Nicola Ulibarri

Collaboration in Federal Hydropower Licensing: Impacts on Process, Outputs, and Outcomes

ABSTRACT: This study explores the outcomes of collaboration in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s hydropower licensing process. A survey gauged 270 participants’ opinions of process and outcomes. Process variables included principled engagement, shared motivation, and capacity for joint action. Dependent variables measured perceived impacts on decision-making and participants (process outcomes), the license’s perceived quality, and predicted environmental and economic changes. Linear mixed-effects models tested the influence of process variables on each outcome. Collaboration was associated with all four outcomes, but influenced process outcomes the most and predicted economic outcomes the least. Principled engagement influenced every outcome variable, shared motivation influenced process outcomes, and capacity for joint action influenced license and predicted environmental outcomes. Respondent affiliation and project size also affected perceived outcomes. Results suggest that collaboration influences a range of outputs and outcomes, but that a growing number of non–process factors mediate the relationship for outcomes further from the collaborative process.

Research as Design: Developing Creative Confidence in Doctoral Students through Design Thinking

This paper explores the benefits of design thinking training to enhance doctoral student problemsolving ability, creative confidence, and emotional well-being. Our team adapted the design thinking curriculum taught by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design to the challenges of developing and carrying out original research, and has taught thirteen workshops to over 240 graduate students, research staff, and faculty over two years. Using a design-based research framework, we reflect on our observation of the workshops, student debriefs, and a prepost survey of participants to assess the value of design thinking for doctoral education. We find that participants felt the workshops enhanced creativity, productivity, and confidence, participants appreciated applying the mindsets of a bias toward action and embracing experimentation to their research, participants learned to be mindful of their research process, and participants valued the emotionally supportive, nonjudgmental atmosphere cultivated in the workshops. The research suggests (1) that creative problem solving methods can be adopted by doctoral students and (2) that there is a demand for graduate training to more explicitly treat students’ intellectual needs in tandem with their emotional needs to create happy, productive researchers.

Reflecting, Iterating, and Tolerating Ambiguity: Highlighting the Creative Process of Scientific and Scholarly Research for Doctoral Education

Producing quality original research requires advanced analytic skills, but also the creative intelligence to design a project as well as the ability to handle the inevitably ambiguous research process. This study unveils important aspects of how successful interdisciplinary scholars understand their research process and how they mentor students through research. Using interviews with nine faculty members and qualitative analysis of classroom sessions, the study investigates the mindsets and behaviors that experienced scholars bring to their work. Results suggest that innovative faculty see creativity as central to their research and actively seek to balance the creative and analytical aspects of their work, use an iterative “learning by doing” approach to refining questions and methods, and view setbacks as opportunities for further learning. However, faculty varied in the extent to which they made this messiness and comfort with ambiguity explicit for their students. By uncovering the mindsets that scholars bring to their research, we hope to better support doctoral students in building not just their analytical but also their creative capacity.

Does collaboration affect the duration of environmental permitting processes

While collaborative governance has many benefits for environmental planning and management, those benefits are not politically feasible if they impact on process efficiency. This study assesses collaborations effect on the duration of water permitting processes, specifically the United States’ Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions hydropower relicensing process. Collaboration was measured using a survey of participants in 24 recent hydropower relicensing processes. A Cox proportional hazards model with mixed effects assessed the relationship between collaboration, regulatory framework, hydropower facility characteristics, and relicensing process duration. Collaboration was not associated with time to license. Instead, process duration depended on the regulatory framework (especially the switch to the Integrated Licensing Process and presence of endangered species) and facility characteristics (generating capacity and facility type). The results suggest that agencies should consider engaging collaboratively during planning and permitting, given that collaborations benefits to decision quality do not incur a cost on overall process time.

Frontiers in socio-environmental research: components, connections, scale, and context

The complex and interdisciplinary nature of socio-environmental (SE) problems has led to numerous efforts to develop organizing frameworks to capture the structural and functional elements of SE systems. We evaluate six leading SE frameworks, i.e., human ecosystem framework, resilience, integrated assessment of ecosystem services, vulnerability framework, coupled human-natural systems, and social-ecological systems framework, with the dual goals of (1) investigating the theoretical core of SE systems research emerging across diverse frameworks and (2) highlighting the gaps and research frontiers brought to the fore by a comparative evaluation. The discussion of the emergent theoretical core is centered on four shared structuring elements of SE systems: components, connections, scale, and context. Cross-cutting research frontiers include: moving beyond singular case studies and small-n studies to meta-analytic comparative work on outcomes in related SE systems; combining descriptive and data-driven modeling approaches to SE systems analysis; and promoting the evolution and refinement of frameworks through empirical application and testing, and interframework learning.