This study seeks to understand how agencies with strict land use requirements and plan formulate and translate land use objectives into budgets and spending priorities. Characteristics such as legislation, policy and management body structure were examined alongside various influences to determine the extent to which these decision processes are impacted and provide insight into how such influences may be usefully levered and potentially transferred to other situations. In particular, the research was focussed on some of the "drivers" to the budgeting and land use prioritising processes. It is often argued that objectives are established in the annual business or corporate plan for the area and the budget follows this. However the intention of the research is to show that finances do indeed affect achieving the objectives but not in a direct cost manner. The research is primarily qualitative given the nature of what was being evaluated; the discrepancy between the offici al view of what should be, and what is taking place from the decision makers view was brought to light through a study of the intervening processes. This study strongly suggests that, although the organisational structures and administrative processes have substantially changed and evolved over the past twenty years resulting in today's Parks Canada and Scottish Natural Heritage, the tools used by these agencies to translate land use objectives into budgets and spending priorities have not. As a result, external influences that could be anticipated and planned for are excluded along with recognition of any potential benefits these influences could bring. Further, efforts to facilitate collaborative management have had only limited successes due on the most part to the constituent authorities using these antiquated tools and the lack of a meaningful evaluation process to measure the success of collaborative management efforts. That is budgeting and planning/resource allocation processes do not reward or encourage collaboration and may, in fact, inhibit such efforts at a management level.