Natural Resource Policy

1
Natural Resource Policy

• What is policy
• Policy is an expression of goals and objectives
  and is a framework of conditions for achieving
  the goals and objectives
• Differs from laws and regulations
• Regulations are specific rules that are based on
  statutory law - Code of Federal Regulations
• Public policy commits the authority of government
  to a course of action or inaction over time
• Policy sets the ground rules by which the game is
  played
• Federal Register

2
Characteristics of Policies

• Purpose or goal-orientated decisions or actions
  specifics compared to laws or regulations, which
  are usually vague
• Courses or patterns of action over time
• Responses to policy demands (and other things)
• Policy statement formal expression or
  articulation of public policy
• Involves what governments actually do, not simply
  what they say they intend to do
• May be active or passive (action vs no action)

3
Purpose of Policy

• Policy is integral in the organization
• Planning, policy, and administration
• All public policy is contingent upon appropriate
  allocation of budget among functions
• Must know how government works
• Executive Branch Agencies
• Legislative Branch Budgets
• Judicial Branch - Interpretation

4
Administration Policy

• Starts with broad concepts that all agencies are
  to follow
• Goals
• no net loss
• clean air
• affordable energy
• Council on Environmental Quality
• Office of Management and Budget
• All new policies are usually to address
  Administration goals
• Executive Orders quick and easy way to dictate
  policy

5
Agencies

• 45 different agencies that affect environment
  policy
• Not always with the same intent
• Agencies frequently conflict
• Remember Executive Branch controls
• Directors Orders

6
Department of Interior

• Fish and Wildlife Service
• Geological Survey
• Minerals Management Service
• National Parks Service
• Bureau of Land Management
• Bureau of Indian Affairs

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Others

• Environmental Protection Agency
• Department of Agriculture
• Farm Service Agency
• Natural Resources Conservation Service
• Forest Service
• Department of Defense
• Army Corps of Engineers
• Department of Commerce
• National Marine Fisheries
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

8
National Environmental Policy Act

• 1970
• Must be part of any Federal Activity
• Major Federal action
• Assessment of potential effects on the
  environment that would result from government
  activities
• Environmental Assessment (EA)
• Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)
• Creation of EPA immediately followed

9
Public Participation

• Policy development should be a public process
  most lawsuits over policy revolve around
  procedure
• Public Role
• Identify a problem
• Identify specific cause of the problem
• Envision possible solutions and set goals
• Get organized (typical bottleneck)
• Cultivate access and influence (lobby)
• Manage development of process

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Common Features of Policy Issues

• Resources are components of highly complex,
  dynamic, interactive systems human manipulations
  have unforeseen consequences
• Users have fundamental attitude (ethical) or
  value differences
• Many users are unaware of the capabilities of the
  resource

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Problems and Issues cont.

• Most users are unaware of the administrative
  difficulties and processes to manage natural
  resources (Ph. Ds)
• Infrequently 2 different uses of natural
  resources complement each other
• Decisions affect many people
• Most alternatives have beneficial and adverse
  consequences
• Resource-related decisions are made in a complex
  institutional structure

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How Policy Changes

• Change in administration
• Rule making process Federal Register
• Rescind Executive Orders or Directors Orders
• Ignore
• Legislature budgets or laws
• Courts
• Change definitions - quickest

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Goal in Natural Resource Policy

• Production of natural resource outputs desired by
  people while protecting the integrity of the
  natural environment
• Sustainability
• Natural resource should be top priority

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Natural Resource Policy and the Professional
Biologist

• All natural resource professionals participate in
  policy processes
• In natural resource conservation and management,
  we solve problems
• Problems are complex
• Solutions have to be explicit, comprehensive, and
  practical
• Actual prevention of environmental misuses must
  involve social and political changes
• Second part of your education

15
Complexity Rules

• Most complex and challenging part of being a
  natural resource professional
• Very easy to become overwhelmed or discouraged
• Reorganization, downsizing, budget cuts, new
  initiatives
• Unclear leadership, frustration, lack of support
• Changing administrations, special interests

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Need More Than Science

• Misconception that only biological science is
  needed for sound policy
• But scientists and biologists charged with
  fixing problems
• Administrators and politicians tend to simplify
  issues
• Natural resource problems involve social
  complexity, peoples perceptions and values, and
  often significant amounts of uncertainty

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Need More Than Science

• All successful policies should be rational,
  politically practical, and morally justified.
• The policy process is a social dynamic that
  determines who gets what, when, and how.
• Fundamentally deals with people
• Social Process

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Process Lecture Starts Here
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Social Interactions

• Peoples perspectives, interactions, and the
  outcomes of decision-making processes
• Achieve what people value KEY
• The significance or meaning of natural resources
  is influenced by peoples values
• Values change

20
Social Process

• Policy should address the common interest of
  society rarely because of the influence of
  special interests
• Common interests those widely shared within a
  community and demanded on behalf of the whole
  community
• Special interests benefit only part of a
  community at the expense of the rest of the
  community

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Social Process

• Human behavior
• Base values
• People understand and interpret events,
  interactions with others, based on individual
  subjectivities
• Facts mean different things to different people
• Groups are people with similar identities and
  base values

