Sustainable Development in an Environmentally - Focusing on Intermediate Organizations -

Abstract

Sustainable redevelopment of environmentally challenged regions has been a major interests in the fields of regional development and environmental policy. Difficult are always developing watersheds in which a multiplicity of local governments, nonprofit and civic organizations, and interest groups are tangled up in complex ways. Imbuing policy ideas such as sustainable development in a diversity of regional development policies are even more harder in complex policy environment. This case study analyzes efforts of local government and stakeholder organizations in a watershed and identifies adaptive capacity of stakeholder organizations, their communication channels and networks, and external resource from entities from state and federal levels. Actors in the watershed established an intermediate organization, IMEF, which provides a place for dialogue and deliberation among stakeholders. IMEF recruited a local education and research institutes and have them play a role of facilitator. The intermediate organization helps communities in the watershed build a long-term plan based upon social and environmental sustainability while undertaking sustainable development projects in the first place.