. The small, highly committed staff has played a critical role in making collaboration work in practice. Given the magnitude of the task and the limited resources available, remarkable progress has been made by the Board and its staff in a relatively short time. A budget of the order of $1.5 million a year might sound large but its limitations rapidly become evident when consideration is given to the demands that have to be met to deliver the mandate summarized in Figure 10.2, through a 19 member Board, in a Basin as big as Great Britain, which includes upwards of 2 million diverse stakeholders involved in producing 80% of the Gross Provincial Product. What has been achieved has only been possible because Board and staff members have been willing to commit much more than the dollar resources might suggest and they have been successful in fostering an immense variety of collaborative partnerships that have creatively brought substantial additional monetary and in-kind resources to the initiative. In varying degrees, these are the general characteristics of almost all successful multistakeholder collaborations.
   The unusual nature of this initiative created significant financial and administrative challenges that were almost totally unrecognized in drafting the Agreement and caused a great deal of operational difficulty. Two aspects of the three-party intergovernmental agreement were particularly problematic. First, the Agreement established one of the signatory governments as the banker for the initiative. While this sounded reasonable and convenient, it turned out to be extremely frustrating and inefficient in the early years. In practice, it meant that the Board could not hire people or enter into contracts, only the federal agency that was the banker could and this meant working within all the rules and regulations of that organization. Constraints on hiring forced the Board to seek the director and staff by negotiating secondments from participating federal and provincial agencies. This was restricting and not easy because agencies were understandably not necessarily keen to lose the services of their talented staff members, who in turn would have reservations about relocating to a position which could only offer short-term security of appointment. Fortunately, well-qualified people were attracted to the new opportunity and eventually contracting arrangements were negotiated through one of the local government signatories so that the Board could operate with greater degree of independence and efficiency. Attempts to have the governments give the Board an independent status such that it could hire and let contracts for itself were unsuccessful.
   The second problem arose from the dual role of the federal, provincial and local government members sitting on the Board. On the one hand, they constituted 9 of the 19 members of the Board, equal in all regards to each other member. On the other hand, they were the representatives of the governmental parties who were signatory to the Agreement and thus the people responsible for negotiating the annual budget with the Board. Again, these dual responsibilities might appear to be convenient but in reality they proved to be highly problematic because of their differing interests as Board members versus party representatives. It took time to develop a Board budgeting process that could address the different interests and questions about Board independence and accountability, as well as learn how to fit into the long and complex budgeting processes of the federal and provincial governments. The issue did not arise with the local governments representatives who had committed from the outset to a level of funding for each of the first five years of the Agreement. As the incoming Chair, I had attempted to negotiate a comparable arrangement with the federal and provincial parties but was unsuccessful. While it is normal for such multistakeholder collaboratives to have to negotiate budgets and cost-sharing arrangements, this initiative, although among the more complicated ones, resulted in an unnecessarily uncertain and inefficient process. In these regards, the hastily accepted Agreement based on the SUC collaborations had some of its greatest deficiencies and most debilitating impacts on the collaboration that followed.

The Use of Multistakeholder Processes
At the heart of the Board's collaboration strategy has been the use of multistakeholder processes to fulfill all five parts of its mandate (Figure 10.2). At an early stage, it became evident that there was much to be gained in moving towards sustainability by requiring that the diversity of stakeholders represented on the Board also should be reflected in appropriate ways in each of its collaborative initiatives. Using this principle in each of its steering committees, task forces and demonstration projects have been a productive means of convening people to identify shared interests, and create fresh perspectives on sustainability and foster collaborative initiatives. In meetings throughout the communities of the Basin, the power of the approach has been revealed. For example, time and again, individuals and organizations have been surprised to discover the many others who are working toward similar ends, when previously they had not known about each others efforts. At a time when resources of all kinds are coming under increasing demands, this has lead to the identification of ways to collaborate in using them more productively. Convening, facilitating and spinning off these collaborative processes has been one of the Board's most profound influences.
