Evaluating Collaborative Planning: The British Columbia Experience‪.‬

Collaborative planning (CP) is emerging as the dominant planning model in environmental management. The essence of CP is to delegate responsibility for planning to multistakeholder groups that engage in face-to-face negotiations to reach consensus agreements. CP is now "institutionalized" as the preferred technique for preparing forestry plans by the U.S. Forest Service and watershed plans by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000; Leach et al. 2002). CP is also used in a wide variety of environmental planning applications in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Despite its widespread use, CP has not been adequately evaluated to determine its effectiveness and to identify "best practice" guidelines for successful implementation. We have attempted to fill this need for more evaluation of CP in two special volumes of Environments. In a previous volume, Environments 31(2) (Gunton et al. 2003), we reviewed the theory and practice of CP in North America. The purpose of this companion volume is to evaluate the most comprehensive application of CP to date: the preparation of regional land use plans for the Province of British Columbia.