Showing papers in "Natural Resources Journal in 1966"

The Role of Professional Norms and Beliefs in the Agency-Client Relations of Natural Resource Bureaucracies

Abstract: Natural resources agencies react in different ways to population changes. Several political science theories of agency-client relations have evolved to explain these reactions: Capture theory, cooptation theory, and agency resource theory. These three theories are applied to two California natural resource and agricultural agencies to test their utility in explaining the particular actions of bureaucrats. It is found that all three focus on institutional factors alone and thus provide only a partial explanation of bureaucratic action. The analysis advances by considering professional norms and beliefs of agency staff as an additional factor to augment the explanatory power of the existing theories.

Convention and limitation in benefit-cost analysis

Abstract: The formal computation of benefit-cost ratios is an established part of the American governmental process; its origins go back at least as far as the River and Harbor Act of 1902,' and it was explicitly provided for in an act of 1920.2 It is peculiarly, perhaps uniquely, American, stemming as it does from a Constitution in which the antinomies inherent in a federation of sovereign states are compounded by a refusal to allow the federal Executive Branch discretion over details of expenditure already approved in principle by the Legislative Branch. (Providing by statute for the computation of benefit-cost ratios is unknown in the United Kingdom, where such discretion is a matter of course, subject only to subsequent parliamentary discussion and the scrutiny of the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons.) The computation of benefit-cost ratios was intended to serve two purposes which in essence are separate. It establishes which public projects are prima facie likely to yield economic benefits and are hence worthy to be submitted for congressional approval; and it furnishes a basis for the apportionment of the cost of such projects between the federal government and others. In the first case, it embodies an economic shibboleth, in the form of a benefit-cost ratio in excess of 1:1; in the second, it lays down a rubric that the apportionment of costs should be in the same ratio as the incidence of benefits. Neither shibboleth nor rubric is in fact binding on Congress, and each is essentially no more than a rule of thumb for the guidance of government agencies in submitting projects.

Strip Mine Reclamation and Economic Analysis

Abstract: Advocating a cost-benefit approach to strip mine reclamation, this article studies the interaction of three basic goals involved in what the author considers an ecnomic undertaking: (1) national productivity, (2) quality of the environment, and (3) local employment. Public policy becomes the compromise between social benefit and minimum acceptable costs; it provides a possible framework for establishing regulations.