Planning

The Frame Game

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There is power in “framing” political discourse and policy development: Those who control the frame, control the content, the context, and more. In short, “He Who Sets the Frame Controls the Game”.

What just happened in the NFMA Rule Development game? The comment period closed yesterday. The frame was set by rehashing experience in planning, then constructing five “Substantive Principles for a New Rule” and three “Process Principles” (each with a battery of related questions). How many people, do you suppose, chose to respond outside that frame? How powerful was the frame?

In my formal comment I said that I wish the Forest Service had simply established a blog, and begun with a simple question, like: “Given the noble ideas embedded in RPA/NFMA (Wikipedia link) and other principal laws related to the Forest Service, how might the planning/management process of the USDA Forest Service be improved?” Then I said that I hoped someday the FS would indeed engage the public in meaningful inquiry as to its operations and the management of the national forests. Not yet, though. I added:

Unfortunately but not unexpectedly given the RPA context, these regulations have been dubbed a “planning rule.” If one looks at RPA/NFMA through the lens of adaptive management, the process outlined in Section 6 looks much different than if one views it through the lens of comprehensive rational planning. Unfortunately, all previous “NFMA rules” (and associated forest plans) have been developed under the “comprehensive rational planning” frame.

We must remember that the Clinton era Committee of Scientists recommended that a forest plan be viewed through an adaptive management lens — viewed, figuratively, as a loose-leaf compendium of all assessments, decisions, monitoring and evaluation efforts, etc. that affect an administrative unit of the national forest system. …

If so-called “planning rule” development is viewed, once again, as yet-another comprehensive, rational planning exercise, the agency will be mired again in analysis paralysis and process gridlock. If viewed as a mandate for adaptive management with a heavy dose of collaborative engagement on the part of other agencies, other governments, and citizens, then a whole new world of opportunity and challenge opens up to the Forest Service.

Please do not fall into the ‘planning trap’ again.

Now we wait for “next steps” and for a “Draft Rule.” And we hope that we — all of us, both the Forest Service and the public — won’t be trapped in an inappropriate “frame.” It is not that I believe that the Forest Service deliberately manipulated the “frame” in this case. Just the opposite. I believe the Forest Service fell into common decision traps: “frame blindness”, “lack of frame control”, “plunging in”, others?

Related:
Adaptive Forest Management blog
Earth to FS Planning: Get a Blog!
The Forest Service as a ‘Learning Challenged’ Organization, (1999)

Adaptive Governance and Forest Planning

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Army Officer at Nine Mile Camp, Mt. Baker National Forest, 1933, photo by W.L. Baker

The more we look at the literature, the more evidence we find that our current NFMA management system doesn’t align with the current thinking about land use management.  We gravitate toward adaptive management, but we don’t quite grasp it yet.

A slight twist on the adaptive management idea is the concept of “adaptive governance.” The word “governance” instead of “management” recognizes the collaborative aspects. It’s similar to the idea of “adaptive co-management”  that Dave Iverson has described in his post here and here on this blog, citing the summary from the Resilience Alliance.

The concepts of adaptive governance are worth considering in the forest planning and management system for a couple of reasons. First, it includes the idea of learning-oriented planning similar to what Jim Burchfield proposes in his earlier post on this blog. Second, the role of science is different. Instead of relying on scientific management as the foundation for policy development, adaptive governance integrates various types of knowledge in a contextual manner.  This is similar to what Sharon describes here and here about analyzing specific questions posed by land managers and the public .

In the book Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision Making by Ronald Brunner, Toddi Steelman, Lindy Coe-Juell, Christina Cromley, et. al., the authors use five case studies across the West.  amazon.com oxford journal review

The authors make the following points about adaptive governance:

  • Planning sets goals. You try alternatives. The burden of decision making shifts to monitoring and evaluation and terminating policy alternatives that fail.
  • No policy is permanent because interests, knowledge, and other significant details of the context are subject to change.
  • There is an understanding that politics are unavoidable. Participants assume responsibility and accountability for the policy because they must live with the consequences of implementing it.
  • Best available science is integrated with other kinds of knowledge, including local knowledge.
  • Science must be contextual, necessitating interpretations and judgments that integrate what is known about the context.

