Natural resource management requires the simultaneous consideration of many different and often conflicting goals. For resource decisions to accurately reflect public values and desires, a systematic method is needed for assessing the importance which public groups attach to different management goals. Direct judgments of the importance of goals are often used as weights in additive utility models for evaluating alternative resource decisions. The overall value of each alternative is assessed by assigning it a value with respect to each relevant goal, multiplying each value by the corresponding goal's importance weight, and summing the weighted values. The validity of this procedure depends on the assumption that each goal's importance is judged independently of all other goals and is not affected by perceived conflicts between goals. Otherwise, the importance of some goals will be overestimated (double-counted). This study tested the validity of this assumption for direct judgments of the importance of forest management goals. Subjects read a description of a hypothetical national forest and rated the importance of six forest management goals on a ten-point scale. They also rated the amount of conflict between each possible pair of goals. The management scenarios were varied to represent two levels of conflict between a wilderness preservation goal and a timber production goal, and two levels of scarcity of existing wilderness areas in the region of the national forest. The conflict and scarcity manipulations were crossed, creating four conflict/scarcity conditions in a two-by-two ANOVA design. Analysis showed that both conflict and scarcity produced effects on ratings of the management goals' importance. The effects differed depending on the nature of the individual goal. In particular, goals which conflicted with wilderness preservation were rated lower in importance when the conflict was higher and when wilderness scarcity was high. This suggests that people discount the importance of goals which are perceived as conflicting with a highly valued goal, such as wilderness preservation. Importance ratings would therefore underestimate the importance of goals such as timber production if they were used as weights in an additive utility model. Further analysis revealed the presence of a single strong dimension underlying the ratings of conflict between goals. This dimension also seemed to be related to judgments of goal importance. It is possible that both conflict and importance judgments are made with respect to general cognitive attributes of the goals (for example preservation/utilization orientation). The results of this study show that direct judgments of goal importance may not satisfy the requirements of additive utility models, and that public perception of conflict between goals must be taken into account when interpreting judgments of the importance of management goals. A resource planner must be aware of what preconceptions the public holds about conflicts between goals and how these preconceptions affect the expressed importance of the goals.

published_or_final_version / Housing Management / Master / Master of Housing Management

published_or_final_version / Housing Management / Master / Master of Housing Management

published_or_final_version / Housing Management / Master / Master of Housing Management

Since the establishment of the first protected area in 1872, the Yellowstone National Park, the concept of protected areas and their management have witnessed several controversies and conflicts. Generally, ownership and management of most of these protected areas has in the past been restricted to state -governments. Other stakeholders and particularly local communities neighbouring these areas were excluded from their management and ownership. Since the last three decades, however, conservation bodies have been trying to encourage various other protected area governance (management) approaches to address failures in the existing management approach (in which state governments almost solely managed and owned these protected areas ) to achieve the conservation goals. Some of these include co-management and private protected area management approaches. In Component A of this study, "Co-management as an option for private protected areas: A case study of the Shongweni Resource Reserve", attempts were made to explore a selection of literature in order to gain an in-depth understanding of the concepts of private protected areas and co-management. Through this documentary review of literature from various sources (internet, libraries, personal communication, etc) the study identified, examined and documented various issues associated with the concepts. It also explored and documented the historical and current perspectives as well as the legal and policy context of these concepts in South Africa. In addition, the study examined the study area and the methods explored in the study. The study concludes in this Component that: 1. Protected area co-management is a pluralistic approach to the management of protected areas. It recognises a variety of stakeholders that are conducive to the achievement of sustainable conservation goals. 2. Private protected areas have tremendously increased in South Africa, with a total of 13% of the land surface under private protected area management. This is more than double the land surface under public protected area management. 3. South Africa has adequate legal and policy framework provisions that encourage comanagement as well as private protected area management. / Thesis (M.Env.Dev.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.

No description available.

