Tomas M Koontz
Biographic Data
| ID | 1574107 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tomas M Koontz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tomas M |
| FAMILY NAME | Koontz |
| SIGNATURE | KOONTZ T M |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3607-6272 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 579 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 37 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Scientific Knowledge Brokering in Collaborative Environmental Partnerships
Navigating the Science-Collaboration Interface for Watershed Management in Aotearoa, New Zealand
Collaborative partnerships around the world address environmental challenges from a local perspective. At the same time, many of these efforts are based on scientific information. Local and scientific information are not always compatible, and numerous challenges arise at the science-policy interface in collaboration. This study identifies key factors affecting the science-policy interface, including credibility, salience, legitimacy, and communi…
Voicing environmental justice
Dilemmas of public goods provisioning
Institutions are critical for collective action around several environmental policy issues. A seldom-studied issue, agricultural drainage, provides a rich setting to examine how institutional mechanisms interact with two variables linked to collective action: group size and heterogeneity. In this study, we examine institutions for establishing and maintaining agricultural drainage systems in the Western Lake Erie Basin region of Ohio. Specificall…
Locating Power in Ostrom’s Design Principles
Ostrom’s design principles are considered to characterize robust institutions for managing common-pool resources. However, the design principles can conceal and perpetuate power asymmetries to limit socially just outcomes, even while improving environmental outcomes. This study integrates theories on power with Ostrom’s design principles to examine power dynamics in watershed management groups in India and the United States through case study met…
A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Government Influence on Collaborative Watershed Institutions in Ohio (USA) and the Dominican Republic and Implications for Decentralization of Resource Management
Collaborative watershed institutions (CWIs) have been promoted as effective vehicles for facilitating decentralization and collaboration between government and local stakeholders in both developed and less developed nations. While governmental actors may see CWIs as a means to increase stakeholder participation, they may also use a variety of mechanisms to influence these institutions to advance agency policies. This article describes the authors…
Systematic learning in water governance
Kochskämper, E., T. M. Koontz, and J. Newig. 2021. Systematic learning in water governance: insights from five local adaptive management projects for water quality innovation. Ecology and Society 26(1):22. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12080-260122
Deciding How to Decide
The growing field of collaborative governance has long sought to explain processes of collective decision making. Insights from institutional analysis highlight the influence of rules in shaping collective decisions. Yet, less is known about how such rules are created; in other words, how collaborative organizations decide how to decide. By drawing on concepts from Cultural Theory, we examine the connections between worldviews and decision rules …
The Science–Policy Nexus in Collaborative Governance
Across many social–ecological systems, policy makers and scholars increasingly call for science to inform policy. The science–policy interface becomes especially complex as collaborative approaches include multiple stakeholders working together across jurisdictions. Unfortunately little is known about how much and how science is used in collaborative governance for social–ecological systems. This exploratory study examines instrumental, conceptua…
Assessing Collaborative Conservation
Much existing research on collaborative conservation has focused on process, even as researchers have called for greater attention to explaining what results these processes yield. It is time to take stock of collaborative conservation research by mapping what kinds of variables researchers are including in analyses. Here we conduct a case survey from the SCAPE database of environmental decision-making cases. We include cases involving collaborat…
Resource asymmetry and property rights in agricultural drainage systems
Scholarly work on examining how property rights affect incentives for collective action in common-pool resource management has benefited immensely from the property-rights analytical scheme proposed in the seminal work of Schlager & Ostrom (1992). Here we apply this scheme to agricultural drainage systems, conceptualizing them as a common-pool resource held in a private property ownership regime and exhibiting asymmetric dilemmas. We propose a pr…
The muting and unmuting of caste across inter-linked action arenas
Governing the commons in the face of socio-cultural heterogeneity is a challenge for academicians and practitioners alike. Some studies find that socio-cultural heterogeneity has negative, positive, or a non-linear relationship with collective action. Another set of studies find that institutions can mediate the effects of heterogeneity that influence collective action for improving natural resource conditions. We build on the second set of studi…
Use of science in collaborative environmental management
Working together? Synergies in government and NGO roles for community forestry in the Indian Himalayas
Adaptive institutions in social-ecological systems governance