These guidelines appear to converge with other ideas that we’ve noted on this blog.  There seems to be evidence that this works.  Although NFMA and the previous forest planning rules are grounded in the scientific management process, the 2000, 2005, and 2008 rules introduced the concept of collaboration in all aspects of planning, monitoring, and evaluation, and required the consideration of uncertainty and risk. But what is missing in those rules is the idea that we are committed to using dynamic monitoring and a collaborative evaluation process in order to change policy.  For those that think that the NFMA planning rule is just about writing a Forest Plan, this would be a huge surprise and some would argue, a wake-up call.  Are the concepts of adaptive governance the next step?

Weaving Discussion Threads Together

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Once a week or so, I will try to weave some of the discussion threads from the past week together. There are many interesting ideas in posts that any of us may not have time to respond to in real time, but may be working in the back of our minds somewhere.

Here’s an attempt for the past couple of weeks:

There is the minimalist, timber-only, view of planning – Andy’s KISS approach, which keeps us legal with NFMA. This seems pretty well developed.

Then we have some consensus around something like an “adaptive governance” .
ADAPTIVE GOVERNANCE
On some timeframe, at some appropriate spatial scale (a forest or subsection of forest or Forest/BLM combination ?), a collaborative group (FACA committee?) would involve the public in discussions of “what’s working now and what needs to change”, determine some ideas for change and learning questions, prioritize some activities to learn about and test ideas for change, monitor, and have a formal, transparent, public process (annually?) for checking on goals and adaptive changes. Climate change would be incorporated as included in scenarios this group would consider. It’s more about public deliberation, and learning from the land in real time, than analysis. As Dave said here

“You can only hope to accomplish anything when you are able to define the scope the problem (time, space, issues, etc.) into “decision containers” that people (stakeholders, administrators, etc) can get their minds around. It seems that traditional “forest plan” containers are hopelessly over-filled when land management zoning, land management goals and objectives, program goals and objectives, and related “standards and guidelines” are all in play — and “in play” in a spatial container that isn’t really relevant to many of the objectives at hand.”

So this idea is adaptive governance for a spatial scale appropriate to the problem at hand, which would make decisions within decision space bounded by environmental law.

ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS: In addition, there is a fundamental legal framework of environmental laws that translate into standards (BMPs, species-wide standards such as grizzly) and serve as restrictions on activities, as well as ideas for improvements to help species recovery (sometimes it is about doing things, in addition to “not doing” things) that can both feed into Adaptive Governance (AG).

MONITORING: There should also be some fundamental framework of monitoring for key elements of environmental quality, such air, water and some, but not all. species, that crosses ownership boundaries and also provides some useful information to the regulatory processes. In addition to this basic monitoring, AG groups could add other monitoring related to their questions and learning objectives at hand.

NEPA : NEPA would be done for each project or at the appropriate scale for larger scale issues (power lines, oil and gas leasing, travel management, species protection). Cumulative effects would be done “just in time” as what is “reasonably foreseeable” one year may be substantially different in three to five (for example, industry is interested/is not/is in certain energy deposits, species are reintroduced or move in on their own or become threatened, bark beetles, big fires and their aftermath, roadless rules, etc.) This is the NEPA equivalent of what Dave articulates here .

“Peter Drucker used to write about the “futurity of current decisions”, that is to look at that will emanate from each decision, as it relates to all other decisions. But to act in as close to “real time” as possible, and adjust policy and program and all else to accommodate emergent realities. I call this “just in time decision-making” or “once and forever decision-making.”

(Dave, did you mean “in contrast to” “once and forever decision-making?”)

There does seem to be some dichotomy among us on the utility of predictions at the “forest plan level.” And differences in the view that somehow broader scale- say, landscape scale- NEPA will both be better and remain fresh while the projects are carried out. This may be where Martin is with his contingency/adaptive NEPA, or maybe that’s just for long term projects such as grazing.

Ray Vaughan expresses a need for something strategic at a broader level in this post, but whether it needs to be NEPA or not is another question, in my view. The idea being that we think ahead strategically so that we don’t end up in some kind of corner by focusing on a project at a time. But to me, that’s a discussion with the public about strategy about what “might could” happen under a variety of scenarios, and not an explicit NEPA analysis of alternatives.

