Changing the rules.

When it comes to policy, communities traditionally have been excluded from the debate. They say they have something to contribute.

It was by all accounts an extraordinary debate.

The subject was national forest management. The House of Representatives seemed captivated by a California coalition's proposed pilot project, which would consider the economic health of surrounding communities along with the ecological health of forests.

When congressmen took to the floor last July to debate the proposal, the statements were surprisingly bipartisan. And there was widespread praise for the efforts of the community-based Quincy Library Group (QLG) to show that national forest management can be conducted in a collaborative manner.

Reaction to the QLG proposal has been mixed among proponents of community-based forestry, but response to Congress' interest has not. That interest signals a willingness to include a new approach to forestry on the congressional agenda as well as an understanding of the movement's basic principles and issues.

The Quincy Library Group proposal has touched a nerve because it affects policy processes - how decisions are made and carried out in the management of public and private lands. Many groups have criticized that proposal both technically and because they fear it will set a bad precedent, prompting a flood of community-based forestry proposals in Congress. Underlying these concerns are questions about sharing power with local communities in the decisions that affect natural resources as well as ensuring that national interests are represented and served in community-based approaches.

Earlier this year at a "learning workshop" for congressmen, staff, and national interest groups, members of the Seventh American Forest Congress' Communities Committee helped introduce these policy issues by breaking them down into four areas - process, stewardship, reinvestment, and monitoring.

Process

In the past, federal agencies like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have failed to successfully involve the public in natural resource planning and decisions - despite the lofty goals of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), and the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). Community-based practitioners feel - after two decades of "public involvement" in which their comments have been synthesized, coded, counted, considered too late, or taken out of context - they have had little or no impact on what happens to the forests that surround them.

What do they want? A more open process that includes local know-how - knowledge that comes from being "of" a place - and that involves a variety of perspectives, just as a community is made up of a variety of interests. They want their local science knowledge included with that of outside experts. And, they want an ongoing dialogue with agency resource managers.

What they do not want, they say, is to call the shots. This is perhaps the thorniest issue surrounding the new approach to resource management. National groups fear local voices will crowd out the interests of the rest of the country, effectively shutting down Americans' say in property that, after all, they too own.

Community-based forestry advocates say they recognize these concerns and appreciate the potential for local processes to be corrupted. The Communities Committee sees integrating local and national interests as one of its key policy challenges. To address this, it is seeking ways to involve individuals representing national interests in processes at the community level and to strengthen the participation of community-groups in national level policy discussions.

Bringing together diverse interests - including traditional antagonists - means conflict, and critics argue that finding common ground involves too much compromise, resulting in "lowest common denominator" decisions. But many community-based groups have seen how bringing people together can lead to better decisions, although not necessarily easier ones.

The collaborative process requires inclusion, actively seeking out those who ought to be engaged but have not been due to exclusion (such as some Native Americans), limited resources, or social and cultural barriers. It also means being able to see the creation of a forest plan as the beginning - not the end - of important management decisions. Advocates call this "learning to manage by managing to learn."

So if there is general consensus that a collaborative process is a good idea, what's the problem? One major obstacle is the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), described by one participant at the congressional workshop as "a good intention gone awry."

Passed in 1972, FACA was intended to "open up" advisory committees and ensure that special interests did not unduly influence federal agencies. Under FACA, whenever federal officials establish a group as an advisory committee, they must follow specific guidelines about the way business is conducted and who is involved. In the past, Forest Service officials have blamed mandatory FACA guidelines for the agency's lack of involvement in community-based initiatives. But a recent analysis by Betsy Rieke, of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado School of Law, suggests the agency has been more restrictive than need be; officials now say administrative changes may allow it to participate more fully.

Stewardship

Stewardship seeks to define an enduring, reciprocal relationship between people and the natural environment; in this case, between communities and the forests that sustain them.

Ideally that relationship is based on respect and responsibility for forest ecosystems, allowing people to learn through both their actions and their observations. In simple terms, it is "the forest sustaining the community and the community sustaining the forest," Communities Committee chair Lynn Jungwirth says.

The challenge is translating stewardship from principle to action. Many groups start by integrating different interests in the community, focusing on restoring and sustaining the forest ecosystem, and building in evaluation and monitoring efforts to allow them to learn from the experience. Because of the need to build trust and learn together, community-based stewardship generally begins as small-scale pilot projects with a strong component for evaluating progress.

Monitoring is key. If no one is going to make sure the project is done right, many say, there is no use doing the project.

"Our strategy has been to start small," says Carol Daly, president of the Flathead Economic Policy Center in Kalispell, Montana, "carrying out a number of projects deliberately limited in acreage and impact, but with maximum public participation in project planning, design, contracting, and monitoring."

"Stewardship contracting" is one way to implement ecosystem services while focusing on what remains on a site, rather than on what products have been removed. The idea is to focus the contract and the incentives for contractors on improving the condition of the land. The products or economic values then become a by-product of these land services.

Two goals of stewardship contracting are to reinvest revenues derived from these by-products into additional ecosystem services for a particular place and to promote natural resource maintenance.

