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. Technical Clarity in Inter-Agency Negotiations: Lessons From Four Hydropower Projects willing to engage in the work of defining the technical issues. In the absence of this willingness, it is not dif- ficult to imagine frustrating and fruitless negotiations leading to a series of studies that fail to provide the necessary information. This was the case in the Ashton-St. Anthony consultations, where studies of Ashton Reservoir were conducted without prior agree- ment on a precise definition of the problem and fish passage studies were conducted in the face of dis- agreement over proper methods. As a result, resource agencies and the applicant had different expectations and never agreed on study results. Maintaining Technical Clarity When Issues Change A natural progression of these consultations was that as the effects of the proposed project become clearer, the technical issues changed. This was exem- plified in Koma Kulshan. As the project design emerged, the effects of the project became more tangi- ble. Participants believed that these changes were a natural and inevitable function of increased infonna- tion. However, changing the scope of the technical issues is not always so readily accommodated. In Cataract, new issues were introduced as project impacts became more apparent. Up to a point, this created no intractable problems, but when the state opened the issue of requiring the utility to provide flows for waste assimilation, the consultations broke down. The utili- ty did not argue that the technical issue was invalid, only that it was not properly addressed within the FERC consultation process. Moreover, the utility viewed the state's action as an unfair attempt to introduce a new issue at the eleventh hour and to bypass the negotiation process. Interestingly, the applicant pointed to this episode as one that dramati- cally decreased the level of technical clarity, while the state resource agency representative stated that it greatly enhanced technical clarity. Other issues in the Cataract project were raised and then dropped during the process. For example, discussions of comprehensive river planning were dis- continued because the applicant had recently had an unsuccessful experience with a comprehensive plan in another river system. Because the issue had not been resolved and was dropped without consensus, some participants believed that the negotiation was a fail- ure because it did not resolve a key issue. The key to maintaining technical clarity when the issues change is to share information and reach consensus about adding or deleting issues from the negotiation. Describing a Problem Versus Crafting a Solution A common pattern was that parties reached agree- ment on problem definition and accepted most new technical issues as they arose. Mter agreeing on these issues, however,it often became problematic to define appropriate studies. If studies were defined, interpre- tation of study results - and making decisions about what actions to take based on those interpretations - sometimes led to lengthy disagreements. Even in Koma Kulshan, general agreement on the scope of the technical issues did not translate into easy agree- ments on how to study the problems. Although they agreed on the need to conduct a study of the fishery, resource agencies and applicants disagreed on methodologies and target species. Negotiators in the Oswegatchie license consulta- tions agreed that the consultations were single-issue, focusing on flows in bypass and downstream reaches, but agreement was not achieved for flows in each of these stretches. Participants speculated that lack of agreement on appropriate study design, the inability to reach consensus on study interpretations, and dif- fering goals all contributed to the lack of success in defining technical issues and, ultimately, in reaching a satisfactory agreement. During the Cataract consultations, all parties agreed to study fish passage. Respondents verified that this was broadly accepted as a legitimate techni- cal issue. They then went on to describe the difficulty of making decisions about how to provide fish passage and how to monitor the results. During the Ashton- St.Anthony negotiations, resource agencies and the applicant bitterly disagreed about whether fish pas- sage was an issue. The applicant contested resource agency studies that indicated the need for fish pas- sage. Once fish passage was made possible by remov- ing boards from the diversion dam, the resource agencies questioned the validity of the technique cho- sen by the applicant to study the effectiveness of the solution. The Ashton Reservoir study was another example of a study conducted without clear understanding of how the results would be applied. The applicant con- sidered the study an avenue for evaluating the poten- tial for a cutthroat trout fishery, while the resource agencies viewed it as an opportunity for detennining which fish species might do well in the reservoir. When asked what factors stood in the way of reaching an agreement, one resource agency representative commented: I think lack of consensus on what the informa- tion said. Doubt on [the utilities'] part that this data was representative of what was going on 195 WATER RESOURCES BULLETIN