   Ironically, when the Board was beginning its multistakeholder processes it was both the best and the worst of times for doing this. By late 1992 and early 1993, the Basin was awash in an amazing number and diversity of new federal and provincial initiatives, all of which involved unprecedented levels of stakeholder involvement. From the federal government came a wide variety of new projects and programs funded by Green Plan monies, including initiatives by not only Environment Canada and Fisheries and Oceans under the $100m for FRAP but also other federal agencies with their own Green Plan funds (including Forestry, Agriculture, and Health and Welfare). From the provincial government came consultation programs on new legislation and policies relating to water management, environmental protection, project assessment, protected areas and land use. On top of these initiatives and all of the previously existing activities of these governments, came new planning exercises in various parts of the Basin, including the regional land use planning process of the Commission on Resources and Environment (CORE) in the Cariboo-Chilcotin, the sub-regional Land and Resource Management Planning (LRMP) process in the Kamloops area, and the Georgia Basin Initiative (GBI) for planning for growth management in the Canada-U.S. bioregion. At the same time as these federal and provincial initiatives were coming from the top-down, stakeholders in the communities and watersheds were developing their own initiatives from the bottom-up, encouraged by the ideas for local round tables being advanced by the B.C. Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (1991a). And, if all of this was not enough, the B.C. Treaty Commission (1994) was getting its process underway with the expectation that First Nations would be coming into the negotiations with claims covering all of the Basin.
   Never before had there been such an urgent need for the kind of multistakeholder coordination and collaboration that the Board was uniquely intended to facilitate. From this perspective on the opportunity, it was the best of times. But the realities of seizing this opportunity in practice were daunting. Three years later with the benefit of hindsight, it is much easier to map the landscape created by the many initiatives. At the time, however, there was huge confusion about what was going on. Not only was their little effective coordination between the federal and provincial governments but even within the governments there was often little successful collaboration. Even worse, there were monumental difficulties in getting collaboration underway on initiatives within key departments from which they were originating.
   All of this confusion made it extremely difficult for the new Board and its staff to comprehend what was going on, let alone to begin facilitating collaboration. To make matters worse, there was already the beginnings of a severe backlash from many stakeholders who were confused about what was happening and who felt they were being consulted to exhaustion with little evidence of tangible results. In its first stakeholder meetings in 1993, the Board was told loudly and clearly that it would be seen as just one more part of the problem unless it quickly demonstrated that it could help to resolve the problems of collaboration. In the Cariboo-Chilcotin, the CORE and related land use planning processes were so contentious and time consuming that the Board decided that it should not even attempt to do much in this middle section of the Basin until the CORE process stabilized. Headquarters and regional personnel within the federal and provincial agencies of government were often cautious at best in welcoming the Board initiative and sometimes were strongly opposed. The reasons varied from simply feeling overcommitted without any new demands, through to being fundamentally opposed to the initiative because it was anticipated to be more of a hindrance than a help in achieving their own ends and interests.
   Thus, at the outset, the Board together with its staff faced a huge challenge not only in developing its own understanding of what it had been mandated to do but also in building support for it among all the stakeholders. All things considered, the Board and its staff were remarkably successful in avoiding a major disaster and slowly began to build understanding and support. Little things gradually made a difference; for example, by the Board members going into the communities early, making clear that they were there to listen and learn; and then acting promptly to show that they had heard through the very quick and complete reporting back promptly to stakeholders on what had been said and acting on demonstration projects. Progress has, however, been slow, and perhaps the greatest difficulties were encountered in winning the support of people in the government agencies. In the beginning, the Board staff had to spend inordinate amounts of time contending with active hostility to the initiative, allaying suspicions, correcting misinformation, clarifying the role of the Board, and persuading people of its potential usefulness to them. But what made the greatest difference and has been key to the gradual progress on all fronts, was the establishment and ongoing use of the multistakeholder processes, particularly as they increased regional and local involvement, facilitated collaboration among all levels, and began to show tangible results. Once again, the all too easy passage and acceptance by first the SUC, and then the governments, can be seen to have been a dangerously flawed collaboration in that it produced an agreement that left so many interests who had not bought in and issues unaddressed.

