No abstract

In the on‐going sociological debate over rural‐urban differences, rural conflict over natural resources is often attributed to environmental attitudes of new residents from urban areas. An alternative hypothesis is that new residents provide not new attitudes, but a new voice for attitudes already held by many local residents. Data from a survey of residents of communities near two national forests show little support for the hypothesis that residential status affects forest management attitudes, dissatisfaction, or action. The findings support the “new‐voice” thesis and show that it is often a female voice.

This paper synthesizes key issues identified and explored by a mix of practitioners, researchers, and resource managers who participated in a workshop designed to understand community-based ecosystem management. The interdependence between healthy ecosystems and community well-being lies at the heart of community-based ecosystem management.

Economic development interventions often do not account for the social, cultural, and political differences among populations being served. Factors that make economic development projects successful in Native American communities are not well known or adequately studied. Drawing on a capital asset framework and the governance hypothesis advanced by Cornell and Kalt, the authors analyze how six Pacific Northwest tribes applied Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative funds to diverse projects, which strategies were successful, and why. The data presented show that culturally congruent, community-based projects that meet multiple tribal goals are particularly successful. The authors discuss the necessity of investing in tribal cultural, institutional, and social capital, the value of efficient tribal bureaucracy that maximizes the benefits of sovereignty, the particular importance of building outside entities' understanding of tribal legal and cultural differences, and how the initiative interfaced with existing tribal structures. They offer lessons learned for tribal economic and community development.

An important part of the Northwest Forest Plan was 1.2 billion dollars of community development assistance made available to northern California, Oregon, and Washington through the Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative (NEAI). The NEAI developed a complex institutional structure to eliminate regional administrative gridlock and enable workers and families, businesses, communities, and tribes that depended on forest product-based economies to regain or improve their economic and social well-being. As part of an evaluation of NEAI that included 31 community case studies, institutional analysis gauged how the initiative's institutional and organizational structure affected program implementation. This paper examines how the institutional analysis complemented the community case studies, the use of Schneider and Ingram's policy design framework as a tool for describing and assessing the initiative's institutional design, and the lessons learned from the overall evaluation.