Susan Lurie

Saving Land but Losing Ground Challenges to Community Planning in the Era of Participation

Over the past quarter century, normative planning theory has argued that planning should be participatory. And a body of empirical studies has found that mainstream planning practice is participatory in some sense. At the same time, however, there is a competing body of empirical studies that disputes the claim that planning is participatory in any meaningful way. As participation becomes more and more prominent in shaping the practice of local government planning, it is important to try to shed light on this apparent contradiction. To that end, the authors have investigated the development of the most recent comprehensive plan for Jackson/Teton County, Wyoming. What appeared to be a process of high involvement and inclusiveness did not lead to community consensus around the plan, nor did it affirm the merits of planning. This study is an exploration of why participatory planning failed to achieve its potential in a community with a history of local problem solving.

The New Natural Resource Economy: Environment and Economy in Transitional Rural Communities

Recent developments in resource management suggest an important opportunity to address the declining socioeconomic health of rural communities struggling to fill the gap left by the transformation of primary production in agriculture and natural resources. Commodity production creates direct links between producers and urban centers, bypassing rural communities and making them economically redundant. A range of activities have emerged in the last 20 years—watershed restoration, community forestry, sustainable agriculture, and ecosystem services, for example—that constitute a “new natural resource economy” (NNRE) that can help diversify rural economies while also enhancing environmental, social, and cultural assets. Constituent components of NNRE have been studied, but there has been no attempt to map the whole territory. In this article we report the findings from a scoping survey and three case studies, as a first cut at describing the NNRE economic sector and identifying barriers to its development.

Creating socio-economic measures for community-based natural resource management: a case from watershed stewardship organisations

One consequence of the transition of rural communities from industrialised agriculture and natural resource extraction to sustainable development principles has been the rise of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). CBNRM entails collaborative efforts, typically involving local, state and federal agencies, private firms and landowners, non-governmental organisations such as environmental and economic development groups, and watershed councils. There are no agreed-upon metrics or even broadly accepted approaches for assessing the effectiveness of these new institutions. A good deal of work has been done on evaluating collaborative processes and some on environmental outcomes, but almost none on the socio-economic effects of their activities. To help fill the gap we have been conducting a long-term action research project in Oregon, an analysis of the most effective approaches to the design and implementation of measures of the socio-economic health of communities in which watershed stewardship organisations are active. In this paper we present one case, a participatory process developing socio-economic measures for monitoring CBNRM. We describe the process and the resulting measures. It is expected that the measures will be systematically updated and tracked by the community over the next decade or more. The case study illustrates the necessity and challenges of developing measures for CBNRM that are locally meaningful.

The CALFED Bay-Delta Program: Lessons from the Rise and Fall of a Large-Scale Ecosystem Management Network

Abstract Ecosystem management, especially at the large/regional scale, typifies the public sector organizational environment of interconnectedness. Networks as complex organizational models can have significant advantages for intricate joint planning and management. There are, however, considerable challenges to establishing and sustaining such organizations in an institutional environment. The complex case study of CALFED, formed to integrate water management for the hub of Californias water supply system, examines issues of network formation and survival in a high-stakes, high-conflict task environment. The lessons regarding conditions and events that led to CALFEDs collapse should be of interest to policy makers, practitioners and scholars.