The Endangered Species Committee (ESC) Northern Spotted Owl: Lessons Learned for Collaboration and Consensus Building

The convening of the endangered species committee (ESC) in 1991 over federal forest management conflicts with the Northern Spotted Owl resulted in a partial, negotiated solution to a broader and longer term issue that required significant additional consensus building and policy development. Like many natural resource management conflicts, the ESC was triggered by a breakdown in agency policy to adequately address multiple objectives and transform conflicts into cooperative and synergistic actions. While the process, by federal law, was science-driven in terms of ESC decision criteria, the agency policies and procedures that preceded it did not fully capitalize on collaboration techniques to translate social and physical science to optimized policy. Ideally, federal agencies would use tested procedures for collaboration, including well-established templates for stepwise, comprehensive, stakeholder based, consensus building used successfully at the state level in the US on other complex and unsettled issues, such as climate action planning. However, barriers exist to federal collaboration that are not applicable at the state and local levels and nongovernmental and private sectors, and require modified approaches. Nonetheless, significant opportunity exists to improve current agency collaborative procedures to incorporate successful techniques used elsewhere, particularly through joint fact-finding, public private partnerships, and capacity building.