Federal and state public forest administration in the new millennium:: Revisiting Herbert!Kaufman's The forest ranger

Herbert Kaufinan 1960 investigation of federal forest rangers provided important insights into administrative discretion, agency culture, and natural resource policy making. Subsequent studies of Forest Service administration have documented that agency change over time, mirroring broad Changes in federal public administration. But little is known about stateforest administration. This article describes results from a survey of line officers in 48 stateforest agencies, as well as stateforest statute analysis. Results indicate systematic state-federal differences in legal constraints, citizen interactions, and the forest administrators themselves. Though these diffierences foster state administrator decision making based on professional expertise, they do not encourage the incorporation Of stakeholder views into agency policy making, nor do they yield a bureaucracy that represents a diverse constituency. Stateforest administrators perceive substantial external challenges to their professional discretion, but it remains to be seen whether stateforest agencies will change to more closely resemble their federal counterpart.