Reporting and Accountability
The BCEN's insistence during the SUC that they were not able to make decisions without first checking with their membership was an early warning of the major challenges to reporting and accountability inherent in such a diverse multistakeholder collaborative. At the time, their insistence was seen as a problem because it might slow down the drafting of an agreement and it was argued that people were only sitting on the Committee as representatives of interests not delegates. In retrospect, it was an unrecognized forewarning of a critical issue for the Board.
   Each of the Board members faced different challenges in reporting back to the stakeholders whose interests they represented and it took considerable time to build effective communication channels. The federal and provincial government members used interdepartmental committees to facilitate communications. The three local government members reported back to a Steering Committee consisting of a representative from each of the 60 communities involved. The three First Nations members and the six non-governmental members had no single mechanism for reporting back but instead utilized the various organizations and networks to which they had access. All of the Board members were extremely busy with other responsibilities and so they had limited time available for conveying the substance of discussions that had taken place at the Board meeting. During the first two years of the Board's activities, when there was little buy-in to the Fraser initiative because of limited consultation during the drafting of the agreement and when it was seen as being just one more of too many initiatives, the constraints on communications were very debilitating. It was not until the multistakeholder processes had begun to operate and a much wider diversity of governmental and non-governmental interests became directly involved that a two way flow of information started to take place and a foundation of trust and collaboration began to be built.
   The initial communication problems were particularly great within the federal and provincial agencies, where members of the Board's staff found that little clear information or instruction was filtering down from their respective government's Board members. The governments instituted a co-ordinating committee consisting of senior representatives of their Board members to facilitate intergovernmental and interdepartmental coordination but this became problematic as it was perceived by non-governmental Board members as the federal and provincial government bureaucracy beginning to predominate over the Board's activities and to be raising questions about the independence of the Board and its staff. These strains became particularly great when this committee got involved in the early negotiations over the Board's budget and began to act as the representatives of the parties to the Agreement. Once again, these difficulties slowly receded with the creation of the multistakeholder committees which directly involved a wider variety of governmental personnel from all four orders of government and began the process of building trust and commitment. Particularly significant was the involvement of the non-governmental members of the Board.
   Under the Agreement, the Chair was accountable to the signatory ministers and mayors and more generally to the people of the Basin. There was a requirement to report at least annually on the Board's fulfilment of its responsibilities. During the time that I served as Chair, I had good access to the ministers and mayors. The greatest difficulties arose from their not surprising lack of knowledge about the Agreement, as well as the rapid turnover in the incumbents and their consequent lack of familiarity with the initiative. For example, in the early months, all parties were confused about the difference between the federal Green Plan's Fraser River Action Plan (FRAP) and the Board's Fraser Basin Management Program (FBMP). For at least the first year, there was a widespread misperception among people in the federal government, who were not immediately involved, that the Board was an instrument of their FRAP, instead of understanding that FRAP was just one part of the Board's FBMP. These kinds of misunderstandings were not helped by changes in the responsible ministers. For example, during my two-year appointment, I reported to three different federal Ministers of the Environment and in each case the early stages of what were only ever short meetings involved building an understanding of the initiative and its complex history to date. Besides coming at a stage when there was a much clearer and widespread understanding of the initiative, the two people who have followed me as the Chair, Ian Waddell (1994-96) and Iona Campagnola (1996-), also had the advantage of having been Members of Parliament, who were experienced in the processes of government, had been active in politics and knew personally many of the key individuals involved in government in both Ottawa and B.C. Those advantages have served the Board well over the last two years, as it has moved more vigorously through the delivery of its Report Cards, to hold all stakeholders more accountable for their progress towards sustainability in the Basin.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The initiative in the Fraser Basin demonstrates not only the potential and essential role of collaborative multistakeholder processes in pursuing sustainability but also the challenges of putting them into practice in watershed management. Politics, power relationships, history, organizational inertia, human dynamics, time, resources and uncertainty are just some of the factors that constrain and necessitate compromise in putting principles into practice. This was particularly so in the hugely ambitious Fraser initiative. But, at the end of the first five years, it is clearly better to have gone ahead and begun the long task of building new forms of governance than not to have tried at all. The priority now is to learn from the experience, build on the strengths and remedy the weaknesses.
