Implementing Innovation: Fostering Enduring Change in Environmental and Natural Resource Governance

CHAPTER 5 Misalignment of Institutional Characteristics: Implementing Innovation in Forest Management

CHAPTER 5 Misalignment of Institutional Characteristics Implementing Innovation in Forest Management THE USFS HAS BEENTHE PRIMARY ACTOR within the forest governance system, as detailed in chapter 2 and depicted in figure 5.1. Even though the agency was decentralized, it consolidated decision-making authority at the federal level. This centralized base of power was challenged in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s as new constitutive-level laws gave participants outside the agency power to participate in decision making. The rise of environmental groups at the national level was essential to this change. As timber sales slowed at the national level, communities dependent on forest products began searching for alternatives to their social and economic problems. Beginning in the 1980s community-based forestry groups throughout the United States saw the need to organize at the collective level to effect change at the constitutive level. By the mid-2000s the number of community-based forestry groups was estimated at two thousand.1 Some of these groups and their efforts have been effective in fostering change, while others have not. It is into this historical mix of actors and influences that the innovations on the Camino Real Ranger District (Camino Real) in New Mexico took place. Placed within the broader context of communal land management in the Southwest (as detailed in chapter 2), this case illustrates the challenges of implementing innovation in a context where institutional characteristics are misaligned. Efforts to manage forests on the Camino Real had been fraught with controversy for decades. The innovations pursued from 1991 to 1998 were in decline by 2009. Community forestry has been characterized as “a process that seeks to reverse historical drawdowns of natural and community capital through reinvestment and redirection of benefit flows toward local groups who have previously not been part of the broader political landscape of 138 Misalignment of Institutional Characteristics 139 pluralistic political process.”2 The Camino Real case study illustrates the considerable challenges of altering historical structure, culture, and individual incentive structures to create the institutional space for these new practices to thrive. The innovation on the Camino Real was the process of Collaborative Stewardship that resulted in numerous improvements in land management relative to the constituencies serviced by the Camino Real. This process was innovative for both the USFS and the communities that were dependent on the USFS for access to natural resources. INNOVATIONS IN FOREST MANAGEMENT: VOLUNTARY REGULATION IN THE CAMINO REAL RANGER DISTRICT The Camino Real is on the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. Nestled among the mountains are numerous small, Hispano land grant villages.3 In addition to the Hispano populations, the Native American Picuris Pueblo is surrounded by the Camino Real on three sides. Conflict, frustration, violent uprisings, and litigation typified the relationships between the USFS and inhabitants of these picturesque mountains and valleys for decades. More than 25 percent of the land in northern New Mexico is under the management of the USFS.4 Clashes over land and land Figure 5.1: Hierarchical Influences on Forest Governance National • USFS • Environmental interest groups • American forests Constitutive • Creative Act and Organic Act • Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act • NEPA • RPA • NFMA • EAP, stewardship contracting language in other laws State • Cooperative State Forestry Local • Timber industry interests • USFS ranger districts • Municipal forest management in New England • Communal land management in New Mexico • Community-based forestry groups Collective • Communal land management • Northern New Mexico Policy • Community-based forestry • Lead Partnership Group • Communities Committee Operational • Tree wardens • Communal land management • Stewardship contracts • Multiparty monitoring Camino Real Ranger District Bottom Up Top Down 140 CHAPTER 5 use were at the heart of most controversies in the region. Consequently, when local communities and the USFS started working together on land use concerns in the early 1990s, it was a noteworthy event. USFS officials faced decades of challenges from the Hispano landowners and more recently from environmentalists over management practices on public lands. Hispano residents and environmentalists used civil disobedience, violence, the legal system, and general protests to affect the way forests were managed in northern New Mexico. At various times since the 1940s, the USFS responded to these demands with innovative policies to better serve local populations. However, each time, the innovations faded under the internal pressures of the agency to serve larger industrial forest interests or the interests of its own bureaucracy. The most recent attempt to respond to local populations emerged out of the work...