I am wondering a few things right now:
How exactly is this done? Do we have the models regularly available and are they (somewhat) easily replicated across the country? The TED presenter seemed to suggest his models can handle the scale at which water pollution proliferates today. OK. Great. Give me some more information, unless you are going to fix the Red Cedar River Basin for me (which I doubt was your plan). More than likely, there are a lot of other factors regarding ecosystem services and technology that he either doesn't know about or doesn't want to acknowledge for some reason.
So now I wonder how to take his inspirational ideas and use them in the Red Cedar Basin. If he is honest about really wanting to clean up the whole country's freshwater, then can he please share with the rest of the class? But, more importantly, I want to see his models so I can try to figure out what he is not acknowledging (or doesn't know) to not only implement it in the Red Cedar Basin but throughout the Midwest (or, dare I dream, the world) effectively.
Or is this another problem with civil society- sharing? NGOs constantly have to worry about bringing in enough funds to keep the doors open, which means they are always in competition with other NGOs for donors. Are there any economic models that would identify incentives to allow NGOs to work well with one another? Or is that not really a problem? If not, then why can't I find out enough details from The Freshwater Trust's website? Who are they "collaborating" with, and by what strategy is that occurring?
Don't get me wrong, I am in love with The Freshwater Trust. They represent some of the best of what we can see coming from civil society. I am just asking some additional questions to help me find ways to love the organization more. Maybe we have a nice case study for an interdisciplinary social science analysis? Takers?
Sounds like a classic game theory problem Nels. There are lots of models to address this, but long story short, they either need to find a way to align donor incentives or specialize in complementary areas.
ReplyDeleteSome potential ideas: if you had one NGO with strong support among one group of donors and weak support among another group and they could find a "sister NGO" with the opposite support groups they might do well by essentially bundling donations and marketing themselves that way so that you committed to split funding and had no incentive to compete. Another option would be to have, say, a "freshwater trust" partner with a "saltwater trust" to address an issue such as the dead zone in the gulf so that they could specialize in complementary areas of expertise and share relevant tasks while not competing for the same "turf".
There is a documentary out that I've been wanting to see called "Pink Ribbons, Inc" that I think essentially addresses this very issue among different Breast Cancer organizations. Maybe we can have a dept film series night and explore this issue.