Bridging the Boundary: Innovative Cross-scale Collaborations

The Puget Sound is a dynamic environment with diverse ecosystems, a booming and diverse population, wide varying topographies, and distributed and diverse governments and tribal nations. With limited resources for ecosystem recovery and an ever-growing list of needs, prioritizing and allocating resources to environmental recovery and protection is challenging. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “one of the key challenges for all National Estuary Programs (NEPs) is to invigorate local support by addressing local problems, but doing so in a coordinated manner that enhances mutual benefits and makes progress on regional problems…”. As a National Estuary Program, Puget Sound is no exception to this challenge. Local Integrating Organizations (LIOs) and the Puget Sound Partnership in 2020 and 2021 launched three innovative new approaches to bridge the boundary between local priorities and regional priorities to build trust and collaborative relationships across local, regional, and state scales and ultimately to move the needle forward on ecosystem recovery. (1) The Puget Sound Continuous Improvement effort strives to link the two groups to overcome persistent barriers to ecosystem recovery through collaborative co-generation of solutions and accessible communications for ease of implementation. (2) LIOs developed a consensus-based process to identify, describe, and select barriers to ecosystem recovery that are either experienced by all LIOs which will then be further investigated to uncover root causes, and convene relevant parties to identify, prioritize, and commit to solutions. (3) The Puget Sound Partnership Boards host biannual local forums to expand local decision-maker engagement with the Puget Sound recovery community and to discuss supporting local and regional priorities. We will discuss these approaches, their examples, and the hope for increasingly improved cross-scale collaborations they provide.