The situation: - University of Arizona



Goal of today’s exercise

The task for today is to learn more about the practice of resource management -- from a policy point of view. In particular, we will compare two methods of citizen involvement in resource management. One is the traditional approach, practiced by most field offices, where resource managers collect information, develop a management plan, present it to the public, and make the final decision. The other approach is based on collaborative decision-making and adaptive management, which involves stakeholders from the very beginning and the management plan is decided upon by consensus. Though this management alternative is largely hypothetical, it could be applied even today under existing law.

In this exercise, the class will be presented with a hypothetical conflict situation and the goal is to resolve it by the end of the lab period. The solution will be presented in the form of a 5-year management plan, a product of either the traditional or the collaborative planning approach. Each student will assume the role of a specific stakeholder, slip into that person’s mindset, and interact with other stakeholders as realistically as possible.

In the end, the group will describe how the management plan was developed and we will have a discussion on the pros and cons of both management approaches.

The situation:

Picture it: 1998, a small community in North Carolina, situated in the midst of National Forest land. Historically, this community lived on logging and some local families are fifth generation loggers. The loggers buy rights from the Forest Service to log on National Forest land. Over the past 20 years, the Forest Service has cut timber sales in half, improving forest health tremendously, but taking local loggers to the edge of bankruptcy. The community has compensated for this loss in part by developing a tourism industry. Tourists enjoy the natural beauty of the forest, which unlike most of North Carolina’s privately owned forests, are less intensively harvested, creating high quality habitats for fish and wildlife.

Then one day, a Fish and Wildlife Service employee discovers a colony of bats living in a dead tree in an area of the forest that slated for harvest. Turns out, the species (Indiana bat) is on the endangered species list, obliging the Forest Service to review their logging plan to protect the survival of the colony.

The Lab Activity

You will take on the role or a particular stakeholder during this exercise, a Forest Service decision maker, a Fish and Wildlife scientist, a logger, the owner of a tourist business, or the member of a non-profit organization that works to protect endangered species. Once your role is assigned you will get minimal instructions on what your role involves. You are welcome to embellish your persona and invent story lines, as long as this is consistent with the role you are playing.

First you will meet with your peer (classmates playing the same roles) and discuss the situation, your positions, and/or even develop a plan of action. For example, you may decide to contact other stakeholders for the purpose of education, build alliances or write letters of protest. If your game involves participants that are not played by anyone (e.g. a local news reporter), your lab instructor will temporarily stand in for that role.

During the course of the game, you will eventually be asked by the Forest Service to participate in one of their activities. When this happens you will have to decide who among your peers joins the traditional and who joins the participatory management group. Once the choice is made, you can’t go back.

The task for both management groups is to come up with a new 5-year management plan that protects the endangered bat species. When that plan has been outlined on a piece of paper, the game is over. The group will present this plan to the class and describe how that decision was reached, what steps were involved and what were the major challenges. The various stakeholders should also say whether they (as stakeholders) agree or disagree with the plan, and what further actions they may take.

Forest Service Personnel (participatory approach)

You are in charge of the decisions. As a federal employee, it is clear that your job is to protect the colony of Indiana bat, and this will probably involve restricting logging in some way. 15 individual lumber sales over the next 5 years are tied to that region of the forest. You are fully aware that canceling these sales will meet quite a bit of public resistance. For now, you have to put these sales on hold until the final management decision is made.

You’ve heard much about collaborative decision-making and adaptive management that have been employed in resolving natural resource conflicts, mostly in other countries. Anticipating a major conflict in this situation, as well as not knowing exactly how to balance the survival of the bat colony with logging, you decide to give it try. You get informed about the major steps taken in this approach and decide to follow it best you can.

Here are the highlights of what needs to be done (from Krumpe and McMCoy, full text available):

1. Create a task force representing all major interest groups. Select people who are well known within their organization and are willing to listen, negotiate, compromise and communicate.

2. As the first item of business, all members will agree to give everyone a chance to speak and withhold judgment on an idea presented by others until it has a chance to be developed. Next, the task force will decide on what its job will be, i.e. what final product the task force will deliver. In this case, the product will be a 5-year management plan (even though this is known from the start, all members still have to agree on this). Making the job clear from the beginning avoids wasting time on non-essential issues.

3. The job of the task force is completed when consensus on the management plan has been reached. The task force should not ordinarily vote, but should attempt to decide by consensus. Simple majority rule leaves almost half of the stakeholders dissatisfied and this is considered unacceptable. The basic tool for reaching consensus should be a group learning process where participants gain appreciation of the needs and views of others. The best strategy is to identify points of agreement and built upon these.

4. As an expert in natural resource management, it is your responsibility to inform the group of the advantages of adaptive resource management. However, having agreed to reach a decision by consensus, you have given up the power to demand this approach.

5. Once a 5-year plan has been agreed upon, outline it on a piece of paper, have it signed by all group members as a sign of approval, and submit it to the lab coordinator.

Forest Service Personnel (traditional approach)

You are in charge of the decisions. As a federal employee, it is clear that your job is to protect the colony of Indiana bat, and this will probably involve restricting logging in some way. 15 individual lumber sales over the next 5 years are tied to that region of the forest. You are fully aware that canceling these sales will meet quite a bit of public resistance. For now, you have to put these sales on hold until the final management decision is made.

