PA 565 Natural Resource Policy and Administration

Reviews the history, politics, and institutions related to current environmental and natural resource policy and its administration. Reviews policy domains like land and forest, water, energy, fish and wildlife, and environmental quality. Special attention is paid to policy and administrative governance issues like sustaining common pool goods, structuring intergovernmental relations, and evaluating policy implementation strategies of direct production, planning, regulation, and changing market incentives. A central premise is that natural resource administrators face a policy arena that is intrinsically problematic because of the dynamic nature of social values about natural resources, the long time horizon implicit in resource systems, the broadening geographic scale considered in natural resources decisions, and the interdependency of social and ecological communities. Recommended as a first course in the environmental and natural resource administration specialization.