Suchergebnisse

12 pages ; The purpose of this paper is to examine similarities and differences between treatment of forest workers and small and disadvantaged businesses performing the same work in Oregon: a.) under existing federal pathways for accomplishing forest restoration work, and; b.) under the Good Neighbor Authority pathway, which allows for the use of state procurement law to accomplish work on federal land. ; This work was funded via an agreement with the Oregon Department of Forestry.

This paper examines micro-processes of institutionalization, using the case of stewardship contracting within the US Forest Service. Our basic premise is that, until a new policy becomes an everyday practice among local actors, it will not become institutionalized at the macro-scale. We find that micro-processes of institutionalization are driven by a mixture of large-scale institutional dynamics and how frontline decision-makers understand and interpret these dynamics, given the local social and ecological context in which they operate. For example, this paper suggests that a new policy may become institutionalized when it is understood to solve problems that old institutions at once create and demand to be solved. Agency actors cannot be conceptualized as untethered from the institutions in which they operate. Yet, within larger institutional dynamics, field personnel make key choices about whether to adopt a new policy, making them important players in the micro-processes of policy institutionalization. The interplay of actors and institutions turns agencies, such as the Forest Service, into complex systems that cannot be understood as artifacts of their own history or as a sum of the decisions of individual actors. This dynamic also implies that macro-level institutional change will be uneven, incomplete, and gradual, mirroring uneven, contingent micro-level processes. Adapted from the source document.

12 pages ; The federal government is the largest landowner in many western communities. It contributes to local socioeconomic vitality by providing opportunities for businesses and partners to perform land management activities and process natural resources. How federal agencies produce these benefits depends on the type of mechanism (e.g., timber sales, service contracts, or stewardship contracts and agreements) used to sell goods or procure services. To perform land management work on the ground, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service or U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management typically goes "to the market" by soliciting service contracts or offering timber sales in the private sector. The agency also chooses how to structure the opportunity—for example, setting an amount of timber to be sold or acres to be treated—and selects a business to purchase goods or perform work. In turn, how this business conducts work further determines community benefits such as the number of jobs created or retained and the wages paid. ; This project was made possible by funding from the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities and USDA Rural Development.

AbstractThe institutional landscape for public land management in the U.S. West underwent a seismic shift in the 1990s as the long‐dominant resource extraction paradigm was replaced by the ecosystem management paradigm. Here we analyze the efforts of community‐based organizations (CBOs), entities that emerged in some locations across the West to help their respective communities navigate the transition from resource extraction to environmental stewardship. Despite their formal status as civil society actors, in practice CBOs came to fill various institutional gaps by taking on roles traditionally assigned to both the state and the private sector. We use a case study approach to examine how the Hayfork, California–based Watershed Research and Training Center engages in institutional work within a setting that is at once both open and constrained, as the rural community within which it operates lacks strong state‐ or industry‐led development trajectories while remaining constrained by the legacies of past institutions.