Failure to Communicate: Inefficiencies in Voluntary Incentive Programs for Private Forest Owners in Michigan

Mark Rouleau,Audrey Mayer,Miranda Smith,Jennifer Lind-Riehl

doi:10.3390/f7090199

Abstract

Coordinating forest management across thousands of nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) owners is a difficult yet necessary task for state land management agencies. Voluntary Incentive Programs (VIPs) can coordinate the decentralized activities of these owners in return for services or financial incentives. However, many VIPs typically have low enrollment. Our study investigates the implementation of VIPs to increase forest management coordination among NIPFs in Michigan. We present findings from 20 semi-structured interviews with leaders of state and local land management organizations, and government officials at state natural resource agencies, and contrast their answers with those recorded from 37 interviews of NIPF owners regarding their knowledge and attitudes toward VIPs. Our interviews highlight a critical disconnect between NIPF owner motivations and VIP incentives, as well as misallocated resources for VIP promotion by state agencies, driving low enrollment. At the core, low enrollment in VIPs is generated by inadequate communication between NIPF owners and program managers, along with distrust of government agency objectives. Viewing managers as “street level bureaucrats”, civil servants whose job discretion is impacted heavily by available resources, may increase our understanding of the issues plaguing VIPs and help identify improvements to VIP design and implementation.

Highlights

Individual private landowners greatly impact regional ecosystems at multiple scales [1]
According to [15], there are many questions left unanswered, such as how decentralized land management efforts impact management practices. They suggest that further research is needed to determine how incentives and interactions between non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners and land management organizations encourage NIPF owner behaviors and intentions to align with the policy goals of resource management agencies. Our research explores this issue in great detail to explain why the problem of voluntary incentive programs (VIPs) under-enrollment persists in the Western Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan, an area of the United States that is a logical fit for VIP management
The most common themes that emerged from our interviews with management agencies related to: (1) inadequate resources for agency staff and incentive funds, (2) inadequate and inefficient outreach to potential NIPF owner enrollees, (3) problems navigating existing programs due to regulatory complexity, (4) the need for non-governmental proxies to simplify VIP choices and buffer NIPF owners from direct contact with government agencies perceived to be hostile to private property interests, (5) the role of and potential for conflict of interest among existing proxies, and (6) the possibility of underserved NIPF owner goals within the existing program landscape

Summary

Introduction

Individual private landowners greatly impact regional ecosystems at multiple scales [1]. It is critical that land managers coordinate the management decisions of often thousands of non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners to achieve broad forest management and conservation goals [2]. Such coordination is important for addressing a wide variety of forest conservation concerns, from controlling the spread of invasive species, to mitigating ecological responses to climate change, and even ensuring adequate provision of economic forest resources such as timber and pulp [3,4,5,6,7]. Large-scale coordination is difficult for state land management agencies, in a regulatory environment that strongly favors the land use autonomy of NIPF owners This is why many land management agencies use voluntary incentive programs (VIPs) to “encourage” the adoption of informed land management practices on private lands. Given that private landowners voluntarily participate in VIPs, this makes it possible for regulatory agencies to minimize their oversight

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