This book identifies many barriers to achieving the cooperation necessary to solving our water problems and discusses how watershed collaborations are a means to overcoming those barriers. Historical experience and lessons from other watershed collaborations informed the design of New York City’s complex watershed collaboration which is shown to contain the elements of a "green milieu" that can foster sustainable economic development. The particular challenges to the collaboration’s environmental and economic goals created by the watershed’s rural economy, farming and forestry are described. The unusual inclusion of the analysis of the economic aspects and effects of collaboration, of the relationship between collaboration and sustainable development, and of the processes of implementation and conflict make this book especially valuable to those interested in collaboration, regulation, environmental cooperation and conflict, watershed protection, economic development in general, and sustainable economic development in particular.