A policy design analysis of federal forest policy

Abstract

The intent of this thesis is to apply policy design analysis to federal forest policy in the United States. This thesis describes alternative policy analysis frameworks and argues that a policy design approach is the most useful for analyzing federal forest policy and for understanding the intense social conflict which surrounds forest policy today. This paper will argue that present conflicts stem from the inability of past forest policy designs to simultaneously pursue the important social goals of economic development, ecological sustainability and social democracy. What is needed is an approach to forest policy which can address and ameliorate these conflicts. This will require several changes in the underlying assumptions of natural resource management. Ecosystem management, as an alternative approach to forest policy, will be discussed and analyzed in order to identify in what ways forest policy may change and to speculate about the implications of these changes.