The San Bernardino National Forest in southern California experienced an unprecedented bark beetle outbreak in the early 2000s. The outbreak, coupled with a looming threat of catastrophic wildfire, droughts, changing forest management priorities, and a legacy of poor forest management practices coalesced to create a challenge that existing institutions and management agencies could not address. In response, an interagency collaborative effort, the Mountain Area Taskforce (MAST), was initiated. Based on key informant interviews, this paper details how this new governance organization emerged and how it effectively addressed a landscape scale forest challenge. Forest governance analyses often focus attention on macroscales, overlooking the microlevel arrangements that set MAST apart from other responses to bark beetle outbreaks. Interagency collaboration has taken on greater importance in efforts to address forest management at landscape scales and this case study provides important insights into the challenges and opportunities of these new governance arrangements. 1. Introduction In 2001, Southern California’s forests experienced the largest bark beetle outbreak on record. The magnitude of the outbreak, which peaked between 2003 and 2004, led to unprecedented forest dieback, which dramatically altered the forest landscape and contributed to extensive socioeconomic consequences. Subsequent to the outbreak, devastating fires occurred across southern California in 2003. In the San Bernardino National Forest (SBNF) the “Old” and “Grand Prix” fires merged, burned 5,863 hectares of forest, destroyed thousands of homes, and cost more than $2 billion in firefighting and property damage [1, 2]. Another fire, in 2007, in the San Bernardino Mountains burned hundreds of more homes. The “Station Fire” in the Angeles National Forest just outside of Los Angeles in the fall of 2009 once again brought national attention to forest management issues in the region. In this paper, we examine a systems-based collaborative effort, the Mountain Areas Safety Taskforce (MAST), that mobilized to address a forest health crisis in southern California’s forests. We present two arguments about natural resource collaborative decision making. First, based on a three-level approach (Table 1), we argue that problems visible at a macrolevel (forest health crisis) require not only an examination of mesolevel governance arrangements but also the microfeatures of interagency collaborations such as MAST and the on-the-ground implementation of its programs. In this case, these microlevel
References
[1]
M. L. Bond, D. E. Lee, C. M. Bradley, and C. T. Hanson, “Influence of pre-fire tree mortality on fire severity in conifer forests of the San Bernardino Mountains, California,” The Open Forest Science Journal, vol. 2, pp. 41–47, 2009.
[2]
A. E. Dunn, A. Gonzalez-Caban, and K. Solari, The Old, Grand Prix, and Padua Wildfires: How Much Did These Fires Really Cost?USDA Forest Service, Riverside, Calif, USA, 2005.
[3]
C. Tollefson, A. R. Zito, and F. Gale, “Symposium overview: conceptualizing new governance arrangements,” Public Administration, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 3–18, 2012.
[4]
M. Howlett, J. Rayner, and C. Tollefson, “From government to governance in forest planning? Lessons from the case of the British Columbia Great Bear Rainforest initiative,” Forest Policy and Economics, vol. 11, no. 5-6, pp. 383–391, 2009.
[5]
O. E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting, Free Press, New York, NY, USA, 1985.
[6]
R. A. W. Rhodes, “The new governance: governing without government,” Political Studies, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 652–667, 1996.
[7]
D. Sprinz and T. Vaahtoranta, “The interest-based explanation of international environmental policy,” International Organization, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 77–105, 1994.
[8]
M. Howlett and J. Rayner, “Globalization and governance capacity: explaining divergence in national forest programs as instances of “next-generation” regulation in Canada and Europe,” Governance, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 251–275, 2006.
[9]
J. Voss, D. Bauknecht, and R. Kemp, Eds., Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2006.
[10]
A. Gatto, “The law and governance debate in the European Union,” Discussion Paper, International Institute for Labour Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, 2006.
[11]
J. M. Wondolleck and S. L. Yaffee, Making Collaboration Work: Lessons from Innovation in Natural Resource Management, Island Press, Washington, DC, USA, 2000.
[12]
M. Nie, The Governance of Western Public Lands: Mapping Its Present and Future, University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, Kan, USA, 2008.
[13]
S. Vangen and C. Huxham, “Enacting leadership for collaborative advantage: dilemmas of ideology and pragmatism in the activities of partnership managers,” British Journal of Management, vol. 14, pp. S61–S76, 2003.
[14]
C. Huxham, “Theorizing collaboration practice,” Public Management Review, vol. 5, pp. 401–423, 2003.
[15]
M. Howlett, Designing Public Policies: Principles and Instruments, Routledge, New York, NY, USA, 2011.
[16]
D. Knoke, Political Networks: The Structural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Mass, USA, 1987.
[17]
S. Lukes, Power: A Radical View, Macmillan, London, UK, 1974.
[18]
C. E. Lindblom, The Policy-Making Process, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn, USA, 1977.
[19]
D. McCool, “The subsystem family of concepts: a critique and a proposal,” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 551–570, 1998.
[20]
M. Doelle, C. Henschel, J. Smith, C. Tollefson, and A. Wellstead, “New governance arrangements at the intersection of climate change and forest policy: institutional, political and regulatory dimensions,” Public Administration, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 37–55, 2012.
