The "Core Partnership" is made up of the Natural Resource Conservation Service, Oregon Soil and Water Conservation Commission, Oregon Association of Conservation Districts, Oregon Association of Resource Conservation and Development Area Councils, and the Oregon Department of Agriculture Division of Natural Resources. The Partnership, working side by side with landowners and land users, has made great strides in conserving natural resources since the 1939 Oregon Legislature passed enabling legislation to create Conservation Districts.
In addition to our core partners, NRCS and the Conservation Districts are developing partnerships with a variety of private and governmental organizations that have mutual interests and concerns.
The Conservation Partnership blends individual member resources to offer technical and financial assistance in planning and applying natural resource conservation practices and systems. It also works together in other areas, such as resource inventories, conservation education, and conservation technology.
The Conservation Partnership in Oregon is a unique coalition of local, tribal, state, and federal groups that mobilizes staff and program funding to help people and communities address natural resource conservation issues. Relying on the mix of expertise, authorities, and common sense each member organization brings to the table, the Partnership strives to realize a shared vision - local people making informed decisions for a healthy and economically viable land.
The strategies for reaching our vision are based on helping people carry out voluntary conservation actions on private land employing a watershed-based approach. They are also based on facilitating locally led conservation efforts to encourage cooperative decision making in local communities. The Conservation Partnership is committed to the following broad initiatives to guide all of our work in making our vision a reality. Over the years, complex issues have surfaced, and growing environmental concerns have added new players to traditional conservation efforts. Oregon NRCS has been restructured in an attempt to more fully address these complex resource issues and to capitalize on the collective efforts of individual landusers, locally vested stakeholders, and partnering agencies.
The Oregon Conservation Partnership is committed to the vision of a voluntary, locally led, watershed-based approach to resource management on privately owned land. The success of this concept is dependent upon the following four key provisions:
Regardless of outside data, landusers do not routinely voluntarily adopt new management practices if they are not convinced that their conventional management has an adverse effect on the resource or off-site stakeholders. For this reason, it is extremely important that the landuser, as the decision maker on his or her property, be involved in the inventory assessment, and alternative identification process.
The active involvement of stakeholders in the watershed planning process greatly enhances the scope and effect of the plan. Further, if stakeholders have been actively involved in the planning, they are familiar with the inventory data, better understand the challenges of the landusers, and are better able to support the implementation of selective alternatives.
Since the landusers are the ultimate decision makers in a voluntary effort, the stakeholders’ interests are best served if they can present their concerns and recommendation in a proactive manner. Both the stakeholders and landusers need to recognize the data being presented by the technical advisors as valid, or be prepared to present other data for consideration which is technically defensible.
It is easy to delineate the distinctions between a voluntary and regulatory approach in addressing resource issues. It is more difficult, yet very advantageous to meld these processes, since the same resource objectives are achieved. Regulatory efforts are most often science driven, whereas successful voluntary efforts are science based. Regulatory efforts are normally dependent upon prescriptions developed by the responsible agency without direct involvement or concurrence of those who must ultimately implement those prescriptions.
Science-based, voluntary efforts require that both the landuser and stakeholder fully understand the problem and have confidence that the recommended treatment will solve the problem. Further, the landuser must voluntarily agree to implement necessary changes in the management system.
To be successful, technical advisors must be perceived by both landusers and stakeholders as competent and reliable sources of technical information. Their most important task is that of educating landusers and stakeholders so they have the appropriate information on which to base their decisions.
If the basis for a regulated resource is defensible, the technical advisors should be able to use the data to communicate the problems to the local planning team in a manner which is convincing. They must also use the data to ensure the local planning group understands the link between the problems and conventional resource management practices.
The role of the technical advisors centers on ensuring that the watershed plan is technologically sound. The selection of technical advisors needed for a given planning effort is the responsibility of the landusers and stakeholders. The makeup of the technical team varies in accordance with the resource issues at hand in each watershed. It should be clearly understood that if the appropriate technical data is not considered in the planning process, it may be used later to discredit whatever plan is developed without it.
Emphasis must be placed on the resource issues as opposed to the regulation. In other words, if a water quality limited stream is the topic, the technical advisor is more effective in focusing on the criteria necessary to support the beneficial uses, as opposed to jumping immediately to the threat of regulations.
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