Cross-level information and influence in mandated participatory planning
From Planning to Implementation
Collaborative approaches are increasingly used to address challenging environmental problems in theUnitedStates and around the world. The inclusion of multiple stakeholders and sources of information is expected to solve such problems. Prior research has highlighted the importance of collaborative process characteristics in reaching agreements and building social capital, but less is known about what factors affect the implementation of such agre…
Multi-level governance, policy implementation and participation
Innovations in European Union (EU) policy making have produced a distinctive, novel mode of policy that combines components of participatory and multi-level governance for policy implementation. In this manuscript we provide a conceptualization of what we term the EU's 'mandated participatory planning' (MPP) approach. This approach is increasingly used to implement EU directives, mandating the explicit formulation of certain plans or programmes o…
Does Collaboration Promote Grass-Roots Behavior Change? Farmer Adoption of Best Management Practices in Two Watersheds
Collaborative watershed management has been prescribed as a means to foster environmental behavior change among resource users. Yet little empirical research has examined this claim. This study compares the adoption of agricultural best management practices between collaborative and noncollaborative settings. Using survey and interview data, we compare farmers in two watersheds: one with a grass-roots collaborative partnership and one without. In…
Policy-Level Collaboratives for Environmental Management at the Regional Scale
Collaborative approaches to natural resource management are playing a key role in addressing complex environmental problems. Much of what is known about collaborative groups is drawn from those working on local, action-level activities. Yet there have also been collaborative groups established to address large regions and policy-level conflicts. Little is known about how policy-level collaboratives differ from the action-level efforts that domina…
Shifting Winds
States have increasingly taken leading roles in U.S. environmental policymaking over the past two decades. As laboratories of democracy, states have developed different levels and mixes of policies to address climate change, nonpoint source pollution, alternative energy, and other challenging environmental issues. Policy scholars have sought to explain variation in state environmental policy through two primary theoretical lenses: internal determ…
Rules for Collaboration
This study employs the Institutional Analysis and Development framework across three collaborative watershed partnerships with differing membership profiles (government centered, citizen centered, or mixed) to determine how rules at varying levels of action (operational rules, collective‐choice rules, and constitutional rules) affect the formation and implementation of rules‐in‐use at different levels. Examining trends across group types at varyi…
Stumbling Forward
This article examines the challenges of collaborative approaches to ecosystem management associated with the formation and maintenance of new institutions. Individuals who lead collaborative watershed partnerships must grapple not only with complex environmental issues, but also the more mundane—but no less critical—challenges associated with building and sustaining a new organization. The authors focus on the nexus of organizational development …
Federal and State Public Forest Administration in the New Millennium
Herbert Kaufman’s 1960 investigation of federal forest rangers provided important insights into administrative discretion, agency culture, and natural resource policy making. Subsequent studies of Forest Service administration have documented that agency’s change over time, mirroring broad changes in federal public administration. But little is known about state forest administration. This article describes results from a survey of line officers …
Nonprofit Organizations in Environmental Management
Across a range of issue areas, governments are increasingly collaborating with nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to achieve policy goals. In the environmental arena, growing concerns over nonpoint source pollution1 have led governments to work through NPOs rather than rely on traditional regulatory approaches. But past studies suggest that government assistance to NPOs can diminish their autonomy, flexibility, and responsiveness—the very qualities t…
From Planning to Implementation
Collaborative approaches are increasingly used to address challenging environmental problems in theUnitedStates and around the world. The inclusion of multiple stakeholders and sources of information is expected to solve such problems. Prior research has highlighted the importance of collaborative process characteristics in reaching agreements and building social capital, but less is known about what factors affect the implementation of such agre…
Multi-level governance, policy implementation and participation
Innovations in European Union (EU) policy making have produced a distinctive, novel mode of policy that combines components of participatory and multi-level governance for policy implementation. In this manuscript we provide a conceptualization of what we term the EU's 'mandated participatory planning' (MPP) approach. This approach is increasingly used to implement EU directives, mandating the explicit formulation of certain plans or programmes o…
One size does not fit all
We Finished the Plan, So Now What? Impacts of Collaborative Stakeholder Participation on Land Use Policy
