Monitoring Emergent Properties of Regions - Economic and Social Variables

Updated 02/27/2009

G. Allen Rasmussen
Department of Rangeland Resources
Utah State University Extension

When we look at ìrangeland health at a regional level, we are addressing the biophysical, economic and social parameters. Then, what are the monitoring objectives? As rangeland scientists and managers, we have generally looked at this with a single objective in mind (i.e. forage, water wildlife, livestock). We have at times tried to look at several of these objectives and occasionally even included economics. But to use and develop monitoring information at the regional level, we must know what decisions we are trying to make? Generally it is about policy and what policy will do to the land and the people associated with that particular region. Which means we must look at more than just the biophysical aspects of the rangelands (Endter-Wada et al. 1998). But for a group such as this to be concerned about including social and economic parameters has still been relatively recent. I would suggest this has surfaced with the idea of Ecosystem Management or as the Australians term it Whole Catchment Management. Whatever you want to call it, it is basically looking at a larger area and includes all the uses and people associated with the area. Monitoring is a critical feedback in helping us make decisions even at these larger scales to interpret potential changes, stresses or perturbations. With this in mind, I set about looking at the different economic and social assessments and measurements used at regional scales (Table 1).

Economic indicators

The most common economic parameters suggested have been income, employment (number of jobs), poverty and resource extraction. These are readily available from several different sources and are currently used to evaluate general economic conditionings of an area (generally a county, metropolitan area or state). However, when looking at employment and wages, even if they are segregated by industry, it is very difficult to relate them to "Rangeland Health".

A problem we share with other professions is that of scale. What do we want to define as boundaries. The most common boundary in the economic and social fields is the county. This makes some sense when we are looking at political decisions and using political boundaries. But there are substantial arguments over using counties as a unit of measurement (Machlis and Force 1988, Lobao 1990). County statistics tend to mask resource connections. Whether it is looking at watershed boundaries which cross counties or income from resource dependent businesses that operate in one county but reside in a different county. It has also been argued that a county is not socially relevant in that people associate with a particular community not a particular county (Perry 1986). But often the county is the only scale with available data.

Even if we had an appropriate scale, there are other problems associated with these traditional indicators of economic conditions. If we use an example from a forest system, the traditional economic indicators of income, jobs or product removed improve and indicate a vibrant, healthy economy as the harvest rates increase but has little to do with forest sustainability. The forest can be quickly depleted and require generations to recover. On rangelands we can have the same thing happen and lose our desired plant community. However, rangeland plant communities generally have a shorter turnover period, they can recover quicker unless we have lost or altered the soil base. If the soil has been lost, reduced or altered then we have fewer options. The change or loss of soil is not easily valued because of time horizons, ownership complexities and other potential problems in determining the externalities associated with these changes. General market solutions found in traditional economics do not work well and make traditional market solutions difficult to impossible.

With this in mind, I would suggest looking at the idea of Regional Accounts. Economists have pushed this idea using National Accounts where resource stocks (renewable and nonrenewable) are the currency. For the renewable resources if their removal if greater than the replacement it reduces the overall wealth of the country. Trying to actually put a dollar value on this has generated a wonderful discussion with economists, similar to what we are having, but they have been doing it for a longer period. While I do not expect us to develop a way to deal with contingency valuation of these resources, I think this idea has merit. I would propose we adopt a system that would judge policies by how well they maintain our ìsoil accountî on rangelands. While I would not classify soil as a renewable resource because the replacement rates in most cases are too long to deal with in management. But the plant communities found on different soils are renewable and we generally have several choices. This is not a new idea, think of the old Soil Conservation Service. The idea of regional accounts has not been done yet by my review of the literature but the idea has been suggested on islands which means that it should have merit at our regional scales. This idea, however, does not readily incorporate or help predict what will happen to people. Some feel the political establishment would not except this "They want to know what you produced not what you saved". Maybe that is our problem we donít think of the long-term and about what should be saved.

Social indicators of regional conditions.

Again there are many measurements that have been developed, but they have the same problems as the economic indicators they are often not clearly related to the surrounding resources (rangeland condition) or are collected at scales irrelevant to questions being asked. One of the more glaring problems is the lack of understanding the connection between people and the land surrounding them. In a review of social assessments Kusel 1996 quoted Burdge (1994), "The field...does not have a series of agreed upon concepts or lists of variables around which to accumulate research knowledge" further there is a need to reach agreement on concepts, procedures and content on environmental planning and social assessment. Does this sound familiar?

