New Approaches in Organizing for Land and Water Use

Abstract

RM /rANY DECISIONS about major commitments to particular land and water uses are basically irreversible, to use Wantrup'sl term, and self-destructive as defined by Shackle.2 Once made, the participants cannot return to their former position; subdivisions are not easily made into open space nor does one dam site readily replace another after the installation is in place. The decisions are not repeated in large numbers. The elements making action possible are destroyed in the act. The bases for these decisions are expectations, not with certainty, but with uncertainty about the turn of future events. The act of decision is creative of a new situation; it is man stepping into the unknown of the next moment of time. These are not situations in a determined system or even a game, although institutions exist in a dynamic sense, and their structuring effect is itself the subject of decision. To the uncertainties faced by an individual in making a landor water-use decision must be added those inherent in public group action-action which is public policy and which, more often than not, decides the ends simultaneously with the means. My own attention in this paper centers upon the public sphere but necessarily includes the interaction of both. The processes by which the public decisions are made have been analyzed by Lindblom3 as being incremental mutual adjustments, and some observers of this process have been called due-process realists by Schubert.4 All this implies the dynamic-pluralistic frame of reference of midtwentieth century western democracy. It is within this context that land and water planning must be organized and function, whether at the local, state, or national level. The planners face the question of what to do-to zone, to buy a park site, to construct a road, to cut timber, to build a dam, to reserve land from food production, or one of many other types of decisions. These are not empty decisions; they are real, albeit bound by a dynamic situational context with stochastic elements. Does planning make sense from this standpoint? Do we share the point of view recently expressed by a water planner in California, What I'm