There is a growing movement toward collaborative stakeholder participation in environmental policy. Rather than calling for a reliance on government officials to solve environmental problems, this approach calls for empowering a community of stakeholders to contribute meaningfully. Scholars examining citizen participation have investigated the performance of such efforts. This study examines one important aspect of performance, the impact of stak…
Research Note A Typology of Collaborative Watershed Groups
Collaborative resource management partnerships have proliferated across the United States in recent years. These partnerships are extremely diverse, varying by region and exhibiting a wide range of structures and functions. While numerous studies have emphasized the uniqueness of each collaborative partnership, theory building to date has been minimal. In this note we take a step in that direction by developing a typology of collaborative groups …
Shifting Winds
States have increasingly taken leading roles in U.S. environmental policymaking over the past two decades. As laboratories of democracy, states have developed different levels and mixes of policies to address climate change, nonpoint source pollution, alternative energy, and other challenging environmental issues. Policy scholars have sought to explain variation in state environmental policy through two primary theoretical lenses: internal determ…
Rules for Collaboration
This study employs the Institutional Analysis and Development framework across three collaborative watershed partnerships with differing membership profiles (government centered, citizen centered, or mixed) to determine how rules at varying levels of action (operational rules, collective‐choice rules, and constitutional rules) affect the formation and implementation of rules‐in‐use at different levels. Examining trends across group types at varyi…
Adaptive institutions in social-ecological systems governance
Nonprofit Organizations in Environmental Management
Across a range of issue areas, governments are increasingly collaborating with nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to achieve policy goals. In the environmental arena, growing concerns over nonpoint source pollution1 have led governments to work through NPOs rather than rely on traditional regulatory approaches. But past studies suggest that government assistance to NPOs can diminish their autonomy, flexibility, and responsiveness—the very qualities t…
Administrators and Citizens
This study examines a basic question: In a federal system such as the United States, do officials at lower levels of governance foster and incorporate citizen input in policy making more than do officials at higher levels? Long-standing efforts to bring the government closer to the people have included calls for devolution of policy responsibility from national to state governments. But the claim that such devolution would lead to greater partici…
Assessing Collaborative Conservation
Much existing research on collaborative conservation has focused on process, even as researchers have called for greater attention to explaining what results these processes yield. It is time to take stock of collaborative conservation research by mapping what kinds of variables researchers are including in analyses. Here we conduct a case survey from the SCAPE database of environmental decision-making cases. We include cases involving collaborat…
Policy-Level Collaboratives for Environmental Management at the Regional Scale
Collaborative approaches to natural resource management are playing a key role in addressing complex environmental problems. Much of what is known about collaborative groups is drawn from those working on local, action-level activities. Yet there have also been collaborative groups established to address large regions and policy-level conflicts. Little is known about how policy-level collaboratives differ from the action-level efforts that domina…
Federal and State Public Forest Administration in the New Millennium
Herbert Kaufman’s 1960 investigation of federal forest rangers provided important insights into administrative discretion, agency culture, and natural resource policy making. Subsequent studies of Forest Service administration have documented that agency’s change over time, mirroring broad changes in federal public administration. But little is known about state forest administration. This article describes results from a survey of line officers …
Working together? Synergies in government and NGO roles for community forestry in the Indian Himalayas
Use of science in collaborative environmental management
Does Collaboration Promote Grass-Roots Behavior Change? Farmer Adoption of Best Management Practices in Two Watersheds
Collaborative watershed management has been prescribed as a means to foster environmental behavior change among resource users. Yet little empirical research has examined this claim. This study compares the adoption of agricultural best management practices between collaborative and noncollaborative settings. Using survey and interview data, we compare farmers in two watersheds: one with a grass-roots collaborative partnership and one without. In…
Stumbling Forward
This article examines the challenges of collaborative approaches to ecosystem management associated with the formation and maintenance of new institutions. Individuals who lead collaborative watershed partnerships must grapple not only with complex environmental issues, but also the more mundane—but no less critical—challenges associated with building and sustaining a new organization. The authors focus on the nexus of organizational development …
Money Talks?But to Whom? Financial Versus Nonmonetary Motivations in Land Use Decisions
