Mission in the HOW
Acadia Partner’s mission, when rendered down to its core, might be as simple as “Protect the Park.†But I often find it difficult to reduce our mission to a single, pithy phrase. In part this is because the scientific, resource management, and socio-economic issues related to our mission are dynamic, diverse and complex – and often controversial. But also because HOW we accomplish our mission is so important and so central to what we do.
This is why I was intrigued when I read the text of a speech given by Charles S. Colgan, of the Muskie School of Public Service, to the Blaine House Conference on Natural Resource-based Industries in November 2003. Dr. Colgan summed up a speech full of unhappy data about resource management and resource based industries in Maine this way:
“To get beyond the zero sum approach to resource Management, we have to build resource management communities which are characterized by shared visions of the resources and their future, shared learning about what we know and don’t know about the use of resources and their impacts, shared decision making processes in which a wide array of concerned people have meaningful roles, and finally a shared sense that whatever the outcome of such processes are that everyone has had to sacrifice something to get there. The vast majority of resource management decisions we face are, in reality, neither pure conflict nor “win-win†but require some sacrifice on the part of everyone.”
Acadia Partners seeks to fill this need. And that describes the HOW. In order to protect the Park, Acadia Partners must help communities of stakeholders develop shared vision, provide programs (research & education) for shared learning, support shared decisions, and help build communities that understand and share the burden.
See “Maine’s Natural Resource Industries in a Post-industrial Global Economy.†Charles S. Colgan, Professor of Public Policy and Management, and Associate Director, Center for Business and Economic Research Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine. Presented to the Blaine House Conference on Natural Resource-based Industries, November 17, 2003.