Across Oregon, and indeed around the world, we are living at borders not drawn on maps, but between ways of living together, governing ourselves, and relating to shared resources. These cultural boundaries are dynamic, in continuous motion at various speeds, under various pressures, and, most importantly, increasingly contested.
Oregon Kitchen Table’s recent engagement along the Upper Rogue River vividly illustrates these points. For generations, the river has been an integral part of a rural, relatively low population way of life shaped by local knowledge, informal and accepted norms, and a strong ethic of Oregon’s long history of “home rule”, where communities have fairly significant capacity to make decisions by and for their own communities. Oregon’s Kitchen Table project was an exercise in community engagement, a part of collaborative governance, whereby we seek out, listen to, and account for all voices with any stake in the issue.
And that way of life hasn’t disappeared! But now, it is intersecting with something new: the river’s increasing use by people arriving from more urbanized places from across the state, the country, and the world who are often more accustomed to more formal regulation, living with higher populations and population density, and more accustomed to shared-use and regulated experiences. Rivers change and so do the people’s relationship to and with it. As more people rely on the exact same stretch of water for different and sometimes incompatible purposes – from shoreline homes, to fishing, to picnicking, to wading, to swimming, to jet boating, etc. – contention has become less and less the exception and more and more the background condition.
What’s striking is that this isn’t just a story about people, or fish, or rules. It’s about identity, belonging, and whose norms are assumed to “fit” a place. Everyone who uses the river describes loving it and what it has to offer. Many share similar long-term hopes for safety, access, and ecological health. And yet conflict persists not because values are absent, but because multiple value systems are colliding in the same space at the same time.
A remarkably similar dynamic is emerging in a very different setting half-way around the world. Thimphu, the capital of the small Himalayan country of Bhutan, home of the concept of Gross National Happiness has opened itself – carefully, but decisively – to global markets, education systems, and labor mobility, where young professionals find themselves caught between inherited cultural expectations and emerging economic realities. The tension is not framed as rebellion or rejection. Instead, it is experienced as dual internal pressures to honor traditional cultural values while adapting to forces that make the old ways increasingly harder to sustain. The result is not a break with the past, but a strain felt deeply, often privately, and rarely resolved through simple policy fixes.
Oregon and Bhutan are two very different places with two very different cultures. And though at near opposite points of the globe, what links these two contexts are that both have a strong history of collaborative problem solving and both are right now facing similar patterns of living with cultural borders in motion. In both cases, people are navigating overlapping systems of meaning and authority without a new and expanded shared model for how decisions should be made.
For Oregon, this is precisely where our legacy of collaborative governance becomes ever more essential – not as a feel-good add-on, but as a core part of Oregon’s civic infrastructure. When cultural borders of these kinds are stable, social norms do a lot of what was often invisible work. But when these borders are shifting, norms alone are no longer enough. Collaborative governance creates structured spaces where competing values can be identified, tested, and negotiated without requiring winners and losers – because we all win together. It allows communities to move from unmanaged pressures, tensions, and stresses to shared problem-solving with effective, sustainable solutions.
As population pressures increase, and shared resources like rivers, land, housing, healthcare, education, and cultural identity itself become more constrained, these cultural border-contentions will inevitably become increasingly common. The question is no longer whether they will happen, but whether we will together build the capacity to govern them peacefully, effectively, and at costs much lower than litigation and contention. Collaborative governance is how we do this work, together.
Interested in learning more about our programs or collaborative governance? Reach out to our team at npccdesk@pdx.edu.