Management of Publicly Owned Forests

Abstract

For two reasons, planning and implementing management for publicly-owned forests is conducted in an environment that almost guarantees failure. First, group ownership is associated with a strong tendency towards over-exploitation (the tragedy of the commons), and second public ownership entails a heavy administrative overhead.The public allows industry to use publicly-owned forests and spends the revenue from exploitation on roads, schools health care, unemployment insurance and so on. The public owners are unwilling to limit industrial use of the forest to keep it in balance with the productive capacity of the forests because this would limit the benefits they receive and because they do not as individuals experience the shared cost of exploitation. Meanwhile, the people who own 90% of Canada's forests have until recently seen fit to spend only 5% of the taxes derived from their industrial use for maintaining their productive capacity. In effect the people of Canada are slum landlords. Like slum landlords, they have not returned to their properties enough money for their basic maintenance. The biggest problem in managing our public forests is in overcoming the owners' resistance to spending enough of the money generated by the forests to manage them in a technically adequate way over long period of time.The second major problem is the tendency of the agencies managing publicly-owned forests to shift from managing the forest to managing its use. This arises partly from the way in which the owners (the public) participate in the management process and partly because public money is used for management.The public owns the resource and must set goals. Unfortunately because they are so remote from the property and their understanding of resource dynamics is so trivial, the public tend to state vague goals accompanied by specific management actions with little thought to the cause/effect connections between them. Technically designed management tends to be over-ridden by socially comfortable solutions that do not solve the real management problems existing in the woods.Use of public funds necessitates creating a paper trail satisfactory to auditors. Consequently professionals responsible for managing the public forests find themselves spending more and more time ensuring that the administrative reporting of actions taken is up to date and in the proper form, and less and less time ensuring that the actions taken are the technically right ones to achieve the stated goals in the forest.