Branching Out, Digging In Environmental Advocacy and Agenda Setting

About this book

Sarah B. Pralle takes an in-depth look at why some environmental conflicts expand to attract a lot of attention and participation, while others generate little interest or action. Branching Out, Digging In examines the expansion and containment of political conflict around forest policies in the United States and Canada.
Late in 1993 citizens from around the world mobilized on behalf of saving old-growth forests in Clayoquot Sound. Yet, at the same time only a very few took note of an even larger reserve of public land at risk in northern California. Both cases, the Clayoquot Sound controversy in British Columbia and the Quincy Library Group case in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern California, centered around conflicts between environmentalists seeking to preserve old-growth forests and timber companies fighting to preserve their logging privileges. Both marked important episodes in the history of forest politics in their respective countries but with dramatically different results. The Clayoquot Sound controversy spawned the largest civil disobedience in Canadian history; international demonstrations in Japan, England, Germany, Austria, and the United States; and the most significant changes in British Columbia's forest policy in decades. On the other hand, the California case, with four times as many acres at stake, became the poster child for the "collaborative conservation" approach, using stakeholder collaboration and negotiation to achieve a compromise that ultimately broke down and ended up in the courts.

Pralle analyzes how the various political actors-local and national environmental organizations, local residents, timber companies, and different levels of government-defined the issues in both words and images, created and reconfigured alliances, and drew in different governmental institutions to attempt to achieve their goals. She develops a dynamic new model of conflict management by advocacy groups that puts a premium on nimble timing, flexibility, targeting, and tactics to gain the advantage and shows that how political actors go about exploiting these opportunities and overcoming constraints is a critical part of the policy process.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Acronyms Introduction 1. The Expansion and Containment of Policy Conflict Part I: The Expansion of Conflict in British Columbian Forest Politics 2.Forest Policy in British Columbia and the Conflict over Clayoquot Sound 3. Constructing the Global: Issue Expansion in Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia 4. From Local to Global: Expanding Participation in Clayoquot Sound 5. Venue Shopping in an International Conflict Part II: The Containment of Conflcit in Northern California6. U.S. Forest Policy and the Birth of the Quincy Library Group 7. Retreating to the Local: Issue Containment in Northern California 8. Allies, Opponents, and Audiences: Containting Participation in the Quincy Library Group 9. Lawsuits, Libraries, and Legislatures: The Quincy Library Group and Venue Shopping 10.Managing Policy Conflicts Appendix: Sample Interview Questions Notes References Index

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Biography

Sarah B. Pralle is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.