In view of this, I like what the Sierra Nevada ecosystem project developed looking at regional community well-being in forest dependent communities (Kusel 1996). This work was based on Senís (1993) concepts of well-being which focused on the real opportunities an individual has and their achievements in light of their opportunities. This well-being approach measured the communities ability to respond to change. They developed a socioeconomic scale and community capacity scale for communities. They then grouped the communities into regions of distinct social and economic areas. This approach uses both secondary and primary data. The socioeconomic scale is derived from five factors found in census data: housing tenure, poverty, education, employment, and number of children in houses with public assistance. Community Capacity was determined by evaluating physical, human and social capacity of a community using interviews with local experts. The physical capacity is defined as the physical elements of the community (infrastructure), the surround resources and the financial status. The human capital is related to the general abilities of the residents (skills, education, and experience). The social capital is the ability and willingness of the residents to work together for common community goals. This has been developed using the number of civic organizations, opportunities in the community and level of participation by residents.

A weakness of this approach from a resource perspective is the reliance on the local communities opinion of the resources condition not the actual condition. While this may not be as far off as most biophysical scientist think (Endter-Wada et al. 1998), people have been wrong in the past. This weakness could be strengthened to help predict the potential well being of the region by incorporating the regopma; accounting (soil) biotic condition of the rangelands and regional accounting (of soil) in the physical capability section. This would require that we work with both economic and social scientists to refine this section and understand the interaction between people and their environment.

I like this approach because it tries to bring together several components of the economic, social and potentially the natural environment. But it is not without controversy even in the field of social science. As Burdge (1994) stated, "The field...does not have a series of agreed upon concepts or lists of variables around which to accumulate research knowledge." We need to further refine what we want to call rangeland health (is the soil protected) and then work with the social and economic scientists to fully integrate the impact of decisions on people if we want to practice the concept of ecosystem management (defined by Burnside and Rasmussen 1997). This would allow us to meet the goal Joel Brown asked about which stated that we want monitoring which managers can use to make decisions as opposed to justifying decisions.

Table 1. Selected examples of economic and social parameters which can be monitored to help describe and predict changes in rangeland systems.

Economic measurements

• Wages
• Employment by sector
• Removal of product
• Standing stocks of resources
• Rate of return on investments
• Economic diversity
• Economic dependency on extractive vs non extractive
• Private investment in land management
• Public investment in land management
• Annual investment in land management research

Social measurements

• Poverty
• level
• intensity
• percent children in poverty
• percent children in homes with public assistance
• Age
• Crime
• Education
• Housing tenure
• House for low income
• Land tenure
• Conflicts in land management

Literature Cited

Burdge, R.J. 1994. A conceptual approach to social impact assessment: Collection of writings. Middleton, WI: Social Ecology Press.

Burnside, D.A. and G.A. Rasmussen. 1997. Ecosystem Management: Can we succeed. Rangelands 19:20-24.

Ender-Wada,J., D.Blahna, R. Krannich, and M. Brunson. A framework for understanding socila science contributions to ecosystem management. Ecological Applications. 8:891-904.

Kusel, J. 1996. Well-Being in Forest-Dependent Communities, Part I: A new approach. in Status of the Sierra Nevada Volume II Assessments and Scientific Basis for Management Options. Centers for Water and Wildland Resources Univ. Calif. Davis. Wildland Resources Center Report No. 37. July 1996.

Kusel, J. 1996. Well-Being in Forest-Dependent Communities, Part II: A social assessment focus. Chapter 13 in Status of the Sierra Nevada Volume II Assessments and Scientific Basis for Management Options. Centers for Water and Wildland Resources Univ. Calif. Davis. Wildland Resources Center Report No. 37. July 1996.

Sen, A. 1993. Capability and well-being. in The Quality of Life. eds. M.C. Nussbaum and A. Sen. 30-53. Oxford:Clarendon Press.

Special thanks go to the following people in helping me put together this working paper: Joanna Endter-Wada, Mark Burnson, Richard Krannick, Rob Lillholm, Bruce Godfrey, John Workman, Donald Ethridge, Don Burnside, and Amy Pervis.

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