Integrated watershed revitalization: the experience of the Mersey Basin Campaign

The collaborative partnership approach has been used extensively in the practice of integrated river basin management across the world for at least the last two decades. This is despite the fact that there has been widespread acknowledgement that partnership working has operational difficulties, especially in the face of political inequality in a real-life context. This paper draws on the results of a research project investigating a concrete example of collaborative partnerships, the Mersey Basin Campaign, a government-sponsored 25-year initiative that aimed to improve water quality and the waterside environments of the Mersey River Basin. This research explores how the Campaign came to be formed, how it was organized and how partnership projects were implemented. The mechanism of the partnership service delivery is developed under three headings: consensus building, facilitation and open participation. The analysis of the results shows that governance and leadership partnership arrangements, which have evolved over time to reflect changing political and institutional environments, are critical for the implementation of watershed partnerships. The results from revisiting the practice of the Mersey Basin Campaign should be of assistance to planners to improve governance of watershed partnerships.