The importance of collaboration
In my work as a service designer for large organisations (including government), lack of collaboration between departments is the most cited reason for an inability to reach an organisation’s goals. Over the years I’ve developed a better understanding of the impact of silos, as well as a number of ways to combat the problems inherent with siloed behaviour.
One such tool is to increase the ability of people to communicate effectively across the silos. You see, it’s not the silos that are the problem, it’s the lack of communication between them.
Silos help us in a number of ways, none-the-least to help us develop a core expertise and support one another in a community of practice. But problems that big organisations face today are often complex, systemic, and adaptive—meaning that we need to work together to solve them. Hence the need to work with other departments, experts, and therefore you need to be able to communicate with them.
In the readings for our Group project it appears that a lack of collaboration across government jurisdictions can have a massive impact on the ability to implement green infrastructure such as water sensitive urban design. Water by its very nature flows across jurisdictions—and therefore requires even greater collaboration.
We are comparing Vancouver and the City of Blacktown in Sydney. The governance of both cities could be characterised as fragmented, with multiple agencies and authorities taking responsibility for a diverse set of management, monitoring, operating, and regulating activities (Bakker, Cook, 2011; Floyd et al., 2014).
In Vancouver, water catchment is managed by Metro Vancouver. Supply of drinking water and management of stormwater is managed by the City of Vancouver (source). In Sydney, raw water is supplied by WaterNSW and filtered at plants operated by Sydney Water (for the most part) and then supplied to local councils who provide residents with drinking water and manage stormwater (source).
In Sydney, water policy and regulation is managed by a variety of state government actors including the NSW Office of Water, the NSW Office of Environment, the Environmental Protection Authority, and the NSW Department of Industry (source). Recently, the Greater Sydney Commission (GSC) has arrived as a coordinating authority, much to the relief of some non-government actors such as the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities (SOURCE).
In Canada, there are some 20 federal departments with policy and regulatory oversight for water (Bakker, Cook, 2011. p. 280). Within each province, the management of water as a resource is the responsibility of multiple ministries — each with a slightly different mandate (eg biodiversity, flood management).
According to Bakker, federal management of water in Canada has been relatively lax — with calls to “renew the role of Canada’s federal government in water governance” (p284). With the recent large-scale fish kills in the Murray-Darling Basin, a discussion of the skill in Australia’s federal government’s management of water resources is probably unnecessary.
