Publications

Communities across the country benefited from $230 billion in federal investments in safe, clean, and affordable options for housing, energy, and transportation infrastructure in 2024, including economically distressed and rural counties, Tribes and small businesses, and red and blue Congressional districts.

A new NPCC collaborative governance textbook, by Greenwood, Willis, and Singer, is situated in the practical—the place where students and practitioners and public managers might apply theory, and especially lessons learned, to the real-life issues they encounter in communities.

As collaborative governance groups form and evolve, they increasingly need a clearly articulated organizational structure to advance their strategy and achieve their goals. This guide provides groups with a process for developing a collaborative governance framework.

At times, government collaboration projects evolve into a more permanent arrangement that leads to formation of an intergovernmental entity. This guide addresses the most common questions the National Policy Consensus Center receives about forming intergovernmental entities.

The people of Harney County, Oregon, have a story to tell about healing decades of conflict and coming together to ensure their community survives and thrives. This guide highlights lessons learned from Harney County's High Desert Partnership.

This research report examines lessons learned from the Sage-Grouse Conservation Partnership, an unprecedented cross-sector collaborative effort  to address landscape-scale threats to greater sage-grouse while also acknowledging rural economic and community interests across Eastern Oregon.

NPCC participated in a global research effort, led by the University of Eastern Finland, related to collaborative governance in an environmental context. Read the policy brief. 

The collaborative efforts of the Federal Forest Working Group to address issues, challenges, and opportunities facing the health of Oregon's federal public forests and that of neighboring communities has spanned three Oregon governors over more than a decade. This guide provides a retrospective of that work.

Leaders today increasingly recognize that, if progress is to be made on difficult issues, citizens need to be involved in discussing or making decisions on those issues in one way or another. This guide examines how citizens should become involved.

The Practical Guide to Consensus helps officials and agencies design the most appropriate, and effective, uses of consensus processes, with "Before, During, and After" instructions.

This report reflects interviews with stakeholders representing key interests related to the Elliott State Forest in Oregon. It informs a process and framework for decoupling Elliott State Forest from the State Common School Fund.

Recognizing how controversial genetic engineering in agriculture has been, the governor brought diverse interests together to help frame the issues so that legislators would have an opportunity to consider the full range of perspectives. NPCC facilitated this task force and developed this briefing document.

At the request of NOAA Fisheries, NPCC’s Oregon Consensus and the William D. Ruckelshaus Center conducted a situation assessment to explore regional views about how best to approach comprehensive, long-term salmon and steelhead recovery in the basin. This report details the results.

This research project assessed the role and experiences of Oregon's area commissions on transportation (ACTs), researched comparative approaches in the state and nationally, and developed and assessed options for improving coordination and increasing effectiveness.

NPCC hosted a colloquium for people involved in watershed collaborations, academics, and other experts from government and nonprofit organizations in order to identify lessons learned from successful watershed initiatives, and to develop recommendations. This report is an outgrowth of that conference.

This report summarizes lessons learned from an NPCC colloquium about transportation collaborations and offers recommendations for governors and state transportation officials on ways to enhance the use and effectiveness of collaborative problem solving around transportation issues.

These four case studies examine the arrangements and mechanisms for integrating land use and transportation in metropolitan regions and assessing these arrangements based on current practice and future potential.

This federal effort focuses on collaborative practices for a range of transportation planning and development issues. Primary objectives were developing increased awareness of collaborative approaches, identifying opportunities in at least two states, identifying training, and designing assessment tools.

This report explores the benefits of expanding the supplemental environmental projects (SEPs) process to incorporate multi-sector, community-based collaboration. A community-based collaborative SEP can leverage community investments to meet economic and environmental justice objectives cost effectively.

This report explores how leaders can create even better solutions by combining collaborative governance activities—engaging the public in discussion and implementing their ideas through a representative group of stakeholders.

The social safety net is critical in Oregon. Much of that safety net comes from federal programs that include health care, income, and educational support. This report looks at whether those benefits are underutilized in Oregon.

Initiatives have shown clear benefit for individuals in poverty. However, it is also important to address communities of concentrated poverty because individual poverty is impacted by where people live. This is a proposal for identifying, measuring, defining and addressing communities of concentrated poverty.

This research project utilized the rich history of Oregon’s watershed councils as a case study and applied a construct of common factors of effective collaborative performance and possible collaboration benefits from the various academic disciplines.