RMC Origins: A Conversation

In Summer 2020, RMC co-founders Julie Wormser and Carri Hulet

sat down with Carolyn Meklenburg, Nina Mascarenhas, and Katie Swan for a conversation about the first two years of the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. Carolyn and Nina had done their masters theses on the RMC at Tufts University and MIT, respectively. Katie, a current masters degree student at Tufts, moderated.

What have you found in your research that allows the RMC to function as an informal regional governance body?

Carolyn: Collaboratives can fill a regulatory gap to address issues that cross municipal boundaries—particularly in a state like Massachusetts that has weak county and regional governments. When I first started researching for my thesis, I was trying to find other initiatives similar to the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. Who else is taking a watershed-based, collaborative approach to climate change adaptation with municipalities at the helm? Where are they? What are the differences? And I found out that it really was a very unique model across Massachusetts and even the country.

Nina: Climate adaptation is a wide-ranging problem. The RMC brings together a combination of state and non-state actors with a certain process which is uniquely suited to the nature of this problem. It is informal and voluntary, yet focused on on-the-ground projects with municipal staff who know their communities very well. So it’s able to build capacity and relationships in ways that a formal, public agency operating at a larger scale might not be able to do.

“Pre-existing relationships among RMC members made such a difference, as well as the ways in which the facilitators demonstrated that members could trust them with their time were really important.”

How will the COVID pandemic impact climate preparedness work?

Carolyn: There are larger questions about the availability of grant funding.  Five years or so down the road, what kind of funding will there be across public and private sectors with the economic challenges we're facing?

Julie: COVID has also laid bare the haves and have nots in a way that I don't think a lot of our municipal engineering, conservation, and planning colleagues may have recognized of as their jobs before.

Carri: The RMC really started thinking about social vulnerability from the very beginning, before COVID changed the world dramatically. What COVID has done is given fuel to the fire that they already had. It was just a small fire, but it was already burning.

“Climate adaptation is a wide-ranging problem. The RMC brings together a combination of state and non-state actors with a certain process which is uniquely suited to the nature of this problem.”

What would happen if the RMC stopped receiving funding?

Carri: What is challenging is that Julie and I (and MyRWA in particular), serve as glue between all of these municipalities. We provide resources to them to be able to work effectively together.  Without that funding, the glue is missing.

Julie: Climate resilience is long term emergency response. My hope is that that in 10 years the RMC is absorbed into a new state agency. That's my dream—to institutionalize it with a dedicated source of funding.

Carolyn: I do think there has been a lasting impact of just bringing these folks together and building relationships.  I could imagine that if the RMC didn't exist anymore, municipal staff would still reach out to their colleagues in the watershed because of the trust fostered between them, and the possibilities offered by this kind of collaboration that the RMC has already shown them.

Julie: Public agencies like the Mass Water Resources Authority have the ability to raise funds and bond and do big engineering projects.  That's the piece that we're missing.  We instead have to write grant proposals and that delays everything.  We have to have resources in hand in order to be nimble—especially to be able to fix stuff after a storm.

Nina: The RMC members I’ve spoken to all find benefits to participating in this collaborative for reasons over and above climate resilience - it gives them a forum to communicate and work with their peers from other municipalities that doesn’t otherwise exist. As long as it provides this unique value, the RMC is likely to continue being funded.

“Climate resilience is long term emergency response. My hope is that that in 10 years the RMC is absorbed into a new state agency. That's my dream—to institutionalize it with a dedicated source of funding.”

Was there anything surprising or an interesting outcome that you have found in your research?

Carolyn: Because I was looking at the RMC in such early stages, I was thinking a lot about the process of collaborating itself.  The pre-existing relationships among the members made such a difference; many of them already knew each other from other regional initiatives.  Putting the same model in the hands of another group of people might not have turned out the same.  This baseline of trust between some of the core members as well as the ways in which the facilitators demonstrated that members could trust them with their time were really important.

Nina: What is unusual is that RMC members don’t have a lot of conflict or disagreement.  This might be because of a common understanding of climate risks which stems from having their MVP climate vulnerability assessments conducted by the same group of consultants. Another reason could be that projects haven’t yet arrived at the stage where municipalities have had to put in their own capital.

Carri: We’ve [RMC] been running a consensus-based model from day one with this group, which means that all ideas are on the table, and municipal members are here to find consensus.  Members are provided space to put their ideas on the table, with facilitated discussions to consider those ideas. The question we keep in mind is “what can we accomplish together?”

Julie: Recognizing that climate change is affecting everyone’s work and that we don’t actually know enough was a key motivator to work together. It was a recognition that we're going to be better off working with our colleagues--not just on RMC projects, but also in a broader information exchange around best practices happening at the municipal level.