Public participation and appeals of forest service plans—An empirical examination

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Abstract
The National Forest Management Act requires the Forest Service to give individuals and organizations access to the planning process. Due to the greater than anticipated level of dissatisfaction with the land management plans, the role of public participation in the planning process has been questioned. The conflict experienced results from disagreement between individuals, interest groups, and the Forest Service about proposed management actions, about how the decisions were made, and fundamental beliefs about what actions are appropriate on public lands. We obtained information about the public participation activity conducted by the Forest Service during development of 61 forest land management plans and about the appeals of these plans. To examine the relationship between public participation and conflict in Forest Service planning (measured in terms of forest plan appeals), we hypothesize conflict to be a function of public participation effort, the extent to which publics perceived their concerns were addressed, and attributes of each forest. Using logistic regression, we found that some measures of forest resource attributes are important in determining the probability of a high number of forest plan appeals and that small group participation activities were important in reducing the probability of a high number of appeals.