Swimming Upstream: Collaborative Approaches to Watershed Management

The book argues that U.S. water resource management has shifted from top-down, government agency-directed decision processes toward collaborative approaches of negotiation and problem solving. Rather than focusing on specific pollution sources or areas within a watershed, this new process considers the watershed as a whole, seeking solutions to interrelated social, economic, and environmental problems. Decision making involves face-to-face negotiations among diverse stakeholders, and the book provides a conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating whether these collaboratives achieve legitimacy and success.

The bulk of the book analyzes collaborative watershed planning projects across the country. It first examines relatively short-term collaborative strategies in Oklahoma and Texas, exploring issues of trust and legitimacy. It then analyzes factors affecting the success of relatively long-term collaborative partnerships in the National Estuary Program and in 76 watersheds in Washington and California. The research combines qualitative and quantitative methods, testing hypotheses about what makes partnerships effective.

The book embodies Sabatier's long-standing advocacy for rigorous social science within policy research. A reviewer noted that he argues scholars should self-consciously work on developing, testing, and revising logically coherent, empirically falsifiable propositions that suggest nonobvious, interesting relations and outcomes. The book uses qualitative and quantitative methods and consists of a mix of theory development and theory testing, with each chapter anchored within a framework introduced in the first chapter.

A critical review argued that the book's positivist methodology erases the influence of broader historical and socio-political context, making helpful generalization almost impossible. The reviewer noted the complete absence of methodological reflection, suggesting a lack of interest in being proven wrong. The research rests on assumptions that are questionable yet untestable within its own paradigm, and the plea for more data and better modeling is beside the point when what is needed is coherent explanation for the unique rather than generalization across a questionably coherent class of cases.