Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Crisis and a direct telephone hotline between the White House and the Kremlin,
came from observing interactions within his family (Schelling 1966). The United
States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics each preferred to avoid nuclear
war, but several plausible scenarios could have led to such an outcome. While this is
obviously an extreme and the stakes for avoiding the worst-case scenario were of in-
calculable value, lessons for avoiding outcomes that are undesirable to all parties can
provide benefits for restoration planning.
Insights from game theory have informed natural resource management for de-
cades. The prisoner's dilemma (described later in this chapter, Rapoport and Cham-
mah 1965) explains the socially inefficient tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968) that
hinders management of fisheries, forests, and other limited open-access resources. Os-
trom and others have studied communities that deal with common-property issues
(e.g., Ostrom 1991) and have modeled such interactions using game theory to develop
improved management rules (Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker 1994), such as for irriga-
tion systems (Weissing and Ostrom 1993). Lessons from game theory have generally
permeated the practice of economics, and its application to ecological restoration plan-
ning is increasing.
Restoration Projects and Social Conflict
Subsets of stakeholders may oppose restoration projects for a variety of reasons. In the
most general sense, they can be seen to expect to incur costs or lose benefits as a result
of restoration. For example, farmers in the Sacramento River Conservation Area in
north-central California opposed large-scale forest restoration on former farmlands
due to concerns about loss of prime farmland as well as transboundary effects of resto-
ration on farming, such as small mammals predating nut crops and increased flooding
due to slowed water flow in areas with forest trees (Langridge, Buckley, and Holl 2007;
Buckley and Crone 2008). This opposition from farmers has reduced funding, the
areas open to restoration, and local government support. It has also motivated on-farm
behaviors that work against ecological restoration goals such as rip-rapping stream-
banks, building fences, or removing vegetation buffers. Restorationists in turn have re-
sponded by working to better quantify and minimize the transboundary impacts of res-
toration (Golet et al. 2009).
In some cases, differences of opinion arise over target ecological composition.
Ecological restoration efforts in Chicago, Illinois, have met opposition from area resi-
dents against restoration methods that involve removing trees, using prescribed fires,
and removing nonnative hedges that have become important resources for bird
watchers (Gobster and Barro 2000; Gobster 2001). Resolving conflict between these
stakeholders led to a compromised management plan that included both native and
nonnative species. A survey of Chicago residents found strong correlation between ex-
pectations of restoration outcomes and attitudes (Bright, Barro, and Burtz 2002).
Many studies (including several in this volume and inGobster and Hull 2000) have
attempted to understand and make recommendations to resolve these conflicts in a
qualitative manner. Game theory tools provide a potentially quantitative approach to
