Restoration Coffee House Session One:
Defining Success
Tuesday, April 24,
4:00pm-5:30pm
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This initial Restoration Coffee House (RCH)
session deals with one of the most perplexing issues faced by the
leaders and managers of ecosystem and basin restoration programs.
Because the large scales of these programs (spatially, temporally,
politically and socially) substantially increases and broadens the
number and range of expectations of interested stakeholders,
reaching agreement on the desired outcomes can be challenging. Yet
many will argue that an up-front agreement on what constitutes
success is an essential prerequisite to successful planning of
project components and implementation strategies and for building
public support for these programs. This RCH session will illustrate
and evaluate how this issue has been addressed by several large
ecosystem-scaled programs around the country, and will explore how
successful the various strategies for building agreement on
definitions of restoration success have been in guiding planning and
building support for these programs. Focus of the discussion by the
panel and audience initially will be guided by the following
questions.
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For purposes of
this discussion, “restoration success” might be defined as
having broad agreement during the early stages of the
restoration planning process regarding the desired endpoints
(i.e., what do we want the system to look like and/or be like
following completion of the program?). In your opinion, how
important has it been to develop this broad agreement up front?
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How has your
program achieved this broad agreement? What have been the
obstacles, and how successfully have you dealt with them? What
have been the consequences of not reaching agreement?
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Success
endpoints can be characterized based on temporal, spatial,
and/or values scales and criteria (e.g., pre-impact system vs.
some more recent, healthier system; landscape vs. species goals,
etc.). What scales and criteria have your program used, and
why? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the different
approaches, in terms of building agreement (01 above) and
planning and assessing the program?
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How (what process) has your program created
quantitative measures of success, and what are the strengths and
weaknesses of this approach?
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