Public participation can fundamentally improve natural resources planning and decision-making. On an ad hoc basis, it has been shown that public participation improves the durability and sustainability of plans and decisions; it increases the technical, consensus-building, and decision-making capacity of the public; it increases levels of trust; and it improves relationships between agency personnel and members of the public. Despite the proliferation of these new tools and strategies and their successful implementation, innovative and inclusive public participation methods have still not become widely integrated into the natural resources planning and administrative decision-making processes of federal agencies. Utilizing the Bureau of Land Management's Western Oregon Plan Revision process as a case study, this paper considers barriers to the regular inclusion of innovative and inclusive public participation methods in agency's planning and decision-making processes and provides some prescriptions for overcoming those barriers. Through analysis of this case study, I identify eight potential roadblocks to integrating innovative forms of public participation in natural resources planning and decision-making, including: 1) political context, 2) the purpose and need of the planning effort, 3) false expectations for public involvement, 4) geographic scope of the planning area, 5) the plan timeline, 6) federal budgetary pressure, 7) agency culture and individual attitudes towards public participation, and 8) the limitations of leadership
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MONTANA/oai:etd.lib.umt.edu:etd-05302007-073835 |
| Date | 23 July 2007 |
| Creators | West, Emily Ruth |
| Contributors | Dr. Martin Nie, Dr. Matthew McKinney, Dr. Jill Belsky |
| Publisher | The University of Montana |
| Source Sets | University of Montana Missoula |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-05302007-073835/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Montana or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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