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Planning in collaborative wildlife management: A critical perspective

Abstract Wildlife managers are increasingly faced with planning and implementing wildlife management programs in collaboration with local governments, user groups, businesses and citizens. The planning process is inherently political as each group attempts to advance its interests. Current scholarship on the theory and practice of planning for wildlife management falls short of accounting for the politics of these processes. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to a theory of planning that both addresses the actual practices of wildlife planners and serves as a guide for future action. To this end, the dominant conceptualization of wildlife planning will be outlined and the study will draw on empirical and theoretical advances in the fields of adult education, organizational analysis and regional planning to construct a more politically-informed theoretical framework for understanding wildlife planning. This framework asserts that planning involves two types of negotiation of power and interests: (1) substantive negotiations which address procedural aspects of planning and (2) meta-negotiations which address political dynamics of planning. An earlier study will then be re-analyzed to illustrate how substantive and meta-negotiations occurred in a case of suburban deer management in the Northeast United States. It is concluded that accounting for issues of power and interests in wildlife planning theory provides a more complete representation of what wildlife managers actually do when planning programs and provides a guide for future wildlife planning practice. Future analyses of planning processes in wildlife management, or natural resources management more broadly, may reveal new insights if the concepts used to guide the analysis reported here provide an understanding of the politics involved.