[21]
T. Moe, “The new economics of organization,” Journal of American Political Science, vol. 28, pp. 739–777, 1984.
[22]
E. Ostrom, “Rational choice and institutional analysis: towards a complementary,” American Political Science Review, vol. 85, pp. 237–243, 1991.
[23]
E. Schlager and W. Blomquist, “A comparison of three emerging theories of the policy process,” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 651–672, 1996.
[24]
P. Sabatier and H. Jenkins-Smith, “The advocacy coalition framework: an assessment,” in Theories of the Policy Process, P. Sabatier, Ed., Westview, Boulder, Colo, USA, 1999.
[25]
R. C. Stedman, “Risk and climate change: perceptions of key policy actors in Canada,” Risk Analysis, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 1395–1406, 2004.
[26]
E. Bardach, Getting Agencies to Work Together: The Practice and Theory of Managerial Craftsmanship, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, USA, 1998.
[27]
C. W. Thomas, Bureaucratic Landscapes: Interagency Cooperation and the Preservation of Biodiversity, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, USA, 2003.
[28]
C. Huxham and S. Vangen, “Doing things collaboratively: realizing the advantage or succumbing to inertia?” IEEE Engineering Management Review, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 11–20, 2004.
[29]
S. Page, “Entrepreneurial strategies for managing interagency collaboration,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 311–340, 2003.
[30]
E. Bardach, “Developmental dynamics: interagency collaboration as an emergent phenomenon,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 149–164, 2001.
[31]
S. Vangen and C. Huxham, “Nurturing collaborative relations: building trust in interorganizational collaboration,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, vol. 39, pp. 5–31, 2003.
[32]
D. P. Moynihan, “The network governance of crisis response: case studies of incident command systems,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 895–915, 2009.
[33]
SBNF, San Bernardino National Forest, 2009, http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/sanbernardino/about/index.shtml.
[34]
USFS. United States Forest Service, Final Environmental Impact Statement, Volume 1. Land Management Plans: Angeles National Forest, Cleveland National Forest, Los Padres National Forest, San Bernardino National Forest, R5-MB-074-A, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Region, 2005.
[35]
K. F. Raffa, B. H. Aukema, B. J. Bentz et al., “Cross-scale drivers of natural disturbances prone to anthropogenic amplification: the dynamics of bark beetle eruptions,” BioScience, vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 501–517, 2008.
[36]
C. D. Allen, “Interactions across spatial scales among forest dieback, fire, and erosion in northern New Mexico landscapes,” Ecosystems, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 797–808, 2007.
[37]
M. J. Jenkins, E. Hebertson, W. Page, and C. A. Jorgensen, “Bark beetles, fuels, fires and implications for forest management in the Intermountain West,” Forest Ecology and Management, vol. 254, no. 1, pp. 16–34, 2008.
[38]
K. F. Raffa, E. N. Powell, and P. A. Townsend, “Temperature-driven range expansion of an irruptive insect heightened by weakly coevolved plant defenses,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 110, no. 6, pp. 2193–2198, 2013.
[39]
M. N. Patriquin, A. M. Wellstead, and W. A. White, “Beetles, trees, and people: regional economic impact sensitivity and policy considerations related to the mountain pine beetle infestation in British Columbia, Canada,” Forest Policy and Economics, vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 938–946, 2007.
[40]
C. G. Flint, B. McFarlane, and M. Müller, “Human dimensions of forest disturbance by insects: an international synthesis,” Environmental Management, vol. 43, no. 6, pp. 1174–1186, 2009.
[41]
L. Merrill, “Bark beetles and tree mortality in the San Bernardino Mountains: current situation and outlook,” Unpublished Report, USDA Forest Service, Region 5, Southern California Shared Service Area, San Bernardino, Calif, USA, 2003.
[42]
N. E. Grulke, R. A. Minnich, T. Paine D et al., “Air pollution increases forest susceptibility to wildfires: a case study in the San Bernardino Mountains in southern California,” in Developments in Environmental Science, Volume 8. Wildland Fires and Air Pollution, A. Bytnerowicz, M. J. Arbaugh, A. R. Riebau, and C. Andersen, Eds., pp. 365–403, Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009.
[43]
R. A. Minnich, M. G. Barbour, J. H. Burk, and R. F. Fernau, “Sixty years of change in Californian conifer forests of the San Bernardino Mountains,” Conservation Biology, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 902–914, 1995.
[44]
J. G. Taylor, S. C. Gillette, R. W. Hodgson et al., “Informing the network: improving communication with interface communities during wildland fire,” Human Ecology Review, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 198–211, 2007.
[45]
G. Rogers, W. Hann, C. Martin, T. Nicolet, and M. Pence, “Fuel treatment effects on fire behavior, suppression effectiveness, and structure ignition. Grass valley fire, San Bernardino National Forest,” Tech. Rep. R5-TP-026a, USDA Forest Service, 2008.
[46]
L. J. Johnson, D. Zorn, B. K. Y. Tam, M. Lamontagne, and S. A. Johnson, “Stakeholders views of factors that impact successful interagency collaboration,” Exceptional Children, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 195–209, 2003.
