Book Description

In Oregon, community-based organizations have become major agents of watershed restoration. The most common of these organizations are watershed councils, which began to emerge in the mid-1990s as the State of Oregon promoted voluntary local approaches to resolving conflict, restoring watershed health, and recovering endangered salmon. Because these nongovernmental organizations represent a significantly different approach to watershed management from traditional government management, regulatory, and extension models, it is important to understand how they mobilize human resources to manage themselves and carry out restoration work. How watershed councils mobilize resources greatly affects the scope and scale of restoration efforts in Oregon. This briefing paper summarizes the findings from a study that explores how watershed councils have built the organizational capacity and human resources necessary to manage themselves and implement watershed restoration.