Land use patterns have important environmental and social consequences. With a majority of U.S. land privately owned, understanding land use requires learning about land owners and how they make decisions. Land use research spans multiple social science disciplines, but past efforts have emphasized parcel owners who rely on their land for economic livelihood, focusing on financial motivations, or else policy tools relying on economic incentives t…
When "Community" Is Not Enough
Collaboration, information, and preservation
Citizen participation
This study examines citizen participation in agency policy making across levels of governance in the United States, to address the following questions: Do citizens pursuing economic policy goals participate and wield influence in agency policy making differently than do citizens pursuing noneconomic policy goals? Does citizen participation in state policy making differ from that in national policy making? Analysis of policy making and participati…
Locating Power in Ostrom’s Design Principles
Ostrom’s design principles are considered to characterize robust institutions for managing common-pool resources. However, the design principles can conceal and perpetuate power asymmetries to limit socially just outcomes, even while improving environmental outcomes. This study integrates theories on power with Ostrom’s design principles to examine power dynamics in watershed management groups in India and the United States through case study met…
Cross-level information and influence in mandated participatory planning
Public hearings for EIAs in post-communist Bulgaria
Money Talks—But to Whom? Financial Versus Nonmonetary Motivations in Land Use Decisions
Differences Between State and Federal Public Forest Management
In United States federalism, public policy responsibilities belong to multiple jurisdictions. This article compares state with federal public forest management. Data come from four cases, each comprising two forests sharing similar physical characteristics but under the authority of different governments. Systematic comparisons suggest that officials in the national forest agency face greater statutory, regulatory, and planning constraints than d…
When "Community" Is Not Enough
Citizen participation
This study examines citizen participation in agency policy making across levels of governance in the United States, to address the following questions: Do citizens pursuing economic policy goals participate and wield influence in agency policy making differently than do citizens pursuing noneconomic policy goals? Does citizen participation in state policy making differ from that in national policy making? Analysis of policy making and participati…
Administrators and Citizens
This study examines a basic question: In a federal system such as the United States, do officials at lower levels of governance foster and incorporate citizen input in policy making more than do officials at higher levels? Long-standing efforts to bring the government closer to the people have included calls for devolution of policy responsibility from national to state governments. But the claim that such devolution would lead to greater partici…
Money Talks?But to Whom? Financial Versus Nonmonetary Motivations in Land Use Decisions
Land use patterns have important environmental and social consequences. With a majority of U.S. land privately owned, understanding land use requires learning about land owners and how they make decisions. Land use research spans multiple social science disciplines, but past efforts have emphasized parcel owners who rely on their land for economic livelihood, focusing on financial motivations, or else policy tools relying on economic incentives t…
Money Talks—But to Whom? Financial Versus Nonmonetary Motivations in Land Use Decisions
Research Note A Typology of Collaborative Watershed Groups
Collaborative resource management partnerships have proliferated across the United States in recent years. These partnerships are extremely diverse, varying by region and exhibiting a wide range of structures and functions. While numerous studies have emphasized the uniqueness of each collaborative partnership, theory building to date has been minimal. In this note we take a step in that direction by developing a typology of collaborative groups …
Collaboration, information, and preservation
Public hearings for EIAs in post-communist Bulgaria
One size does not fit all
We Finished the Plan, So Now What? Impacts of Collaborative Stakeholder Participation on Land Use Policy
There is a growing movement toward collaborative stakeholder participation in environmental policy. Rather than calling for a reliance on government officials to solve environmental problems, this approach calls for empowering a community of stakeholders to contribute meaningfully. Scholars examining citizen participation have investigated the performance of such efforts. This study examines one important aspect of performance, the impact of stak…
What Do We Know and Need to Know about the Environmental Outcomes of Collaborative Management
Many tout the benefits of collaborative environmental management as an alternative to centralized planning and command and control regulation, but the excitement over collaborative processes has not been matched by evidence that these processes actually improve the environment. The most crucial question in collaborative environmental management remains unanswered and often unasked: To what extent does collaboration lead to improved environmental …
Stumbling Forward
