User:Bwerick

Shared vision planning was developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the National Drought Study (1989-1993). Shared vision planning has three basic elements: (1) an updated version of the systems approach to water resources management developed during the Harvard Water Program; (2) an approach to public involvement called "Circles of Influence"; and (3) collaboratively built computer models of the system to be managed.

Three basic elements
Each of the three elements in shared vision planning has an evolutionary history leading to it. The Harvard Water Program planning approach was documented in "Design of Water Resources Systems; New Techniques for Relating Economic Objectives, Engineering Analysis, and Governmental Planning” (1962). Haarvard's conceptual ideas were practiced and refined by a team led by Harry Schwarz in the North Atlantic Regional Study, a Federal water study instigated by President Lyndon B. Johnson after an historic drought in the Northeast led New York City to stop releasing water from its reservoirs into the Delaware River.  President Johnson intervened because without that rush of freshwater flowing down the Delaware into the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic salt water might have been introduced into the Philadelphia drinking water system. Schwarz later summarized the practical interpreation of the Harvard principles in "Large Scale Regional Water Resources Planning" which he wrote with David Major, a Harvard economist. The lessons learned in the North Atlantic Study were later encoded in the Federal "Principles and Standards for Planning Water and Related Land Resources" (1973) often shortened to "the P&S". The "P&S" were used in the design and justification of proposed federal water projects. During the National Drought Study, the Corps modified the P&S planning steps to make them more suitable for drought management decisions, which generally do not involve significant federal funding. These decisions typically must also be agreed to by multiple management entities, and the federal role may not be central.

The "Circles of Influence" method of public involvement was developed by Dr. Robert Waldman during the National Drought Study and modified traditional Federal approaches. Typically, Federal water studies would invite "stakeholders" - people whose lives could be affected by a the decision to build a project - to public meetings. Stakeholders might come to support and shape the infusion of Federal money into the region. But drought management studies typically do not determine whether federal money will be invested in a region; they determine the storage and allocation of water. Accordingly, "Circles of Influence" participation methods encourage the management agencies to participate in existing forums created by stakeholders. Trust is developed in concentric circles winning the trust of locally trusted and respected stakeholder representatives.

The third element, the "shared vision model" was proposed by Richard Palmer during a National Drought Study case study meeting in Seattle, Washington in 1991. Palmer had been doing post-doctorate work from Johns Hopkins University at the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB). ICPRB was one of several government organizations developing reservoir projects to address water supply needs in the Washington Metropolitan area. Palmer's efforts to show that needs could be met with only two new reservoirs if the water supply systems of Maryland, Northern Virginia and Washington were managed collaboratively fell on deaf ears. Palmer was aware of the use of interactive water models by Pete Loucks, a professor of engineering at Cornell University and he decided to build a simple interactive simulation model he called "PRISM" (Potomac River Interactive Simulation Model") and used it in a game playing exercise with water utility representatives. The exercise led to an historic agreement in 1981.  Dan Sheer, who was working at ICPRB labeled this technique "computer aided negotiation" and has been using it since then in river basin studies around the world.  Palmer introduced the concept to the National Drought Study team using a systems simulation model building software called STELLA, and the union of Palmer's modeling technique with the planning and public participation elements resulted in what is now known as shared vision planning.

The name
The method at first was called the "drought preparedness study method" but was renamed "Shared Vision Planning" at the suggestion of the late Brian Mars, a University of Washington colleague of Palmer who had heard the name applied to systems design at nearby Boeing Aerospace. Peter Senge used the shared vision phrase in his 1990 book on systems analysis, "The Fifth Discipline" and this may have been where Boeing learned it.

Other Case Studies
Shared vision planning was used in five test studies during the National Drought Study; two were considered successful, the other three were not. Bill Werick, the National Drought Study leader later developed a set of questions to ask that would help determine whether shared vision planning would be helpful. Shared vision planning was applied immediately after the the National Drought Study in the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa-Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Rivers conflict. Its application led to the first interstate water compact in the southeast, but the compact expired years later when the three governors of Florida, Georgia and Alabama could not agree on terms for its continuation. The method has been used in several case studies since, most recently in the International Joint Commission's Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence River Study, which ended in 2006.

The prospects for wider use of the method
The use of the methods of shared vision planning are now more widespread than the name itself. Robert Costanza, the director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics has used STELLA models in environmental and economic modeling since 1987. Dr. Costanza is a co-founder of the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society (iEMSs)has its goal the development and use of environmental modelling and software tools to advance the science and improve decision making with respect to resource and environmental issues. "Mediated Modeling" a term used by Marjan van den Belt, describes a systems based participatory modeling approach to environmental issues that is very similar to shared vision planning but has typically been used as a learning tool, especially for stakeholders who might otherwise be left out of public policy dialogues.

The Corps' Institute for Water Resources (IWR) managed the National Drought Study and now manages the Corps' shared vision planning activities. IWR, Sandia National Laboratories and the United States Center for Environmental Conflict Resolution hosted the first national gathering of shared vision planners in Albuquerque, New Mexico in September, 2007. Conference participants agreed that the basic methods of shared vision planning were slowly becoming part of the mainstream in water resources management but that the process could be accelerated if a common name and community identity could be applied to all the various permutations on the approach.

--Bwerick 22:36, 21 September 2007 (UTC)