Mismatched Scales, Mismatched Intentions: Regional Wastewater Planning on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA

Despite extensive and expensive efforts, water quality degradation continues to plague much of the United States and the world. Such complex environmental problems—where impacts are distributed inequitably and causes are contested—pose significant challenges to developing effective plans and policies. This dissertation explored patterns of spatial reasoning that occurred as stakeholders on Cape Cod, Massachusetts were enlisted to compose a regional wastewater plan in 2013 & 2014 to address a long-standing water pollution problem. Prior plans on the Cape had failed to improve regional water quality because they focused on expensive, one-dimensional technological fixes rather than addressing the complex, social and ecological, cross-scale dynamics driving the production and flow of wastewater effluent. To avoid the future collapse of their aquatic ecosystems, stakeholders and decision-makers on the Cape used a set of shared practices that explicitly addressed the complexity of their problem. This dissertation exposed the anatomy of those cross-scale planning judgments as they occurred during the real-time flux of stakeholder meetings. It showed how and when stakeholders considered cross-scale interactions in order to understand the spatial complexities of the Cape, and how they realigned action, authority, and responsibility to account for that complexity. To do so, twenty-two, four-hour stakeholder workshops, held between September 2013 and May 2014, were observed and video recorded. Discourse from a sample of those meetings was analyzed to show patterns of cross-scale reasoning. Video records were first reviewed to identify shorter interactive conversations, reflective of group deliberations. These conversations were coded for scalar levels in order to distinguish individual strands of talk from the fabric of the fuller conversation and to expose the judgments of the stakeholder groups. Findings from this analysis pointed to several ways that stakeholders engaged in, what this dissertation refers to as, "20,000 Foot Thinking." This shared conceptual practice that blended scales, rather than isolating or attaching to single scales. Consider, by way of contrast, the fifty-foot scale often used in site plans and which crucially ignores external factors like the flow of natural resources. Participants engaging in "20,000 Foot Thinking" often moved between spatial scale levels (e.g. from local to regional) or between different scales (e.g. blending watersheds and towns) as they considered new ways of remediating water pollution. Findings also highlighted the important role played by professional facilitators and planning support systems in prompting pivots between scales, supporting 20,000 Foot thinking when it occurred. The cross-scale judgments allowed the participants on the Cape to bridge the effects of solutions acting at different scalar levels, to identify and reconsider the composition of cooperative organizational networks, and to propose policies that might enable positive action and constrain maladaptive behaviors. What's more, these modes of reasoning afforded participants the capability to coordinate these reforms across administrative levels and institutional layers. This revelatory example illustrated how collaborative governance can be "rescaled" to anticipate the behavior of the system at one scalar level, to coordinate behavior at lower levels (prevent defection), or to influence a change at a higher level (promote a revolution). Learning to think and act in these terms is difficult, and this dissertation highlights how cross-scale reasoning arises in practice in order to show planners how to facilitate these kinds of judgments about complex environmental systems as groups and as individuals.