To better understand the value of those who engage in environmental stewardship of natural areas, we studied volunteer steward's motivation to participate, their sustainable behaviors and attitudes toward stewardship-related constructs. Specifically, we designed and conducted a survey of volunteers who work as stewards in urban natural areas in Portland, Oregon. We hypothesize that as volunteer frequency increases: participants will be more motivated to participate for environmental reasons, volunteers will be more likely to feel a strong connection to the stewardship site, participants will be more likely to engage in public pro-environmental behaviors, and their level of environmental literacy will increase. Participants were sampled using a face-to-face survey methodology over the course of late winter and spring of 2012 during 18 different Portland Parks and Recreation sponsored stewardship events. We examined the motivations, attitudes and behaviors of the volunteers, and devised appropriate management implications for those organizing volunteer efforts. We equated a three-tiered typology of environmental literacy, based upon the frequency of volunteer participation, and analyzed our survey data using a principal component analysis, generalized linear models, and a qualitative coding analysis. The most frequent participants showed a higher likelihood of participation in public environmental behaviors, whereas participants at all frequency levels were also likely to participate in private environmental behaviors, such as removing invasive plants in one's yard. Volunteers across all frequencies of participation were motivated to engage in stewardship events by a desire to help the environment. By understanding volunteers' motivations and linked behaviors, park managers may gain insights about the recruitment, retention, and messaging of volunteers upon whom they may depend to achieve restoration goals. We recommend considering volunteers' motivations and benefits derived from participation in messaging to recruit and retain volunteers. Additionally, park managers should take advantage of educational opportunities linked to stewardship events, such as training programs and chances for volunteer mentorship.

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Many resource management controversies indicate disagreement about the possible intended and unintended effects of management actions on ecosystems. Researchers have documented a variety of negative effects on specific ecosystems, e. g. the degradation of salmonid habitat due to mass wasting (Hagans et al. 1986). While the effects of some management actions are reversible, others change systems capacities and are therefore irreversible, e.g. the poisoning of Kesterson Wildlife Refuge with selenium due to agricultural practices (Schuler 1987). The difference between reversible and irreversible management effects is often a matter of scale. Management actions that are out of concordance with the properties of a system have the potential to irreversibly change a system if applied over large spatial and temporal scales. Using the method of contextual watershed classification (Warren 1979) the concordance of forest management with the properties of the Yaquina drainage (an Oregon coastal watershed of 220 sq. mi. size) and its environmental class (the North-central Coast Range) are evaluated. For this purpose, the watershed and its environment are classified according to five components: climate, substrate, biota, water, and culture. Properties are selected that are rather invariant and general, and therefore reflect the potential capacities of system and environment. The climatic, geologic, geomorphic, and hydrologic characteristics are compared to trophic relationships and life history traits of selected tree species in an attempt to understand the biophysical relationships in the forest environment that dominates the watershed. It is found that commonly applied harvest regimes are out of concordance with the biophysical environment and thus have the potential to lead to resource loss. Alternative management practices that would be more concordant with resource properties are proposed. The influence of dominant world views (namely mechanism, realism, rationalism, individualism, utilitarianism, and elitism) on the forest planning process and on the opinions of community leaders is evaluated. It is found that forest management practices, although they are out of concordance with the biophysical environment, are in concordance with the larger cultural environment and the perceptions and opinions of local community leaders. Hence, adopting new practices that are more concordant with the biophysical environment will be difficult. The major hindrance is located in the economic sphere. Concerns relating to the economical sphere are discussed and a probable route to more concordant resource use is proposed. / Graduation date: 1989

Environmental monitoring initiatives are typically conceived as strictly scientific affairs designed to provide support for managerial decision-making; as a consequence most initiatives are centered on a formal mandate or an overarching mission statement that provides direction for monitoring activity. But official frameworks tend to marginalize lay perspectives as experts pursue disciplinary rigor at the expense of public input, a situation not in keeping with the spirit of the biosphere reserve concept. This thesis argues that an alternative design approach that reaches beyond scientists and resource managers is necessary. Environmental monitoring under an ecosystem approach is subject to scientific, social, and bureaucratic demands that defy easy disentanglement. A medley of factors influence how data are collected, interpreted, and used; neglect of these 'soft' dimensions runs the risk of failing to win the enduring support of stakeholders. There is a need to coordinate activity and to partially align multiple perspectives-this is the 'soft underbelly' of integrated monitoring that gets short shrift in most designs. While there is much monitoring being done in and around the Long Point World Biosphere Reserve, there is little coordination among monitoring groups and no obvious way to combine disparate data sets in a meaningful way. This thesis describes the elements of a locally-sensible framework for monitoring practice that is mainly concerned with trying to make sense of confusing and ambiguous situations; it strives to integrate the 'why', 'what', and 'how' of monitoring in as transparent a manner as possible by crafting 'boundary objects' that help to congeal understanding and provide centers of coordination. Using principles of participatory design in the soft-systems tradition, the overall intent is to primarily support sense-making, not decision-making; to generate searching questions, not final solutions; to facilitate learning, not control.