I liked Ray Vaughan’s analogy that he discusses in the same post, but the family in the analogy doesn’t have to spend a significant part of this year’s budget on a formalized, legally defensible, construct of different alternatives to reach its goal, given that perhaps it doesn’t know a)how many children will arrive, b) their family income, nor c) costs of education, that far in the future.

So does my weaving resemble yours? Tell us about what yours looks like.

Send Benchmarks to the Bench

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From Andy Stahl

It’s Friday before a three-day weekend, so here’s a short one. Twenty-eight years ago, while serving on the National Forest Products Association’s federal land planning task force, I suggested a way to use the FORPLAN model to calculate the timber opportunity cost from environmental protection. First, have FORPLAN calculate the maximum sustained yield of timber assuming no discretionary environmental protection. Second, sequentially impose environmental protections – the timber volume difference between the two is the opportunity cost of protecting the environment. Forest Planning published my article (thanks Randal) and Doug MacCleery took it with him when he made his move from NFPA to USDA as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in the Reagan Administration. In 1982, Doug re-wrote the Carter Administration’s 1979 NFMA rules and added benchmark analysis as a planning requirement.

Benchmark analysis had only one purpose – to highlight the cost of protecting wildlife habitat, ensuring clean water, and keeping the forest pretty for people to enjoy. The thought being that if people, and decisionmakers (like OMB), only knew the dollars they were giving up, they would rally around increased national forest logging. But it was not to be. When it comes to public forests, no opportunity cost appears too high to pay for their protection.

I’m delighted to add my nail to the benchmark analysis coffin. Forest planning is challenging enough without adding gratuitous and divisive analysis that provides no information of real use to national forest managers or the public.

Earth to FS Planning: Get a Blog!

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Yes I know that the FS thinks it has a Planning Rule blog. But it doesn’t. Not a real blog anyway. All it has, so far, is a poor excuse for a comment aggregator. The other day I decided to leave a comment on Peter Williams’ recent post on the “official blog”. Guess what? The so-called blog won’t accept comments that include paragraph breaks. No HTML is allowed. And, best I can tell, even simple “http” references are not converted to active links. So I decided that until and unless the FS is willing to at least fix the paragraph breaks problem—or tell folks how to use the blog so that it will include “breaks”—I will just use real blogs outside the “official” smokescreen. Here is the comment I intended to post as a response to Peter, slightly edited:

Here is my “take” on Peter Williams’ final two questions, restated a wee bit:

How might the planning rule provide for an all lands approach and address the contribution of NFS lands to local communities?

  • How can the new planning rule, by itself or as a road map for developing forest plans, reflect the interdependency of social, economic, and ecological systems in a way that supports sustainable management of national forests and grasslands?
  • How can it help provide or ensure opportunities for goods and services to support vibrant rural, regional, and national economies?

My guess is that any planning rule that is developed in the long tradition of “rules” dating back to 1979 will not be helpful in achieving the goals embedded in the questions. Why? Because the focus of each “rule” has always been on developing a “Forest Plan” as if there were wide discretion in that process and “as if” the forest administrative unit made sense as an overall “catchall” for decision-making. Neither is the case.

One problem is that there can not be wide discretion in forest-level decision-making if only because the ecosystems embedded in each administrative unit of the national forest system are themselves part of broader ecosystem wholes, e.g. larger watersheds, larger “basin and range” systems, both, and more. This means that what works for sustainability (instead of against) re: “forest subsystem contributions” to ecosystems must be informed by the needs of broader wholes. So too with social systems. An “all lands approach” must be scaled, hierarchically, to guide development of plans at subscales. Maybe a NFMA “rule” can address such, but we haven’t seen one yet. Only with such an adaptive management assessment information system could forest-level decision-making begin to make any sense. And the ecosystems/social systems scale problem is but one of many problems that impede wide discretion in decision-making. Another is what I call the “wicked problem” problem.