   Once again, it is the best and the worst of times for innovation. Some can already be heard to argue that at a time when governments are cutting back in all areas of activity so as to reduce their deficits and begin paying off their debts, the Board and its Program can not be afforded. The end of the federal FRAP and its $100m budget in 1997 take away a major driving force for innovation in the Fraser. Inherently, the initiative is an easy target for criticism because it is in the nature of its mandate that its products will not be readily evident; it would be so much easier if the Board was identified with major regulatory actions (e.g., shutting down a persistent polluter) or investment decisions (e.g., allocating dollars for building a new sewage treatment plant). Further, to the extent that the Board has been successful through its emphasis on multistakeholder and consensus processes in empowering those who were not previously at the table and thus disempowering some of the elites that previously held sway, opposition has been catalysed. As with the B.C. Energy Commission, the B.C. Round Table on Environment and Economy, and the Commission on Resources and Environment, it would be all too easy for governments to terminate the intiative while arguing that the Board's job has been done and expecting little immediate political backlash from its supporters who are widely dispersed and when much more drastic cut backs in core programs are going on at the same time.
   On the other hand, others can be heard arguing that this is the best of times for further innovation. Building much greater collaboration among all of the stakeholders, including novel intergovernmental agreements and new public-private partnerships, is the only way to increase the productivity of governance and maintain levels of service and investment in the face of the retreats by governments. If anything, the need for collaboration has increased because of the major new policies introduced by governments in the last few years (e.g., risk averse regulation of the fisheries, wide-ranging community growth management legislation, a far-reaching forest practices code, huge new funds for forest renewal, and the province-wide negotiation of aboriginal claims). The challenge facing the Board is to use the present discussion of the draft BasinPlan to generate more tangible evidence of the support for its accomplishments to date and the potential for building on this in the future. It is fitting that the Board be challenged to demonstrate its prowess in facilitating the development of a broadly based consensus among the Basin stakeholders on the next steps in the Fraser sustainability initiative.
In developing the draft of a potential second generation agreement, it is crucially important that key questions be addressed and not be neglected, as happened during the drafting of the first agreement. Given the novelty of the approach and the hugely ambitious aspirations of the first occasion, the faults in the process are arguably understandable but this time it would be inexcusable having seen the debilitating consequences for the initiative during its early years. From this perspective on the handicaps it had to overcome, the Board's achievements are all the more impressive.
   In my view, there should not be another agreement unless the Board is given an appropriate institutional basis and the resources to carry out its mandate efficiently and effectively. Continuing the Board under the present arrangements should not be considered; in all likelihood, it would result in its slow demise from perceived inefficacy. Better that the initiative be promptly and unambiguously discontinued than it be allowed to die a slow death and wither away. From my perspective, three highly interdependent ingredients are required to build on the proven strengths and remedy critical weaknesses of the first agreement-;an influential board, an independent institutional base, and adequate resources to support a small staff and board activities.

An Influential Board
The Board has the potential to be highly influential. This potential derives from two primary elements: the seniority and diversity of the multistakeholder membership, and the mandate to audit progress towards sustainability. In the case of the first element two suggestions should be resisted, namely that there be any separation of the governmental and non-governmental members (e.g., the Board becomes constituted of solely non-governmental members who are advisory to an intergovernmental committee) or that there be any further diminution in the seniority of governmental Board members (e.g., the provincial ADMs vacate in favour of Directors or interdepartmental committee chairs). Instead, the first element of potential influence should be enhanced by building ways in which the Board members are seen to be more accountable (e.g., the federal, provincial and First Nation members implement more transparent reporting relationships to their constituencies, comparable to those established by the local government members), and, accelerating progress towards the establishment of regional multistakeholder processes to which non-governmental members of the Board report.
   Regarding the second primary element of influence, the audit mandate, it should be strengthened as outlined below. Suggestions should be resisted, at this time, for broadening the powers of the Board (e.g., giving it regulatory powers or responsibilities for allocating funds). Such changes would fundamentally change the concept of the Board and consideration of them should be postponed until the present concept has been more vigorously tested. The next two ingredients are crucial to doing this.