22
Social Process

• Every group has interests
• Society made up of groups
• Groups share beliefs
• Basic to all human interactions is values
• Things and events in life that people desire, aim
  at, wish for, or demand
• Seek values that are perceived to leave them
  better off

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Social Process

• Recognize all participants
• Do not exclude stakeholders or process will fail
• Map the perspectives of participants to
  understand differences and similarities and find
  common interest
• Identity what you associate yourself with
• Parochialism vs universalism

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Social Process

• Must have leadership for an issue to be addressed
• We cannot understand natural resource policy and
  management without a good understanding of
  peoples identities, expectations, and demands
• Situations Interactions change frequently

25
Social Process

• Base values values already processed by people
  and groups
• Power and wealth are recognized for their
  predominant influence in our society
• Strategies management of base values to affect
  value outcomes
• Diplomatic communication among leaders

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Social Process

• Ideological communication with a wider public
  to persuade and gather support
• Economic goods and services, boycott
• Military use resources as weapons
• Outcomes short-term, good or bad depending on
  perspective
• Effects long-term outcomes in terms of values,
  institutions, and society
• Innovations new practices and values

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Social Process

• Stakeholders label for people involved in a
  given issue
• All stakeholders must be involved for a policy to
  succeed
• Community peoples interacting in patterns that
  while pursuing their own values, but must take
  into account values of others

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Social Process

• Social process is the most overlooked dimension
  of policy making.

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Decision Process

• Means of managing conflict through politics in
  order to find a working specification of a
  communities common interests
• Heart of policy making
• Produces rules or norms prescription content
• Clear purpose and goals
• Specify rules to meet purposes
• Describe when rules apply
• Lay out sanctions
• Provide assets or resources for implementation

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Decision Process

• Seven Functions to any decision
• Intelligence, planning, is the process of
  obtaining and processing information and giving
  it to decision makers
• Depends on information about past trends and the
  conditions that produced trends
• Your job
• Usually selectively used to promote special
  interests
• Promotion is the recommending and mobilizing
  support for policy alternatives
• People must be moved to act
• Mass support and enthusiasm

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Decision Process

• Promotion is the recommending and mobilizing
  support for policy alternatives
• Everything happens at this step lobbying,
  contribution, political parties, conservation
  groups, conspiracy, deals
• If promotion is openly discouraged by authorities
  then discontent
• Open, active debate about what to do

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Decision Process

• Prescription is the activity that establishes the
  rules by which people live
• Clarify and articulate the basic goals and norms,
  or values, of the community
• Carried out by authorities CEOs, advisors,
  councils, and legislatures
• Must have content, authority signature, and
  control intent
• Invocation is the first action taken to invoke,
  or appeal to, a prescription
• Sets up administrative arrangements, allocates
  people, resources, and facilities

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Decision Process

• Application resolves disputing claims over how
  prescriptions will be implemented and who has
  authority to make those decisions
• Covers final decisions courts
• Appraisal assessment of a decision process as a
  whole and of the success of a particular
  prescriptions in achieving their goals
• Opportunity for learning and course correction

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Decision Process

• Termination repeal or large-scale adjustment of
  a prescription
• Cancel or succeed original prescription
• New beginning

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Decision Making

• Ordinary decision making focuses on substantive
  policy choices and deliberations take place
  within a given structure and context of decision
  making that is viewed as legitimate
• Constitutive decision making is made up of
  deliberations and choices about how policy should
  be made and goes beyond ordinary everyday
  operations

36
Decision Making

• Responsible decision makers (including
  biologists) must stay in touch with reality and
  appreciate that there are always several versions
  of reality in competition in policy making

37
Decision Making

• Common interests should prevail over special
  interests
• Precedence to high-priority interests
• Give preference to participants whose value
  position is most substantially involved
• Allocate base values (power, money, knowledge,
  skill) for policy to succeed

38
Problem Orientation

• When natural resource problems arise people jump
  to recommend solutions
• Make assumptions about goals
• Pay too little attention to what has happened in
  past and what might happen
• Focus uncritically
• Concentrate on problem not solutions,
• Analyze and understand before prescribing
  solutions

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Problem Orientation

• First, clarify goals of participants both what
  they hope to achieve and how they expect to
  achieve it
• Must be detailed objectives
• Long term and short term
• Second, describe past and current trends
• Both resource and social trends
• Changing relationships between people and
  environment

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Problem Orientation

• Third, analysis of the conditions or factors that
  affected past events and decisions.
• Purpose of science, including policy, is improved
  freedom of choice
• Science provides options
• Four, consider the level of the crisis
• Fifth, detail potential solutions
• Make projections

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Problem Orientation

• Sixth, and final step, is to devise, evaluate,
  and choose policy alternatives
• Win-lose
• Compromise
• Integration new framework of cooperation is
  devised and adopted. New perspectives,
  practices, and frames of reference result
• Hard work and usually done under pressure

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A couple of cautionary words

• Statistics can be a valuable quantitative method,
  but require interpretation
• By themselves, statistics tell us little, but
  what we infer from them can tell us a great deal
• We have created so many partnerships,
  coordinators, plans, policies, and administrative
  hierarchies that we are doomed to spend most of
  our time merely servicing the labyrinth the
  paradigm of our own demise.