For almost two decades, alternative or environmental dispute resolution (EDR) has been a hot topic for many scholars and practitioners of environmental and natural resources policy and administration. There are now many books and articles that examine the promises and pitfalls of ERD. For the uninitiated, EDR can include any type of conflict or dispute resolution that falls outside of the normal state or federal judicial or bureaucratic system. This can include everything from negotiation, mediation, and arbitration (commonly used in the legal system—and not typically thought of as EDR) to things with names like collaborative, cooperative, or collective management and adaptive governance. The normally cited perquisites for ERD are that the negotiations be voluntary, that the parties participate in the process directly, that participants may withdraw from the process at any time, that third-party facilitators have no formal authority to impose a decision, and that the parties agree to whatever is decided. If this sounds like getting people together to talk and work things out, that is because this is what it is.

Most of the books written about EDR (including these two) spend little time on the constraints of the process, and in their enthusiasm seem to ignore the contexts where ERD is not particularly useful. (Making Collaboration Work: Lessons from Innovation in Natural Resource Management, by Julia Wondolleck and Steven Yaffee [2000], although an excellent resource for activists and managers, exemplifies this shortcoming; Rosemary O'Leary and Lisa B. Bingham provide a notable exception to the trend in The Promise and Performance of Environmental Conflict Resolution, 2003.) Although Swimming Upstream gives us a summary of criticisms of collaborative management, it maintains the overall enthusiasm we have come to expect from these works. Adaptive Governance is not as introspective and, in fact, is similar in most respects to the earlier work by Ronald D. Brunner et al. (Finding Common Ground: Governance and Natural Resources in the American West, 2002).

The two books under review do basically the same thing. Both start out with a description of the status quo and why it is wanting. Adaptive Governance calls traditional means of dispute resolution “scientific management” and describes it as centralized, top-down, based on the best science, and done by experts relying on hard methods with minimal outside participation and without politics when possible. Its description of traditional management seems a bit harsh—federal resource managers are rarely as strict and one-dimensional as depicted here. Swimming Upstream describes traditional decision making in somewhat gentler but no less damning terms: technocratic, single agency, and top-down with public participation limited to hearings designed to fine-tune or ratify agency plans. This book focuses on watershed management, whereas in the former, the net is cast wider, covering both watersheds and land areas. For both, the target of reform is the status quo in natural resource management. Both books make the point that ERD should be nonlinear, multidimensional, all-inclusive, and (in the case of Adaptive Governance) directed toward the “common interest.” (Adaptive Governance is not quite clear how the common interest will always be achieved, and the fact that there are sometimes “winners and losers” seems to be conveniently skirted.)

Both books use case studies to illustrate their points, and the cases are their major strengths. In Adaptive Governance, five case studies cover fisheries, management on the Colorado River above Grand Junction, range management in northern New Mexico, range management in southern Arizona and New Mexico, watershed management in Oregon, and on the national level, forest management. Swimming Upstream is divided into three parts. The first part provides an overview of watershed management in the United States and the role of collaborative management in that history. In the second part, case studies examine collaborative water management experiences in Oklahoma and Texas. Part III integrates quantitative analyses of stakeholders with various theoretical approaches to collective action in an examination of the factors that impact the success or failure of collaborative watershed management. Concluding chapters in both books summarize and generalize primarily for the benefit of practitioners of natural resources management in order to make recommendations for a transition from “scientific management,” or traditional management, to adapted government or collaborative management. The final chapter of Swimming Upstream provides a list of recommendations for practitioners interested in implementing collaborative management, as well as suggestions for researchers in collaborative approaches to management (p. 293).

One of the major obstacles for a wide implementation of EDR has been a lack of understanding of who will participate and why. Rational political actors will select the means of participating in the policy process that maximize their chances of success. Consequently, EDR will only be followed when it is perceived to be advantageous to conventional means of influencing policy. Much research has been done on the incentives of political actors to follow a particular policy process over another. We know, for example, that parties will attempt to influence the policy process at those points where the resources they possess have the greatest chance of making an impact. For many interested parties, this will not be in face-to-face negotiation. Some of the EDR literature holds out the promise of cooperation without evaluating its constraints. In the international context, this is something like the regime theorist who hopes that the rational self-interested actors will somehow overcome their self-preservation instincts and cooperate for the common good. Such behavior is no more likely in the domestic arena.

It is clear that additional research is needed so that we can develop a better understanding of the incentives actors have to use, or avoid, EDR. There is no doubt that EDR is preferable under certain conditions but clearly not desirable under others, depending upon who you are and what your goals are in the process. Unfortunately, neither of these books sheds much light on this subject.

Although EDR is not the panacea that some would make it out to be, its value, in some contexts, cannot be denied. Both Swimming Upstream and Adaptive Governance provide excellent case studies and make solid recommendations that will be useful for practioners. Anyone interested in the use of ERD in environmental and natural resources management, both practitioner and scholar, will find these books useful.