The Forest Service has never (to my knowledge) addressed “wicked problems” (Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem. Such problems were first introduced to the Forest Service in 1986 by Allen and Gould (Journal of Forestry) and to the world by Rittel and Webber in 1973 (Policy Sciences). Anyone who has studied forest management problems knows that they are indeed politically wicked and cry out for approaches much different from the “comprehensive rational planning” approach that the Forest Service always gravitates toward. Even when dressed up with terms like “adaptive” or “adaptive management” the reality of the approaches used always have rational-planning at their core.

One thing is certain when dealing with wicked problems: You can only hope to accomplish anything when you are able to define the scope the problem (time, space, issues, etc.) into “decision containers” that people (stakeholders, administrators, etc) can get their minds around. It seems that traditional “forest plan” containers are hopelessly over-filled when land management zoning, land management goals and objectives, program goals and objectives, and related “standards and guidelines” are all in play — and “in play” in a spatial container that isn’t really relevant to many of the objectives at hand. I have long felt that rational planning approaches simply can’t work. Here is how I put it in my Epistle to the Clinton-era Committee of Scientists (link: http://www.fs.fed.us/eco/eco-watch/cos_greenplans.html) , written when I was an employee of the Forest Service:

… [W]e have failed to learn the lesson that there is a difference between complex problems and wicked problems (see: G.M. Allen’ and E.M. Gould. 1986. “Complexity, wickedness, and public forests.” J.For 84(4):20-23, also Henry Mintzberg. 1994. The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning). According to Allen and Gould, politically wicked problems can not be solved by any multi-step planning process designed to “collect more data, build bigger models, and crunch more numbers … [expecting that] surely the right answer would be forthcoming.” Allen and Gould suggest that the Forest Service’s general operating norm for planning–more data, fancier analysis, more computing power, more scientists–reflects a “naive hope that science can eliminate politics.” This problem went unresolved–is still unresolved–because [Forest Service] ‘professional arrogance’ wouldn’t allow [the agency] to admit that national forest management and planning is ‘political’.

Why not try adaptive management, better still Adaptive Co-Management (Resilience Alliance Link: http://www.resalliance.org/2448.php) when thinking in terms of an “all lands approach”. Note here that the adaptive management I’m talking about is multiple-scale oriented, addresses wicked problems, and involves double loop learning (More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_learning). Maybe such adaptive co-management can be and will be fit into the NFMA “rule” rewrite. But I doubt it. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I hope I am proven wrong.

Final thought: If adaptive co-management is to work, decision-makers will have to constantly check and “be checked” to make sure that decisions (cumulatively) aren’t afflicted with policy “decision traps.” E.g. a set of decisions might be afflicted with “policy drift” — a “tyranny of small decisions” that eventually runs counter to policy aims due to the cumulative effects of sequential or segmented decisions.

Building Public Decisions

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In the early 1990s a few of us — Hanna Cortner, Maggie Shannon, Larry Davis and a couple of us in the Intermountain Region — nudged the Forest Service toward an approach we called “Building Public Decisions”. Today we might call such adaptive co-management or collaborative stewardship, or ??.

In 1993 I ran a little thing by my Eco-Watch network titled Leadership and a Sustainable Future. In my intro to the post, I said, “Jeff Sirmon’s philosophy might be summarized as ‘building public decisions and public trust.’ It certainly seems like the right thing to do.”

In another Eco-Watch post that year — a book review of Dan Kemmis Community and the Politics of Place — I highlighted additional readings from contemporary ‘policy analysis’ arguing as Kemmis had for a return to the Jeffersonian engagement. These were:

The Power of Public Ideas, edited by Robert B. Reich, Harvard University Press, 1990.

Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process, by Giandomenico Majone, Yale University Press, 1989. (Related to, and pushing forward, some of the ideas in The Power of Public Ideas.)

I said, “They are my personal favorites in policy analysis, synthesis, and governmental choice. It will be interesting to see what some of you think about these and the whole idea of shifting from federalism to more engaging, and participative, forms of government. To embrace Jeffersonian engagement (or public deliberation, as Robert Reich calls it) would transform ‘public involvement in decision making’ into ‘building public decisions.'”

Would that the Forest Service had embraced that future. But it didn’t. As usual there was (and is) a catch, Catch-22. (see also Catch-22 and Maladaptive Organizations).

