When economists talk about environment decision-making, they are usually referring to techniques such as cost-benefit analysis, tradable pollution permits, and contingent valuation. But when non-economists – biologists, foresters, land managers, sociologists, political scientists, ecologists, etc. – discuss environmental decision-making, they virtually never mention these techniques.
Instead, among non-economists, academic analyses in recent years have concentrated primarily on techniques variously known as public participation, consensus-building, collaborative decision-making, and alternative dispute resolution. In each case, the underlying presumption is that decisions about the environment will not be made by government bureaucrats, but collaboratively by those private individuals who have an interest in how our land, water, and air are used.
In most cases, the presumption is that the government will bring together all of the interested parties – for example, environmentalists, recreational users, farmers, and logging companies – and require that those parties reach a consensus on how the resources in a particular region will be used. The government’s role in most of these cases is that of facilitator and implementer; but it does not (necessarily) participate actively in the development of the policy.
In some cases, however, private citizens have voluntarily formed their own collaborative groups and have designed environmental policies without the active participation of the relevant government agencies. The most famous of these collaborations has become known as the Quincy Library Group.
Quincy is a small resource-based town in northeastern California. For fifteen years, the area (of about 2.3 million acres) had been the subject of raging controversies among environmentalists, logging companies, and the government. Finally, in 1992, a county supervisor, an environmental activist, and a senior executive from one of the largest logging companies, began a series of meetings at the Quincy Library to try and devise a compromise plan that could be supported by all stakeholder groups.
As word of these meetings spread, more and more people became involved, until representatives of most of the interest groups were attending. By the end of 1993, the Quincy Library Group (QLG), as it had become known by then, had developed a plan that was widely accepted within the region. When the Forest Service refused to implement this plan, it was taken to Washington, D.C., where Congress passed the Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery and Economic Stability Act in 1997; and the Senate, somewhat reluctantly, approved funding in 1998.
The success of the QLG provided an important turning-point in many analysts’ thinking about environmental decision-making as it showed that, when the benefits of cooperation are sufficient, antagonistic groups with seemingly inconsistent agendas may be able to reach consensus - even in the absence of government inducements. Subsequently, a huge literature has developed (i) to analyze the conditions under which collaborative decisions will be reached; and (ii) to enquire whether such decisions can be expected to be socially desirable.
Also, numerous voluntary associations similar to the QLG have developed in the environmental field. The Applegate Partnership was formed by an environmentalist and a logger who were trying to resolve the lengthy legal and political battles that had created gridlock in the Applegate watershed of southwestern Oregon. The Whiskey Creek Group is a coalition of wilderness users who were concerned about delays in the preparation of a management plan for four wilderness areas in California’s Sierra Nevada. An informal group composed of representatives of state and federal governments, environmental groups, and farmers has been meeting since 1996 to resolve disputes between environmentalists and farmers concerning the use of the Platte River in Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska. And environmentalists and farmers in the Brownsville region of Texas formed an informal committee to respond to the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to protect the aplomado falcon by banning many of the pesticides used on cotton fields.
What the success of these groups, and many others like them, suggest is that it is not necessary that environmental decisions be made by centralized, government agencies. In the same way that you and your significant other are able to agree what color the living room should be or where you should go for your annual vacation, maybe environmentalists, recreationists, and developers can negotiate how a river or national forest should be managed.
[For further information about the QLG, I highly recommend their website, which carries a fair sample of both positive and negative commentaries, at: http://www.qlg.org]
