The Northwest Environmental Defense Center, the Northwest Environmental Advocates and the Idaho Conservation League filed an open records request to gather more information on what they called “secret meetings to develop regional trading policies” in the spring of 2013. The Willamette Partnership organized the meetings in question to create a “Joint Regional Water Quality Trading Agreement” between Idaho, Oregon and Washington. A $1.5 million contribution from the USDA's Conservation Innovation Grant program funded the process. One of the groups that filed the request, Northwest Environmental Advocates (NWEA), indicated that it was not against all forms of Water Quality Trading, but believed that Oregon's shade-trading program violated EPA regulations. NWEA had long been highly critical of Oregon's water quality policies, and has successfully challenged elements of those policies in court.

This type of resistance to “closed-door” meetings between proponents and regulators highlights the third major challenge facing markets for ecosystem services. The efforts in the Pacific Northwest, the Chesapeake Bay and the Midwest show that displacing certain environmental qualities and producing equivalence between pollution and restoration have proven formidable barriers to the full realization of the ESM idea. The third type of obstacle for the creation of ESMs is the development of effective participation procedures in the creation and implementation of this new type of institution. NWEA's suspicions about the regional discussions and its strong opposition to the shade-trading program gives some insight into how difficult it can be to reach consensus on the creation of an ESM. However, the environmental advocacy organization's previous success in the courtroom and its ongoing scrutiny of market-creating efforts suggest that ignoring them altogether would also be a mistake from the perspective of the proponents of ESMs.

There is no formal handbook indicating how to structure a participatory decision-making process for the creation of an ESM at the watershed scale, although numerous prominent market proponents have written extensively about their experiences and insights (Jones et al. 2006; Kieser and Logue 2015; Willamette Partnership, Pinchot Institute for Conservation and World Resources Institute 2012; Willamette Partnership, World Resources Institute, and the National Network on Water Quality Trading 2015).