Management paradigms for the 78 million hectares of land under the U.S. National Forest System have undergone numerous changes in recent decades, encompassing concepts such as ecosystem management, healthy forests, and—most recently—resilient landscapes. The conceptual turn toward resilience is grounded in recognition of the limitations of conventional management paradigms that viewed forests in terms of their ability to efficiently produce a limited number of specified outputs. With its focus on adaptation, social-ecological integration, and cross-scalar linkages, the resilience paradigm implies potentially substantial revisions not only to national forest management objectives but also to processes of planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, consideration of climate dynamics, and engagement with nongovernmental actors. In this research project, we analyzed whether core elements of the scientific concept of resilience influence national forest planning at the project and forest plan scales. We used a multi-methods approach that included a content analysis of planning documents, case studies of three recent forest plan revision processes, and a survey of U.S. Forest Service planners.
Results/Conclusions
We find that the resilience paradigm is broadly commensurable with medium-term national forest policy trends but that its incorporation into planning and management has been impeded by persistent institutional tensions. We focus on three broad categories of tension between the resilience paradigm and more conventional national forest management paradigms: 1) understanding resilience as distinct from resistance; 2) accounting for complexity of social, ecological, and coupled systems; and 3) the intersection of science and politics. Because the social, policy, and budgetary drivers of U.S. Forest Service management have remained relatively consistent over the scale of years to decades, the latitude for new paradigms such as “resilience” to transform national forest management remains limited. Nevertheless, some individual examples suggest possible models for a more substantive incorporation of resilience principles into national forest planning and management.