Open for All: How Are Federal and Municipal Land Management Agencies Adapting to the COVID-19 Pandemic Alongside Increased Societal Recognition of Racial Injustice

Michelle L Johnson,Sophie Plitt,Lindsay K Campbell,Erika S Svendsen

doi:10.3389/frsc.2021.725620

Michelle L Johnson, Sophie Plitt + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2021.725620

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Abstract

In addition to impacts on human health and the economy, COVID-19 is changing the way humans interact with open space. Across urban to rural settings, public lands–including forests and parks – experienced increases and shifts in recreational use. At the same time, certain public lands have become protest spaces as part of the public uprisings around racial injustice throughout the country. Land managers are adapting in real-time to compound disturbances. In this study, we explore the role of the public land manager during this time across municipal and federal lands and an urban-rural gradient. We ask: How adaptable are public land managers and agencies in their recreation management, collaborative partnerships, and public engagement to social disturbances such as COVID-19 and the co-occurring crisis of systemic racial injustice brought to light by the BLM uprisings and protests? This paper applies qualitative data drawn from a sample of land managers across the northeastern United States. We explore management in terms of partnership arrangements, recreational and educational programs, and stakeholder engagement practices and refine an existing model of organizational resilience. The study finds abiding: reports of increased public lands usership; calls for investment in maintenance; and need for diversity, equity, and inclusion in both organizational settings and landscapes themselves; and the need for workforce capacity. We discover effective ways to respond to compound disturbances that include open and reflective communication, transforming organizational cultures, and transboundary partnerships that are valued as critical assets.

Highlights

In addition to the devastating impacts on human health and the global economy, COVID-19 has changed the way humans interact with open space, natural resources, and public lands (Soga et al, 2021)
Civil society–including non-governmental organizations and civic groups– provide capacity for environmental stewardship (Svendsen and Campbell, 2008), engage in programming and planning that axctivate open space to function as social infrastructure (Campbell et al, 2021), and participate as key brokers in environmental governance networks (Connolly et al, 2013, 2014), but they are uneven across the landscape (Johnson et al, 2019). Given this context and background, we posed the overarching research question: How adaptable are public land managers and agencies in their recreation management, collaborative partnerships, and public engagement to large scale social disturbances such as COVID-19 and the co-occurring crisis of systemic racial injustice brought to light by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprisings and protests? We conducted semi-structured interviews with representatives of two public land management agencies operating under different authorities and geographic contexts: urban forested parks in New York City (NYC) operated by the City of New York Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks) and National Forests within the Eastern Region (Region 9, or R9) of the USDA Forest Service National Forest System (Forest Service)
We found that while public land management is structured to respond to disturbances that are typically related to extreme weather, visitor safety, wildlife, and wildfire, responding to the impact of COVID-19 was different in several ways for the land management community and forming a shared ideology

Summary

Introduction

In addition to the devastating impacts on human health and the global economy, COVID-19 has changed the way humans interact with open space, natural resources, and public lands (Soga et al, 2021). Many land managers were often deemed “essential”, operating under new protocols to ensure that these resources remained open to the public. Public land managers in both rural and urban settings had to adapt old practices in realtime to a new and changing reality (Jacobs et al, 2020; McGinlay et al, 2020; Miller-Rushing et al, 2021; Sainz-Santamaría and Martinez-Cruz, 2021). As the crisis deepened and spread, the impacts on how public land managers steward natural resources and support recreation and public engagement opportunities continued to unfold

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