Increasing droughts and water shortages are intensifying the need for residential water conservation. We identify and classify 24 water conservation studies using the information–motivation–behavioral skills (IMB) model by categorizing interventions based on content and water conservation effectiveness. This synthesis revealed several insights. First, all of the interventions used information, motivation, and/or behavioral skills, suggesting that water conservation interventions can be interpreted within the IMB framework. Second, interventions with two or more IMB components led to reductions in water usage, but the average effect sizes between different types of interventions were similar and there was a considerable range around these averages. To the extent that intervention effectiveness is driven by populations lacking specific IMB components, more elicitation research to identify gaps in specific populations could support greater effectiveness. Designing interventions explicitly with the IMB model would facilitate comparability across studies and could support a better understanding of water conservation interventions.
Modern bureaucracy faces trade-offs between public and congressional input and agency expertise. The U.S. Forest Service offers an opportunity to quantitatively analyze whether an agency that is required to be more open to the public and congressional input will be forced to ignore its technical expertise in managing resources. This study uses data on 83,000 hazardous fuels reduction activities conducted by the Forest Service from 2001 to 2011. Although the results show that managers are responsive to public and congressional considerations, this has not prevented them from utilizing their technical knowledge to restore lands most deviated from natural conditions. This suggests that managers can balance responsiveness to public and political principals with technically sound management. C 2013 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.In recent decades, advancements in science have required management agencies to incorporate increasingly technical factors into their management decisions. One way to manage these technical problems would be to hire homogenous managers (Kaufman, 1960) and insulate the agency from political control (Bawn, 1995;Epstein & O'Halloran, 1994). However, management agencies have also faced an increasing imperative to be more open to public input. Openness to public and political input means that agencies may face conflicting political, public, and technical imperatives. The policy question agencies face, therefore, is how to respond to input from the public and Congress while taking advantage of technical expertise, when these two imperatives could trade-off.The organization of the U.S. Forest Service and its implementation of forest fire policy offer a compelling empirical test that allows us to understand whether openness comes at the price of neglect of technical implementation of policy. Forest fires have ecological benefits (Agee, 1998), but because they can destroy lives, property, and livelihoods, managers face pressure from the public and from Congress to avoid losses. The consequences of wildland fire are immense. For example, the Bastrop County Complex wildfire in Texas in 2011 burned over 34,000 acres, destroyed about 1,600 homes, killed two people, and resulted in losses of $400 million (Badger, 2012).Since Kaufman's 1960 publication of The Forest Ranger, which argued that the organizational culture of the Forest Service could encourage dispersed Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 32, No. 3, 554-573 (2013 Technical Management in an Age of Openness / 555 frontline managers to advance the centralized goals of the agency, 1 the political, economic, and technical environments have changed considerably (Tipple & Wellman, 1991). Scholars have pointed out that the Forest Service has undergone three main changes: an increased focus on ecological concerns (e.g., Brown & Harris, 2000), more openness to citizen and interest group input via such laws as the National Environmental Policy Act (e.g., Halvorsen, 2001), and less insulation from congressio...
Environmental regulations frequently mandate the use of "best available" science, but ensuring that it is used in decisions around the use and protection of natural resources is often challenging. In the Western US, this relationship between science and management is at the forefront of postfire land management decisions. Recent fires, post-fire threats (e.g. flooding, erosion), and the role of fire in ecosystem health combine to make post-fire management highly visible and often controversial. This paper uses post-fire management to present a framework for understanding why disconnects between science and management decisions may occur. We argue that attributes of agencies, such as their political or financial incentives, can limit how effectively science is incorporated into decision-making. At the other end of the spectrum, lack of synthesis or limited data in science can result in disconnects between science-based analysis of post-fire effects and agency policy and decisions. Disconnects also occur because of the interaction between the attributes of agencies and the attributes of science, such as their different spatial and temporal scales of interest. After offering examples of these disconnects in post-fire treatment, the paper concludes with recommendations to reduce disconnects by improving monitoring, increasing synthesis of scientific findings, and directing social science research toward identifying and deepening understanding of these disconnects.
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