Steve Yaffee

Steve is professor of natural resources and environmental policy at the University of Michigan. He also directs the university’s Ecosystem Management Initiative— a research, teaching, and outreach center focused on large-scale conservation and sustainable management of natural resources. He has worked for more than 30 years on federal endangered species, public lands, and ecosystem management policy, with work spanning marine, terrestrial, and freshwater resources. His recent work focuses on multi-party, collaborative decision-making as a necessary element of an adaptive ecosystem approach. Steve is the author of five books including Making Collaboration Work and Marine Ecosystem Based Management in Practice, books co-authored with Julia Wondolleck. Steve is working on a new book entitled Public Process, Private Dollars: The Unlikely Story of California’s Marine Protected Areas, a book that explores the evolution and dynamics of the science-intensive, collaborative decision-making processes used to establish a marine reserve network in California. He has facilitated collaborative processes across North America and assisted a set of philanthropic foundations with ways to evaluate and measure their success.

Steve received his doctorate in environmental policy and planning from MIT and has been a faculty member at Harvard University and a senior fellow at World Wildlife Fund.