Organizational Response to Integrated Land Management Planning: NFMA and the U.S. Forest Service (United States).

Capitalizing on the initial efforts of the U.S. Forest Service to comply with the National Forest Management Act of 1976 (NFMA), this study sought to (1) identify factors that appear to influence the adoption of integrated l and management planning and (2) explore different approaches to implementing NFMA focusing particularly on organizational and environmental complexity as an influencing factor. Two additional questions pertaining to matters of policy and administration concern the wisdom of implementing a policy requiring uniformity and consistency in a heretofore decentralized agency, and whether the Forest Service should have expected all National Forests, located in widely different environments, to adopt planning in a similar fashion. The study setting includes Region 6 of the Forest Service consisting of 19 national forests located in Oregon and Washington. Data for this study are of two types. The description of the forests and their operating environments are based largely on secondary data from sources such as the U.S. Bureau of the Census and Forest Service records. The second type of data was obtained from a questionnaire sent to 127 planners on the 19 forests in the region. The underlying hypothesis of this study was that the more complex forests would behave in a manner more consistent with the concepts of integrated l and management planning. The findings support the hypothesis with respect to such issues as leadership, tasks associated with plan development, innovativeness of interdisciplinary planning teams and the magnitude of interest group pressure. Complexity level did not account for differences in the area of problems related to managing the introduction of a complex innovation within the Agency. Problems reported to cause disfunction included excessive influence from the central administration, the length of time required to develop plans and the political nature and lack of clear requirements in the planning process. Additional problems centered on the appropriateness and utility of FORPLAN as a planning tool and the perceived imbalance when considering all resources in the planning process. Participants comments indicate a strong sense of frustration, futility and low morale. Improvements in future forest planning efforts will require that attention be given to effective management styles at the forest level that target planning behavior with legislative intent.PhDUrban planningUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161212/1/8702690.pd