As a first step you will consult with colleagues from Fish and Wildlife services to learn more about the bat’s habitat and the extent of the conflict between logging and maintaining the bat colony. Perhaps some more research is needed. If you decide on more research, present your lab instructor with an experimental design and he/she will tell you the outcome of the “experiment”. Eventually you will have to develop a new 5-year management plan that protects the bat colony, but ideally is also sensitive to the needs of the community. You then organize a public hearing, where you outline the plan and listen to the response of the community. After the hearing you decide on the final 5-year plan, either ignoring public input or picking up on some ideas that strike you as workable. Lastly, outline the 5-year plan on a piece of paper and submit it to the lab instructor.

Fish and Wildlife researcher:

Since the original discovery of the bat colony, you collected more information. First of all, you identified that the colony consists of 25-28 female Indiana bats and their offspring. In winter, the colony hibernates in nearby caves and abandoned mines, and females return in March/April to roost in the peeling bark of dead or dying trees. The females give birth in summer and nurse their young. Whatever else is known about the species is summarized by the Fish and Wildlife Service on the attached pages.

During the course of the game you may be contacted by the Forest Service, which is developing a plan to deal with the new situation. One team member will cooperate with the traditional managers and will probably be asked to share conservation information with the Forest Service, or even conduct research on the local bat population. The other will cooperate with the collaborative management team and join a task force.

Logger

You own a small logging company with two full time employees and team of 5 part-time loggers that you hire whenever a job needs to be done. You inherited the firm from your father and have seen it go downhill in the last 20 years. You even had to reduce your staff recently from 4 to 2 full-time employees. You see your part-time workers struggle financially but are unable to employ them around the year. It doesn’t help that you have to compete against big lumber companies that own their plantations.

The whole situation is frustrating. In your view, the forest is full of excellent logging opportunities, but the Forest Service seems less and less willing to sell lumber. You have seen the forest deteriorate to the point where large trees die and topple over rather than being harvested when they are still marketable. You have little sympathy for the Forest Service’s idea to rebuilt secondary forest and create better habitats for wildlife, when local families lose their livelihoods. You feel that the find of the Indiana bat and the subsequent suspension of three lumber deals you had already agreed upon with the Forest Service years ago was the last straw, a proof that the federal government cares more about a blood-sucking animal than the common man! In your view, the endangered species are the loggers!

-- Develop this persona further by inventing more detail about your business operation and what actions you and other loggers might take faced with this situation.

During the course of the game you may be contacted by the Forest Service, which is developing a plan to deal with the new situation. One team member will cooperate with the traditional managers and attend a public hearing, where you will be asked to state your position as the representative of the non-profit organization. The other will cooperate with the collaborative management team and join a task force. In the task force, you will represent the local logging industry.

Local business owner

You are a villager that owns a small business, catering chiefly to the tourists that visit to enjoy the forest, go caving, game hunting or fishing. Perhaps you are the owner of a bed&breakfast, a bait and tackle store, or a store that rents bicycles. Make up a story and give your business a catchy name.

Your family has lived in the village for several generations and you want to see it flourish. You understand the difficulties the logging families go through, perhaps your own father owned a small logging company and had to give it up. However, your family adjusted to the changing market conditions and now does quite well living on the tourism business.

During the course of the game you may be contacted by the Forest Service, which is developing a plan to deal with the new situation. One team member will cooperate with the traditional managers and attend a public hearing, where you will be asked to state your position as the representative of the non-profit organization. The other will cooperate with the collaborative management team and join a task force. In the task force, you will represent the local tourism business community.

Member of a non-profit endangered species advocacy group.

You don’t live in the village but in a major population center a 3-hour drive away. Ever since you were little you loved the outdoors and when you went to college, you became an environmental activist. First you volunteered for of this non-profit organization, informing the public about the plight of threatened species and taking part in some publicity-getting stunts. Because of your long-standing commitment to the organization, you were recently offered one of the few paid positions in the organization. Although the pay is only one half of what you made before, you decided to take the offer, because it gives you a chance to make a living on what you really believe in. -- Develop this persona further by deciding what education this person chose and what job he/she held before joining the organization.

You first found out about the discovery of the bat colony from a local newspaper. Immediately you knew that the organization had to become involved. Discuss your position on the issues with your peer, decide what actions you will take and follow through.

During the course of the game you may be contacted by the Forest Service, which is developing a plan to deal with the new situation. One team member will cooperate with the traditional managers and attend a public hearing, where you will be asked to state your position as the representative of the non-profit organization. The other will cooperate with the collaborative management team and join a task force.

Family from distant urban center owning a vacation cottage:

You are only tangentially interested in the Indiana bat dilemma. Your work is in the big city and you come to the small village to relax and forget the troubles of the world. You obviously make good money, which allowed you to buy a cottage on 3 acres of land adjacent to the National Forest three years ago. If it was up to you, you wouldn’t allow any logging, since this potentially lowers the value of your real estate. On the other hand, with catastrophic forest fires so much in the news, you hope the forest service does a good job of controlling the fire hazard. Other than that, you are not very involved in local politics. In fact, your closest acquaintances are other families like you, who also own some land and houses and live in them only on long holiday weekends and for a few weeks in summer. -- Develop this persona further by deciding what education this person chose and what job he/she holds in the big city.

During the course of the game you may be contacted by the Forest Service, which is developing a plan to deal with the new situation. One team member will cooperate with the traditional managers and attend a public hearing, where you will be asked to state your position as the representative of the home owners association. The other will cooperate with the collaborative management team and join a task force.

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