High stakes for the Great Lakes: Geographers explore how to find - and keep - environmental stakeholders

From the boundary waters of the United States and Canada to the vast Cuyahoga River watershed to the Milwaukee Estuary, there are 43 Areas of Concern (AOC) surrounding the Great Lakes. Each is in need of remedial clean-up to address numerous beneficial use impairments that impact humans and wildlife alike.

The AOCs on the U.S. side of the border are overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, but at the ground level, clean-up efforts fall to local stakeholders.

Great Lakes Areas of Concern are toxic ‘hotspots’ where some sort of contaminant has affected the quality of the surrounding environment. These “beneficial use impairments” range from contaminants causing tumors or deformities in fish and wildlife, to tainted drinking water, to beach closings, and more.

The AOCs range from the small – Ohio’s Ashtabula river AOC is just a few thousand feet long – to the enormous, like the Cuyahoga watershed AOC that includes Cleveland, Akron, and other municipalities. The nearest AOC to UW-Milwaukee is the Milwaukee Estuary on Lake Michigan.

No matter the size, the Environmental Protection Agency views stakeholder participation of a fundamental part of site clean-up.

The question is, how do you find, recruit, and keep those stakeholders?

Associate Professor of Geography Ryan Holifield offered some answers in a recent article, titled “Recruiting, integrating, and sustaining stakeholder participation in environmental management: A case study from the Great Lakes Areas of Concern.” Published in the Journal of Environmental Management, the research grew out of surveys that he and co-author Katie Williams, Holifield’s former graduate student, sent to various administrators of Great Lakes AOCs to determine what methods work best to establish and keep stakeholder participation.

The hunt for stakeholders

A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in the outcome of a particular AOC: “State, local, and municipal or county governments, sewage districts, or port facilities in some cases,” said Holifield. “It would also include businesses that are affected by areas of concern. Local environmental organizations are a big stakeholder in a lot of these Areas of Concern.”

However, identifying stakeholders isn’t the problem.

“One of the findings was that the question of how we recruit active stakeholders, and getting people to be active and stay active over time, is possibly a bigger challenge than identifying them in the first place,” Holifield said.

Stakeholders from the industrial world are often tough to recruit, for example. Holifield and Williams’ research showed that many groups had trouble convincing businesses to participate in environmental projects, even though they often have the biggest stake in their outcome. Some of the businesses may have even been responsible for the contamination of certain environmental sites to begin with.

Another problem is that there is no “one size fits all” approach to encouraging participation. The size and scope of AOCs vary wildly. The Milwaukee Estuary Area of Concern, for example, is defined as bank-to-bank: Only the waterways and a small part of Lake Michigan are included in the AOC. In contrast, the Cuyahoga River Area of Concern covers the water and land of the entire Cuyahoga River watershed, which includes the cities of Cleveland and Akron, Ohio.

Ryan Holifield

That means, said Holifield, that the level of stakeholder participation needed at each AOC also varies. The recruitment methods for one AOC won’t necessarily work for another.

So, how do AOC administrators overcome those challenges?

The “best practices” of participation

As Holifield and Williams conducted their surveys, they found some recurring themes. Chief among them was that successful recruitment and meaningful participation relies on building relationships.

For example, one set of AOC coordinators was struggling to maintain the involvement of a First Nations reserve as a stakeholder in the project. Traditional methods of engagement weren’t working, so they tried another approach.

“The groups met and had a traditional dinner, which was much less formal. There was a lot of conversation. That was a great breakthrough for them where they were able to get a lot of people on board,” Holifield said. “That pointed to another finding that emerged out of all of this, which was the importance of relationship-building, and the importance of making stakeholder participation meaningful for people.”

It seems like a simple thing, he added, but the importance of building strong social relationships is often overlooked.

“In retrospect, it seems like, of course! But you realize for how long that that didn’t really play much of a role in what it meant to conduct public participation, and that’s something that’s now emerging and catching up,” Holifield said.

He and Williams found other “best practices” as well. Several groups spoke about the importance of using social media to appeal to a younger generation of stakeholders. Many said it was crucial to emphasize stakeholder successes to boost morale.

“Another best practice that we heard repeated over and over again was cultivating champions: People who are leaders of some kind in the community, but who also had wide networks. They’re able to both steer the committee towards decisions but also have good relations with a lot of people in the area and can also bring those people on board, or at least, forge alliances with them,” Holifield said.

Establishing stakeholder participation is a crucial part of AOC recovery. As climate change continues to impact the environment, the Areas of Concern need all the stakeholder help they can get.

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science