When the first national parks were established in western North America, they were “…oases of civilization in an ocean of wilderness.” Early park wardens built access roads; encouraged the construction of hotels, towns, and ski hills; undertook programs to move or eradicate; and even approved of the development of mines and dams.
As “civilization” moved west from the Atlantic and east from the Pacific, however, parks developed more slowly than their surroundings and increasingly they began to resemble “oases of wilderness in an ocean of civilization.”
With this change in perception, the goal of the park system changed also, from one of encouraging human use to one of protecting natural spaces. But by this time, towns, hotels, ski hills, and backcountry hiking systems were all well established in the parks and managers were forced into a role for which most them were poorly-prepared: determining the appropriate use of parks’ scarce resources. Should ski hills be allowed to expand? Should hiking into the back country be encouraged or discouraged? Should trail riding be permitted in an area of wolf habitat? Etc.
At first, managers attempted to use “scientific management” to resolve these issues. But it soon became apparent that although “science” might be able to identify the environmental impacts of human activity, it could never determine whether citizens considered the benefits of any environmental program to exceed the costs.
Thus was born the call for “public participation:” if park managers could not deduce whether the public would support the closing of a hiking trail or the curtailment of ATV use, perhaps they could simply ask the public. Town hall meetings were held, roundtables were organized, public opinion polls were taken: everyone who had a view was asked to express it. And from this, managers were construct a set of rules for deciding “appropriate use.”
The process was doomed to failure. The simple reason for this is that when interest groups are asked for their opinions about government policy, each group has an incentive (i) to put its own case as strongly as possible; and (ii) to do everything that it can to denigrate the positions of all other groups. The result is that the government comes away with nothing more than an exaggerated statement of “positions.” What it does not get is what it needs: a method of weighing the strength of any one position against that of the others.
I experienced this failure first hand in the Banff-Bow Valley Study, a task force whose purpose was to identify techniques by which managers could identify the appropriate uses of Banff National Park, in western Canada.
Central to this Study was a citizen Roundtable that consisted of representatives of twelve interest groups – including environmentalists, ski hill operators, alpine hikers, and the tourism industry. It met one weekend a month (two days each time) for over a year, during which time the participants were to put forward a set of goals that could be employed by park managers when making their decisions.
But the result of this process was simply a list: the members of the Roundtable agreed that skiing, hiking, tourism, the environment, history, culture, transportation, etc., etc., were all important and should be taken into account when Parks Canada made any decision.
And a "list" is of no value to park managers. When they have to decide whether to close a popular hiking trail, in order to protect a wolf den, it is of no use to them to know only that both wolves and hiking are important to citizens. They need to know whether wolves are more, or less, important than hiking. But public participation processes provide virtually no information about those weightings.
As an observer of the Study, I gained a new appreciation for the difficulties faced by government officials if they truly wish to choose those uses of public lands that best satisfy the competing demands of their populations. It occurred to me, however, that as economics is concerned with “… the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends” economic analysis might be able to provide some of the answers park managers were seeking; and I began a search for economically-based techniques for determining “appropriate use.”
My contributions to this blogsite will track my long, often lonely, search for the answer to this question, a question that I subsume under the general heading of “environmental decision-making.” My trek leads through topics as varied as eco-labeling, eco-tourism, consensus-building, contingent valuation, enviro-capitalism, environmental impact assessments, and negotiated rulemaking. I will also deviate off into issues such as the question of whether parks are the best method of protecting the landscape, the determination of the appropriate form of scientific methodology to be employed in environmental research, and the analysis of games of bargaining.
