Community Engagement in National Forest Management Planning: An Analysis of Revised Forest Plans
| dc.contributor.advisor | Wald, Sarah | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Gash, Alison | |
| dc.contributor.author | Rangel-Lynch, Megan | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-08-18T15:58:54Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-08-18T15:58:54Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2023 | |
| dc.description | 84 pages | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | Historically, mainstream environmental movements in the United States have been entrenched in settler colonialist ideologies, and white or wealthy individuals have been considered the only legitimate environmental stakeholders. These privileged groups have disproportionately influenced land management decision-making. There is a need for land management to continue in a way that respects tribal sovereignty and engages communities of color, whose claims to public lands have been marginalized, disputed, or erased. Scientific literature has reported that collaboration among multiple stakeholders is essential for achieving the ecological and socioeconomic goals of forest management. However, little research has been done on what it would mean to prioritize environmental justice in managing national forests. The research presented here examines how the United States Forest Service (USFS) sought to engage public stakeholders during recent forest plan revision processes and explores the extent that the USFS employed tactics that engage historically underrepresented communities and tribal nations. This thesis is the result of a community-engaged research process focused on qualitative document analysis of publicly-available federal documents produced from forest plan revision processes. Objective assertions were made about the specific tactics used to include the public in a revision process. Connections were then made between comments from the public, direct statements from the USFS, trends noticed in public behavior, and recommendations from equity and engagement literature to make assertions about the attention the USFS gave to an equitable, inclusive public participation process. This research determined the USFS was effective in making available a variety of opportunities for members of the public who have been typically engaged in land management planning, but there is room to improve in targeting underrepresented groups and ensuring tactics meaningfully involve a diverse set of stakeholders. As the USFS works to provide a greater array and more innovative tactics for public engagement, they must continue to employ a range of tactics, as web-based options are not accessible to all populations and certain tactics have proven to be more effective for engaging underrepresented groups. Further, a very limited number of tactics were employed beyond the USFS’s legal requirement to consult tribes. The USFS not only has the ability to ensure more meaningful inclusion of tribes within existing engagement tactics, but also should consider a future of land management based on principles of comanagement and Indigenous sovereignty. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.orcid | 0009-0006-4355-4451 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/28712 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | |
| dc.subject | National forests | en_US |
| dc.subject | Public participation | en_US |
| dc.subject | Land management policy | en_US |
| dc.subject | United States Forest Service | en_US |
| dc.title | Community Engagement in National Forest Management Planning: An Analysis of Revised Forest Plans | |
| dc.type | Thesis/Dissertation |