Abstract
U.S. Western rangelands are inherently dynamic systems where policies are in tension with issues of scale and uncertainty. It is difficult for federal rangeland managers to nimbly respond to real-time conditions, interannual variability, or events such as wildfire. Management challenges such as these span multiple spatial, temporal, and political scales and cannot be overcome by command-and-control approaches. Beginning in 2017, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has sought to integrate greater flexibility into federal rangeland management through a series of initiatives that I collectively term “outcome-based rangeland management” (OBM) in this dissertation. In contrast to traditionally prescriptive approaches to rangeland administration, OBM was envisioned to offer a collaborative means for BLM staff and livestock grazing permittees to adaptively respond to place-specific challenges by (1) identifying desired social, economic, and ecological outcomes for grazing allotments, and (2) adaptively managing to achieve desired outcomes.OBM is an attempt to address the persistent difficulty of crafting governance rules for sustainable resource management while also providing avenues for experimentation, learning, and adaptation to occur. This dissertation considers this theme by examining OBM implementation on Idaho’s BLM rangelands and asks: Within a federal policy context, what institutional arrangements can accommodate flexible, adaptive rangeland management approaches? The first article uses comparative case studies of BLM field areas to elucidate how informal and formal institutions interact and create (or eliminate) arenas of discretion for actors to implement outcome-based approaches to address wildfire risk on Idaho’s BLM rangelands. The next article uses a co-management framework to examine actors and processes engaged when OBM was first envisioned and offers a perspective on the institutional work necessary if principles of OBM are to be legitimated and, eventually, institutionalized. The final article is conceptual and builds on the two empirical studies by bringing to the fore the scale at which outcome-based processes and adaptive management, more generally, must occur. By focusing on the desired outcome of long-term ecosystem resilience to fire, I propose social and biophysical variables to define the scales for effective outcome-based thinking, planning, and management.
This dissertation has implications for public managers seeking to clarify the boundaries of administrative discretion within the realm of adaptive management. Through an in-depth look at the intersection of institutions and local context, this dissertation explicates the roles of actors and processes working at multiple scales to maintain or modify the institutional landscape to support administrative approaches that better reflect local conditions.