Integrated Planning Framework for Urban River Rehabilitation

In 2002, 2005, and 2006, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of the Army entered into memoranda of understanding to implement the Urban Rivers Restoration Initiative (URRI). The URRI is a collaborative process where numerous agencies and stakeholders having different values, interests, and responsibilities come together to agree on actions to restore urban rivers. Much of the literature on collaborative planning addresses topics such as appropriate stakeholder representation, and securing and facilitating participation in planning over time. Less attention is paid to another key to successful collaborative planning processes: utilization of a common planning framework. A common planning framework will help collaborators to develop a shared understanding of the factual basis needed to define the nature and scope of problems and the merits of possible solutions. This paper identifies how the analytical frameworks of the principal URRI participating agencies (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and EPA) can be integrated to serve the goals of the URRI in ways that highlight incremental effects on costs and benefits from choosing among alternative plans and presented in a manner enabling collaborators to compare the benefits from different combinations and permutations of all the potential measures for given budgets. The conclusion discusses the contribution of the integrated planning framework to building consensus among federal agencies, nonfederal agencies, and other stakeholders on a URRI implementation plan.