This article examines the challenges of collaborative approaches to ecosystem management associated with the formation and maintenance of new institutions. Individuals who lead collaborative watershed partnerships must grapple not only with complex environmental issues, but also the more mundane—but no less critical—challenges associated with building and sustaining a new organization. The authors focus on the nexus of organizational development …
Federal and State Public Forest Administration in the New Millennium
Herbert Kaufman’s 1960 investigation of federal forest rangers provided important insights into administrative discretion, agency culture, and natural resource policy making. Subsequent studies of Forest Service administration have documented that agency’s change over time, mirroring broad changes in federal public administration. But little is known about state forest administration. This article describes results from a survey of line officers …
Nonprofit Organizations in Environmental Management
Across a range of issue areas, governments are increasingly collaborating with nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to achieve policy goals. In the environmental arena, growing concerns over nonpoint source pollution1 have led governments to work through NPOs rather than rely on traditional regulatory approaches. But past studies suggest that government assistance to NPOs can diminish their autonomy, flexibility, and responsiveness—the very qualities t…
Rules for Collaboration
This study employs the Institutional Analysis and Development framework across three collaborative watershed partnerships with differing membership profiles (government centered, citizen centered, or mixed) to determine how rules at varying levels of action (operational rules, collective‐choice rules, and constitutional rules) affect the formation and implementation of rules‐in‐use at different levels. Examining trends across group types at varyi…
Shifting Winds
States have increasingly taken leading roles in U.S. environmental policymaking over the past two decades. As laboratories of democracy, states have developed different levels and mixes of policies to address climate change, nonpoint source pollution, alternative energy, and other challenging environmental issues. Policy scholars have sought to explain variation in state environmental policy through two primary theoretical lenses: internal determ…
Does Collaboration Promote Grass-Roots Behavior Change? Farmer Adoption of Best Management Practices in Two Watersheds
Collaborative watershed management has been prescribed as a means to foster environmental behavior change among resource users. Yet little empirical research has examined this claim. This study compares the adoption of agricultural best management practices between collaborative and noncollaborative settings. Using survey and interview data, we compare farmers in two watersheds: one with a grass-roots collaborative partnership and one without. In…
Policy-Level Collaboratives for Environmental Management at the Regional Scale
Collaborative approaches to natural resource management are playing a key role in addressing complex environmental problems. Much of what is known about collaborative groups is drawn from those working on local, action-level activities. Yet there have also been collaborative groups established to address large regions and policy-level conflicts. Little is known about how policy-level collaboratives differ from the action-level efforts that domina…
Cross-level information and influence in mandated participatory planning
From Planning to Implementation
Collaborative approaches are increasingly used to address challenging environmental problems in theUnitedStates and around the world. The inclusion of multiple stakeholders and sources of information is expected to solve such problems. Prior research has highlighted the importance of collaborative process characteristics in reaching agreements and building social capital, but less is known about what factors affect the implementation of such agre…
Multi-level governance, policy implementation and participation
Innovations in European Union (EU) policy making have produced a distinctive, novel mode of policy that combines components of participatory and multi-level governance for policy implementation. In this manuscript we provide a conceptualization of what we term the EU's 'mandated participatory planning' (MPP) approach. This approach is increasingly used to implement EU directives, mandating the explicit formulation of certain plans or programmes o…
Adaptive institutions in social-ecological systems governance
Resource asymmetry and property rights in agricultural drainage systems
Scholarly work on examining how property rights affect incentives for collective action in common-pool resource management has benefited immensely from the property-rights analytical scheme proposed in the seminal work of Schlager & Ostrom (1992). Here we apply this scheme to agricultural drainage systems, conceptualizing them as a common-pool resource held in a private property ownership regime and exhibiting asymmetric dilemmas. We propose a pr…
The muting and unmuting of caste across inter-linked action arenas
Governing the commons in the face of socio-cultural heterogeneity is a challenge for academicians and practitioners alike. Some studies find that socio-cultural heterogeneity has negative, positive, or a non-linear relationship with collective action. Another set of studies find that institutions can mediate the effects of heterogeneity that influence collective action for improving natural resource conditions. We build on the second set of studi…
Economics (29 works) · Political science (29 works) · Business (27 works) · Environmental resource management (19 works) · Geography (19 works) · Public relations (19 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (16 works) · Public Administration (16 works)