Civic Infrastructure: Building the Capacity for Effective Collaborative Environmental Problem-Solving
Presented by: Drew O’Connor, National Civic League; Chris Paterson, Green Mountain Institute for Environmental Democracy; and Steve Jarvela and David Polish, U.S. EPA Region 3

This session will attempt to answer two key questions: how can the processes of developing and using community indicators be designed and conducted so that they build the civic capacity or “civic infrastructure” of a community? and what is the relationship between the health of a community’s civic infrastructure and its ability to engage effectively in collaborative environmental problem-solving? Over the past decade more and more communities are seeking to develop and use indicators. These have become a core tool for hundreds of community-improvement processes across the U.S. Through its work with hundreds of communities, the National Civic League has identified 12 components of community civic infrastructure—the formal and informal processes and networks through which communities make decisions and attempt to solve problems. A healthy civic infrastructure enables a community to more effectively engage in public dialogue and collaborative problem-solving, in turn building the capacity for better self-management.
Workshop facilitators will provide participants with an introduction to the Civic Index—a tool for better understanding and assessing community civic infrastructure—and give examples of how the Index has been used by various communities. Following a brief presentation, participants will work in smaller groups with specific components of the Civic Index as they design a process for developing community indicators for a specific environmental issue. In the group’s collective review of the proposed designs, the discussion will focus on how processes for engaging community members can enhance or hinder the development of civic infrastructure and how these processes affect whether the indicators will be used effectively by community members for collaborative dialogue and action. The session will close with a discussion of how the Civic Index and the principles of civic infrastructure can be integrated into the design and implementation of other environmental assessment and planning tools and the tools environmental management practitioners can use to assess civic health and capacity for collaborative environmental problem-solving.