For all its chatter about collaboration and collaborative stewardship or whatever buzz phrase of the moment, the Forest Service in its bureaucratic center simply doesn’t want to share enough power to collaborate. Look at the NFMA rule rewrite, for example. There is much discussion as to how the agency will collaborate to implement the “rule”, but when it comes to the rule itself, well that is another story.

On the Offical Planning Rule Website, the FS has thrown out a wee bit of material and said “comment by Feb. 16”. Then it has said that the comments are open to public inspection, but essentially blocked that effort by packing them into individual pdf files, rather than into a more easily accessible format. Finally it initiated a blog that isn’t really any more helpful than the comment gatherer.

Let me predict what will happen next. The FS will convene a few scattered meetings to gather yet more comments. Then it will issue a draft “rule.” Then it will defend that rule — a tweak on the 1982 rule — until Hell freezes over. 20 years from now, if any of us are still alive, we will be rehashing this once again—unless we’ve found better amusements.

I hope I’m wrong.

Should Forest Plans Establish Management Areas?

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For some people, the essence of a Forest Plan is the establishment of “management areas”.  But do they work?  Does it make sense to equate a Forest Plan to a zoning document?

Under the 1982 planning rule, management area prescriptions are one of the Forest Plan content requirements (along with a summary of the management situation, multiple-use goals and objectives, and monitoring/evaluation requirements.)  A management area prescription addresses multiple-uses with “associated standards and guidelines for each management area including proposed and probable management practices such as the planned timber sale program.”  (36 CFR 219.11(c) – 1982 version)

The weakness of this approach is that management areas are often viewed as single resource by single resource emphasis areas.

In their book Designing Sustainability Forest Landscapes, Simon Bell and Dean Apostol observe:

“NFMA led to development of complicated zoning maps for each national forest.  In essence, the attempt was (and still is) to resolve competing uses by creating overlays and associated standards, very similar to what one finds in local land use planning.  The Mt. Hood National Forest in Oregon, for example, identified over 40 separate zones, including such designations as timber emphasis, developed winter sports, scenic viewsheds, a big-game winter range, and late successional reserves.  Each zone has a set of standards that specify whether logging can occur, and if so at what rotation, the size of clearcuts, the allowable density of roads and so forth.

 The level of zoning typical on US national forests today demonstrates the limits of what can be accomplished through zoning-based plans.  At its worst, it represents an absurd division of the forest to a point where it cannot even be understood, let alone competently managed.  The managers are tied in knots, and neither they nor the public who owns these forests can effectively visualize what the forest will look like or be.”  p. 25

 The requirement to identify management areas was absent in the 2005/2008 planning rule.  Rather than “prescriptions”, the intent was to identify “desired conditions” at multiple scales, and “overlays” of specific suitable use maps at broad scales with approximate lines.  There are many advantages to this approach – plans are more adaptable, maps are consistent with the unique role and scales of contributions that a particular Forest may serve, and plans don’t seem more prescriptive than they really are.  Still, it seems like planning teams couldn’t get away from the concept of management areas.   In some cases, some teams used the identification of “special areas” as a replacement for management areas.  While it certainly makes intuitive sense that you don’t need zones to cover every inch of a National Forest, it also makes sense to limit the types of special areas to a consistent National set (recommended Wilderness, research natural areas, botanical areas, National Recreation Areas, etc.)

Should management areas still be a component of Forest Plans in a new planning rule?    Are Forest Plans really zoning documents, and how can they represent themes rather than specific actions?

The Blame Game

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Whether we are talking about planning, assessments, monitoring, or any other managerial function it is good practice to also talk about what I like to call the “p” words, psychology and politics. Here is a little tidbit I’ve been thinking about again recently.

How often do we resort to blaming others for our own problems/failings? Think first of international relations and war. Think second of our own families. Think third of the organizations we work for and with. Admittedly, everything depends on everything and relationships are a two-way street. But I still believe that much of our undiscussed, and often undiscussable conflict derives from our own inability to see ourselves as others see us. This too, is a two-way street. Anyone or any groups we are in conflict with usually have the same problem, which we might think of as a special case of “frame blindness.”

(See generally Chris Argyris’ Action Science ideas. For the Forest Service specifically, see my Catch-22 and Maladaptive Organizations, and on “frame blindness” and other decision traps, see How to Avoid Harebrained, Cockamamie Schemes.)

