Alignment is needed at two levels: in formal plans, and in on the ground practice.

When formal plans are aligned they legitimise each other. If you have worked up a better approach to some aspects of ecosystem management, then having agencies aligned in support of it makes it much more likely that the shift in policy or practice will be sustained when staff leave or leadership changes in one of the organisations.

If on the ground practice is not aligned, then ecological outcomes are unlikely to satisfy any of the organisations or groups, as ecosystems (a river, a lake, an estuary, ...) integrate the effects of many stakeholders' actions. When stakeholders' actions pull in different directions it is difficult to improve degraded systems and difficult to maintain the 'health' of systems that are not yet in decline.

Getting agencies and other groups aligned with each other is centrally a matter of conversation, and particularly negotiation.

An effective way to negotiate is to use 'principled negotiation' in which conversation focuses on looking after people's interests, creatively generating options to make this easier, and discussing which explicit principles can legitimately be used to make a choice amongst the options.

In principle, always.

In practice:

• when you have opportunities to work with other organisations with related or overlapping interests (e.g. State agencies, local Councils in the same region, statuatory authorities, ...); to have an "opportunity" you need both:
• access to staff in the other agencies, and
• authority from your own agency to negotiate (but "authority" can take many forms: many officers have 'authority' to negotiate informal cooperative working arrangments with staff in other agencies, and that can be a valuable form of alignment)
• when the interests of the agencies allow it
  • when they will allow it can be difficult to determine in advance of course: a pragmatic approach is often needed: exploring through negotiation whether, to what extent, in what ways alignment can be negotiated.

Negotiating alignment is always useful in principle because ecosystems experience an integration of communities' activities, and because aligning agencies around policy shifts can help stabilise shifts to better practice. We increase the social resilience of better environmental policy.

Negotiating alignment is the focus of this practice, rather than negotiating 'agreement', because:

• if we enter into negotiations seeking 'alignment' rather than 'agreement', we are:
  • more open to listening to the other organisations' interests and finding a way to look after the whole set of interests in play
  • better positioned to learn from other stakeholders about what, in fact, makes better socio-economic and ecological sense
  • more inclined to interest based bargaining rather than positional bargaining (i.e. more likely to get a better outcome, overall: see Principled Negotiation)
  • more curious about what is possible.

Negotiation is something of an art. Kinds of sensitivity play a fundamental role - in particular listening to others and listening to ourselves. Effective negotiation is a combination of preparation (e.g. stakeholder analysis) and working from 'the feel' of the situation. 'The feel' is a shorthand way of referring to the fact that, if we get skilled at differentiating 'our feel for the whole of a situation' from 'our anxieties' or 'our logical beliefs', and we use our 'feel' as a key point of reference as we negotiate, then we ground our action in a more holistic insight than either our logical analyses or (of course) our anxieties can embody. Donald Schön explores these possibilities in 'Educating the reflective practitioner':

“When good jazz musicians improvise together, they similarly display reflection-in-action smoothly integrated into ongoing performance. Listening to one another, listening to themselves, they ‘feel’ where the music is going and adjust their playing accordingly. […] As the musicians feel the direction in which the music is developing, they make new sense of it. They reflect-in-action on the music they are collectively making – though not, of course, in the medium of words.” (Schön D 1987, Educating the reflective practitioner, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco; p30.)

See Listening to ourselves for more on this.

Urbanwater.info's catchment audit protocol has been designed, amongst other things, to help you develop a negotiating position. See in particular:

• Who are the stakeholders?
• What are their positions and their underlying interests?
• Where are their interests in tension or conflict?
• Finding and inventing options
• What principles should guide decision-making?

Having the strategies of multiple organisations and groups aligned is very important for ecosystem management.

1. Many stakeholders play a part in shaping ecological outcomes. If they are aligned, then the likelihood of ecological outcomes being as intended (by any one organisation or group) is far higher.
   
2. Downstream ecosystems generally depend on sustained changes in catchment management (e.g. in management of urban stormwater). There are two facets to this:
• receiving water bodies are expressions of their catchments, so they stay 'healthy' as long as the catchment performs like a 'healthy' catchment;
• efforts to restore degraded water bodies rely on sustained improvement in the behaviour of catchments; the complication here is that there is usually a lag effect: the catchment needs to perform 'better' for quite some time before the water body becomes demonstrably 'healthier'.

Negotiating Agreements for Integrated Flood Control: Guadalupe River Flood Control Project Collaborative, Santa Clara Valley, California (US)
"This article establishes several lessons about the effective use of facilitated negotiation to resolve flood control related policy disputes. These include: establishing a clear structure and framing a specific, bounded agenda for negotiation which helps set the foundation for specific agreements. The joint scoping, review, and synthesis of technical information (joint fact-finding) is central to reaching consensus on technically complex and uncertain issues. Using a single negotiating text and delegating drafting responsibility to working committees is an effective strategy for completing the written agreement. Establishing several deadlines helps motivate closure in complex negotiations. Creating strategies to deal with implementation is also an essential step."

Principled Negotiation (Urbanwater.info)

Maintaining alignment when outsourcing
This paper is about keeping contractors aligned with the contracting organisation. But many of the principles discussed have application to keeping agencies aligned. The major differentiations derive from the fact that relations between agencies are (generally) far more mutual than those between an organisation and those contracted to it.

Statements of Joint Intent (with supporting audit processes) as a way of formalising alignment between agencies (NSW Healthy Rivers Commission)