For over a century, American have created laws, processes, objectives, priorities, and rules for federal land management that often conflict, contradict, and undermine each other. We now find ourselves with inconsistent laws, unclear priorities, procedural mazes, and an antiquated bureaucratic structure. Processes and procedures often impede rather than aid management actions and prevent good stewardship. The overall result is a loss of public benefits and undesirable impact on natural resources. Allan Fitzsimmons presents a clear argument for major changes and offers new ideas for how those changes can be accomplished. Students and professionals interested in public policy, resource management, and environmental studies will find this book to be particularly interesting.

For over a century, American have created laws, processes, objectives, priorities, and rules for federal land management that often conflict with each other. We now have inconsistent laws, unclear priorities, procedural mazes, and an antiquated bureaucratic structure. The result is a loss of public benefits and undesirable impact on natural resources. The author argues for major changes and offers new ideas for how those changes can be accomplished.

The federal government is running huge budget deficits, spending too much, and heading toward a financial crisis. Federal spending soared under President George W. Bush, and the costs of programs for the elderly are set to balloon in coming years. Hurricane Katrina has made the federal budget situation even more desperate. In Downsizing the Federal Government Cato Institute budget expert Chris Edwards provides policymakers with solutions to the growing federal budget mess. Edwards identifies more than 100 federal programs that should be terminated, transferred to the states, or privatized in order to balance the budget and save hundreds of billions of dollars. Edwards proposes a balanced reform package of cuts to entitlements, domestic programs, and excess defense spending. He argues that these cuts would not only eliminate the deficit, but also strengthen the economy, enlarge personal freedom, and leave a positive fiscal legacy for the next generation. Downsizing the Federal Government discusses the systematic causes of wasteful spending, and it overflows with examples of federal programs that are obsolete and mismanaged. The book examines the budget process and shows how policymakers act contrary to the interests of average Americans by favoring special interests.

In recent years, FAO has carried out extensive assessments of the forest tenure situation in the four regions of Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Central Asia, including its impact on sustainable forest management and poverty reduction. The experiences and lessons learned from these assessments, complemented by numerous studies carried out by other organizations, provide a rich information base on different tenure systems and on the successes and challenges of tenure reform processes.

This paper attempts to define and assess the various institutional and mechanical elements which constitute a land management system and which have a significant impact on the functioning of land markets. The assumption of this report is that the accumulation over time of different institutions and instruments, which have relfected different priorities and policies, has inhibited the efficient and equitalbe operation of land markets and that reforms of institutions and policies are now urgently needed. (Adapté du résumé des auteurs).

A compendium of the most ridiculous examples of Congress's pork-barrel spending.

Historians have long viewed the massive reshaping of the American landscape during the New Deal era as unprecedented. This book uncovers the early twentieth-century history rich with precedents for the New Deal in forest, park, and agricultural policy. Sara M. Gregg explores the redevelopment of the Appalachian Mountains from the 1910s through the 1930s, finding in this region a changing paradigm of land use planning that laid the groundwork for the national New Deal. Through an intensive analysis of federal planning in Virginia and Vermont, Gregg contextualizes the expansion of the federal government through land use planning and highlights the deep intellectual roots of federal conservation policy.