Not only do we too-often think of ourselves as victims, but usually “frame” ourselves as well-meaning heroes — hardworking, fair and sensitive heroes — stopped in our tracks by those who we vilify as enemies, or malcontents, who we to-often view as lazy, inconsiderate, unappreciative, and insensitive. The problem gets worse as each side digs in, nurturing a co-dependency. In organizations the problem spreads as more and more people buy into the blame game, setting up a contagion that afflicts entire organizations.

I just finished a little book, Leadership and Self-Deception (2000, Second edition 2010, Amazon.com link) that captures the organizational “blame game” well. Importantly, the authors give hints on how to move beyond victim/blame both in interpersonal relations, management and leadership, and organizational effectiveness measures.

One key toward organizational betterment is to learn to appreciate people as people, not as cogs in organizational machinery. Another key is to learn how to accept and share responsibility for organizational problems. In an afterword, the authors describe how in applying lessons learned from the book a CEO instituted a new way of tracking and dealing with problems in a company:

Whereas before, he would go to the person he thought was causing the problem and demand that the person fix it, the CEO began to consider how he himself might have contributed to the problem. He then convened a meeting including each person in the chain of command down to the level where the problem was manifest. He began the meeting by identifying the problem. He laid out all the ways he thought he had negatively contributed to the culture that had produced the problem and proposed a plan to rectify his contributions to the problem. He invited the person directly below him to do the same thing. And so on down the line. By the time it got to the person most immediately responsible for the problem, that person publicly took responsibility for his contributions to the problem and the proposed a plan for what he would do about it. In this way, a problem that had gone on literally for years was solved nearly overnight when the leaders stopped simply assigning responsibility and began holding themselves strictly accountable.

See too: Difficult Conversations (1999) (Amazon.com link) (Google Books preview)

None of this is new, of course, both the aforementioned books were written around 2000. In a 2006 Forest Policy-Forest Practice post titled Perplexed by Principles for Process Improvement , I alluded to the “power-over” v. “power-with” dilemma, and reiterated my 2003 suggestion to get us beyond gridlock by beginning the journey toward true collaboration.

Maybe I was planting seeds of thought, maybe I was whistling in the wind. Maybe the time is right now, or is yet to come. But maybe it will never come!

Why ? Despite rhetoric to the contrary, Capital P “Politics” is a power-over game, and US government agency administration is “political”. It used to be that the Timber Barons and their Congressional and Administration lackeys were never far from earshot of anything that the Forest Service did (remember especially the 1950s through 1970s or 80s). Now the game has shifted, and Fire Money (and assoicated power) has more sway, as increasingly does Recreation Money. Maybe we will get a chance for better collaboration, even adaptive co-management as the Resilience Alliance folks call it.

But I won’t be surprised if we don’t. I have been hoping for a “collaborative future” for a very long time, but I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve not fallen into the insanity trap: doing (saying) the same things over and over, and expecting different results.

Returning to more optimistic thoughts, Leadership and Self-Deception got me to thinking about other books like Argyris and Schön’s Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning, (1990) and Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations (2002). (See my 2005 Forest Policy-Practice Fierce Conversations post). Only after learning to own up to and defeat the victim/blame game do we have any chance at other important organizational learning opportunities.

A key question: Is it really possible, or remotely likely that the US Forest Service (or any other large government bureau) will ever be able to move beyond the blame game?

Lessons from National Park Service Planning

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Recently, several of us in the planning staff in the Rocky Mountain Region here in Lakewood, Colorado went a few miles down the road to visit the Denver Service Center of the National Park Service.  This center has a planning staff, which enters into an agreement with each Park Service Region and individual Park Service units to do a general management plan for each Park unit. The advantages of this approach are the organizational efficiencies from having a trained professional staff in a centralized location. There are some disadvantages such as travel costs, etc., and there appear to be some budget battles between the Service Center and the Park Service regions that sometimes have their own planning personnel. What’s also interesting is that some parks (notably Yellowstone) have refused to do a general management plan, preferring a local planning approach for each area of the Park.  Overall, however, there are many lessons from the Park Service planning model that might be useful for the Forest Service.  Here is the Park Service planning website.