An Independent Institutional Base
The credibility of the Board depends on it being seen to and in fact operate with a measure of independence while still being accountable and having the capacity to operate efficiently and effectively. The institutional arrangements under the first Agreement neither provide for adequate accountability of the Board members, as indicated above, nor give the Board enough independence to escape the undue influence of the government bureaucracies. The makeshift arrangements for financial administration and the inefficient processes for negotiating budgets from the federal and provincial governments undermine the credibility and efficiency of the Board. There really is not any ready-made model for the most unusual balance of governmental/non-governmental institution or quango that is required. Two potential models would be either to establish the Board as a Special Operating Agency (i.e., an agency that operates as a separate entity, financing itself by charging for services delivered) or a non-profit society. Each would give it a greater degree of independence while keeping it in the middle ground of governmental and non-governmental institutions. While the former keeps it closer to government, the latter moves it further away. Neither is perfect; the former might keep it too close to government and the latter might put it too far away. In either case, an ongoing commitment to a minimum level of support (as suggested below) by the governments would be essential. In particular, this would be the case with the non-profit option, for which the common experience has been that their energies become consumed by the never-ending battle to maintain a flow of funds. While this is healthy to a point, it can become self-defeating, particularly where there are also wider and longer-term public interests to be met.

Adequate Resources to Support a Small Staff and Board Activities
Catch-22 is to give the Board a broad mandate and then not provide it with adequate resources to do the job. The evidence to date clearly indicates that auditing progress towards sustainability by all stakeholders is the most fundamentally important element of the Board's mandate. Without this power, the Board would be seen as toothless and have little with which to influence stakeholders decisions and collaboration. Specifically, the other four elements of its mandate (Figure 10.2) would be rendered ineffectual, particularly to the extent that they are already severely constrained by the Board's limited resources.
   It therefore follows that careful consideration must be given to the minimum resources required to support the Board's staff and activities, in particular the critical audit function. When the Board was first established, I argued on the basis of experience with similar types of initiatives that it needed a budget of about twice what it has been receiving (i.e., it needs about $3m a year). After the experiences of the last five years, I still believe this is what is required, given the specifics of the mandate, the large size of the Basin, the immense complexity of the sustainability issues to be addressed, and the potential pay-offs. To be capable of doing credible and constructive audits, the Board needs enough resources so that it can act with an adequate degree of independence. The budget levels in the first years of the Agreement have not left enough for effective auditing after covering the other minimum costs of meeting its mandate. The other four elements of the mandate are each essential to achieving the overall goals of facilitating collaboration towards sustainability, and minimum budgets are required to carry out each of them efficiently and effectively. While an important element of the innovative multistakeholder collaborative approach is the principle that all participants should contribute, there is a minimum level that needs to be contributed by the Board, particularly in the case of the fundamentally important audit function, if the process is not to be unduly influenced by or captive to those in government agencies and the private sector who control the essential information and have substantially greater financial resources and expertise. In addition, the success of the Board depends on it being able to put some minimum financial or in-kind resources on the table so as to be one of the contributors in collaborative initiatives. Examples of where this has been particularly productive are the multistakeholder flood management strategy, demonstration projects, the regional coordinator activities, jointly organized conferences (e.g., Sustainability: Its Time for Action (Commission on Resources and the Environment et al., 1995)), and cooperatively produced guideline and education materials (e.g., Community Stewardship: A Guide to Establishing Your Own Group (Fraser Basin Management Program et al., 1995a); Navigating for Sustainability (Fraser Basin Management Program et al., 1995b). Arguably, the persistent efforts of the Board to catalyse and facilitate a multistakeholder watershed management process in the Nechako, which in the autumn of 1996 appeared to be coming to fruition, uniquely demonstrate the Board's potential to foster collaboration even in the most challenging and momentous circumstances.
   In late 1996, the signs are that there is some interest in a successor Agreement. Particularly significant is the offer by the local governments to increase their per capita levy, perhaps as much as doubling their contribution. It remains to be seen how the other signatory parties will respond and what might be the innovative characteristics of a second generation model for putting principles into practice in collaborating towards sustainability together in the Fraser Basin.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Most useful comments were provided on an earlier draft by the editors and a reviewer.

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