These contracts, proponents argue, can promote ecosystem management by designating a variety of activities across a wide area over several years. That's preferable, they say, to the present system of scattered small-scale, single-task, short-term projects that fail to complement one another.

Another objective is to boost small-scale businesses in the affected communities. That, in turn, would build diverse skills within the community, helping its residents as they help the forest.

Reinvestment

Community-based activists contend that forests historically have been exploited, their resources extracted with little thought given to reforestation and maintenance. They argue that much of the economic value from these ecosystems has been transferred out of the local area. Left behind, too often, are degraded forests and watersheds that need restoration work but that have insufficient resource values remaining to pay for it.

Although progress has been made, our economic, political, and social systems continue to undervalue the services forest ecosystems and communities provide. Recent studies suggest natural ecosystems produce values and ecological services much greater than our market and political systems account for, such as clean air and water, nutrient cycling, and biological diversity.

A 1996 economic assessment of northern California's Sierra Nevada ecosystem concluded that while its annual resource values topped $2 billion, a mere two percent were reinvested in the ecosystem and rural communities. That small percentage is the amount realized by federal, state, and county governments through taxes and fees.

Of the economic benefits provided by the Sierra Nevada ecosystem, more than half - 61 percent - were related to water, and nearly all of those were captured by downstream users for irrigation, municipal water, and hydroelectric power. Almost none came back to the Sierras to maintain or restore the ecosystem or to support institutions and jobs in rural communities.

When critics say that the idea of reinvestment won't work, activists point to a so-far successful partnership between water users in New York City and their upstate watershed. The agreement calls for New York City to provide more than a billion dollars to rural communities in the Catskill and Delaware watershed for activities that help protect water quality.

Reinvestment focuses on the need for restoration and maintenance of natural or ecological capital on public and private lands. Community-based advocates want a mechanism that allows them to use a variety of funding options for activities on public lands and incentives that entice private landowners to better maintain their land.

In its fiscal year 1998 budget, the Clinton administration proposed a new Forest Ecosystem Restoration and Maintenance Fund (FERM), which addressed similar reinvestment concerns, including watershed restoration, thinning, and fuels reduction. Under FERM, forest restoration and maintenance activities would be separated from more controversial timber-salvage sales. FERM also proposes ways to pay for restoration, including stewardship contracting and allocating a portion of the receipts from other national forest management activities.

The FERM proposal could help community-based groups restore damaged landscapes and showcase activities that build stronger relationships between forests and communities. It could also complement existing federal/rural development programs that pay for training and give local people skills to implement restoration activities.

A variety of other reinvestment "tools" are being explored by community-based advocates, including tax incentives, recreation fees, carbon offsets, cost-share programs, and market-based initiatives such as wood - product certification.

Monitoring

Because we don't know everything about how an ecosystem works, all ecosystem management is a kind of experiment. To learn from our successes and failures requires monitoring of ecological, biological, social, and economic conditions.

Monitoring, however, is one of the great unfunded mandates. Required of land managers, it is often touted as essential but is rarely done. Why? Because it's expensive, draws money from projects, and doesn't always give you the answer. It can tell you when you're wrong but it can't always indicate when you're right.

Yet, monitoring is essential for those who work and benefit from land management and for their communities, not only to help them understand where they've been but to help attain desired objectives for the land.

Equally important is the opportunity monitoring offers everyone involved to ensure that their concerns are met. Whether it is an environmental group concerned with agreed-upon limits for soil compaction or rural developers who want to ensure the local community benefits from resource management, monitoring allows for discussion and review.

As Leah Wills, a rural development specialist and member of the Communities Committee, says: "Trust is achieved through verification, and verification is achieved through monitoring"'

Only after all the parties believe that their interests are being protected will they begin to trust one another. This "all-party" monitoring shields an ecosystem from any single interest while recognizing the legitimacy of local, national, even international interests.

So how does it work? All-party monitoring is based on the notion that various parties with different local, national, ethnic, cultural, economic, and educational orientations should share responsibility for monitoring and assessing what they deem vital. Combining their knowledge and interests, they monitor the health of an ecosystem, the health and well-being of affected workers and communities, and the quality of management. Failure to involve parties near the beginning of a project can lead to battles later, including those that pit one scientist against another.

The strong need for monitoring expressed by community-based activists is beginning to be heard by policymakers. This was acknowledged in October when Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) introduced a revised public-lands management proposal, which placed increased emphasis on monitoring and adaptive management. The issue needs to be discussed in greater detail and the legislative proposal needs to be clarified and developed further, but it is now on the table.

Questions and challenges will come as interest in this movement grows, and proponents must be prepared to respond openly and constructively - and to take advantage of opportunities.

For all its promise, community-based forestry is still in its infancy, more a set of ideas than a reality. Its success will depend on the degree to which practitioners can demonstrate and build support for fundamental principles and goals. Their success will be measured not by any one project, program, or piece of legislation, but by the level of ongoing commitment to this new approach to integrating the long-term interests of communities and forests.

Gerry Gray is AMERICAN FORESTS' vice president, Forest Policy, and Jonathan Kusel is director of Forest Community Research in Taylorsville, California. Both are members of the Seventh American Forest Congress' Communities Committee.