Here are some further thoughts from Dave Loomis, a regional environmental coordinator on our staff, who also attended the meeting, about an intriguing issue – how much simpler the overall Park Service planning direction appears to be when compared to the Forest Service, and how the guidance sets the stage for planning that is less costly and more efficient.

Forest Service planning is in a state of disarray because it costs too much and takes too long. The agency is currently operating (indirectly) under planning regulations from the 1970s, a time when most of the planning profession was operating under the theory of “rational comprehensive” planning. This theory held that we solve a huge comprehensive list of land use issues by studying them really hard, conducting extensive inventories, and applying rational scientific problem solving models. Sounded great, but did not work. It was too expensive, too time consuming, and did not reflect the reality that land use planning is largely a political process.

Nationwide, the planning profession has moved beyond the old rational comprehensive model towards more efficient, more effective collaborative processes that are extremely difficult to codify in a detailed ordinance or regulation. For example, the National Park Service has a very simple regulatory structure that allows it the flexibility to develop Park general plans efficiently and effectively. The average cost of a Park Plan is $700,000 compared to $2,000,000 for a Forest Plan. Yes, the Park Service mission is more focused and its plans deal with a narrower range of controversies, but its recreation vs preservation controversies are every bit as intensive as any controversy facing a Forest Service plan. Yet, the Park Service is able to complete its plans at a fraction of the cost of Forest Plans and with far less litigation. Simple, straightforward planning directives contribute to this effectiveness. By contrast, the complex Forest Service rational comprehensive planning regulatory structure has contributed to our lack of effectiveness. Think Windows 7 simplicity vs Windows Vista complexity.

OK here’s two caveats. One, Park Service efficiency is not solely the result of its streamlined directives. The Park Service has also developed business models that also contribute to planning effectiveness. However, the ability of the Park Service to develop innovative business practices is related to its less prescriptive directives. Two, the Park Service plans do not solve many land use issues on many of the Parks. They are not all things to all people. Some tough decisions are made during program, project, or site specific planning. There are clearly tradeoffs to be made in developing planning hierarchies.

That said, it’s important to consider efficiency and effectiveness as the Forest Service continues to update its planning regulations. The agency should focus on successful planning structures developed by other federal, state, and local land use planning agencies. The fact that the Park Service’s simple regulatory structure has contributed to its ability to develop plans at a fraction of the cost of Forest plans cannot be ignored.

Forest Options Group- Some thoughts and questions

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Here I suggested we meet back here in a week after we had time to read the report of the Forest Options Group.

I’m glad that Andy brought this paper to our attention. Many of the problems are still as relevant today as they were in 1997.

Not really about planning but interesting to me..

FS pilots
I don’t know how many current FS employees were on the pilot forests in the 80’s. I was on the Ochoco at the time and we thought the bucket of money concept was fantastic. As I recall, it foundered on the shoals of budget line item accountability to Congress or our regional or Washington Office’s view of that. Here’s a summary of that effort to decentralize from the bottom up..

User fees– we have experience with rec fee demo and the Valles Caldera, which suggests that people are worried that if FS units get funds from uses, they will be inclined to favor those uses to the detriment of the environment. Just on its face, the simple act of charging for recreation is a concept that works for state and federal parks… why not national forests?

On to collaborative planning.. Pilot 3. I am not so sure that collaborative councils to help with planning and monitoring are all that different from cooperators’ groups or FACA committees that exist for some forests around the country, except where the final authority rests.

But the forest plan would be developed under a new hierarchy in which a collaborative council helps the forest planning team prepare and evaluate alternatives. Forest planners act as staff for the council, and the council replaces the regional forester in selecting the final plan.

Would the ultimate locus of the decision in and of itself really help people become less polarized? I wonder how the Group thought that would work.

Also, being from a region with low timber values, and as I said above, unable to charge for most recreation, and unlikely to wrest oil and gas revenues from Interior, I don’t think getting receipts directly to the unit is a strong enough incentive to get a plan done. We could think of other mechanisms, but collaboration can take time. In my experience, in general, the fact that the plan is old does not seem to unduly inconvenience anyone (if you can do amendments). Hence there may need to be additional incentives to get plans done, even with a collaborative council.