Public participation in forest planning: eight attributes of success

Federal ecosystem and adaptive man-agement programs encourage collabo-ration with local forest communities.Such programs offer opportunities not onlyto experiment with approaches to forestmanagement but also to capitalize on localknowledge and build support for manage-ment decisions. But for natural resourcesprofessionals, questions persist. What do wewant from the public? What do they expectfrom us? How do we do public participa-tion? What would a successful participatoryprocess look like?
These same questions confronted theimplementation team of the Central Cas-cades Adaptive Management Area on Ore-gon's Willamette National Forest. Oneplace to look for answers was the publicparticipation efforts of the not-so-distantpast. We consulted with Forest Service per-sonnel and local citizens to examineprocesses previously
undertaken on theWillamette andlearn from their ex-periences about thesuccess and pitfallsof agency-public in-teractions.