The political component of national forest planning

Excerpt

AT the heart of the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) of 1976 is the requirement, outlined in Section 6 of the law, that the Forest Service develop comprehensive land management plans for each administrative unit in the national forest system. Regulations to implement the requirement and to relate forest and regional planning to national Resources Planning Act (RPA) planning were issued in 1979 and revised in 1982. The focus of these lengthy regulations is on defining land management planning principles and numerous procedures for applying the principles. Responsibility for determining specific management prescriptions is left to each forest's planning process.

Observers of the new RPA/NFMA planning process are concerned, however, that the process is being approached as a series of objective, technical procedures (2, 7). When applied, planners expect these procedures to improve decision-making and lead to better forest management. But these expectations may not be realized because of political influences on governmental planning processes.

Land management planning allocates benefits to some and imposes costs on others, which makes the process inherently political (21). Politics defines both the scope of analysis and the nature of policy change that can be addressed (5). The nature of planning …