June 2001 / Vol. 51 No. 6 • BioScience 445ArticlesThe 29% of the area of the United States that is inpublic land contains a rich store of biotic and abiotic re-sources available to its owners, the American people. Decid-ing whether, how, and by whom these resources are to be usedis the foremost challenge facing those who set public policyfor natural resources. A number of land management agen-cies are vested with the responsibility of carrying out theprescriptions of public policy, and have, or had until recently,research arms charged with providing scientific informationto enlighten policymaking and management.Ecologists understand very well that deciding whether andhow public resources are to be used—that is, the process ofsetting public policy—is highly contentious because of the dif-fering values attached to these resources by different subsetsof American society. Those values commonly conflict, and res-olution is not often mutually satisfactory.It is also not news to ecologists that the structure andfunction of biological resources, as well as the responses to theiruse and management, are among the most complex issues ad-dressed by the field of ecology. Policy setting is most likely tobe rational and socially optimal if this complexity is thoroughlyelucidated by accurate and objective research. This is not tosay that policies are set only on the basis of science. As Sabatier(1978) states, “No policy decision can be based solely ontechnical information. Normative elements invariably en-ter.”But if not enlightened by quality research, policy is basedon guess, hearsay, and traditional knowledge, and ultimatelyis determined by power politics.Thus, the research carried out to enlighten the policy-making process not only copes with the conceptual andmethodological challenges posed by the complexity of itssubject matter, but is commonly conducted in the contentiousclimate of policy disputes within which the agencies function.As a result, agency researchers often struggle to produce theaccurate and objective research that is needed to fully enlightenthe policy process and management. These efforts are oftensuccessful, as shown by a long history of distinguished researchon many natural resources issues. Hence, I find extremely disturbing the continuing flow of literature (e.g., Schiff 1962,Chase 1986, Smith 1988, Anonymous 1989, Forster 1990,Hirt 1994, Yaffee 1994, Hutchings et al. 1997) describing in-stances in which research is manipulated to support agencypolicy positions. One of the most recent and troubling is abook by Todd Wilkinson (1998), Science under Siege.It chron-icles the cases of eight scientists in five federal agencies andone state agency who were ordered either to condone man-agement actions they knew to be environmentally damagingand contrary to their agencies’ mandates; rewrite environ-mental documents which would condone management ac-tions inimical to resource protection; make public statementscontrary to their professional judgment that proposed activ-ities would damage resources; or simply remain silent. Theseare, admittedly, extreme cases, used by Wilkinson to call at-tention to the problem. But on the basis of his investiga-tions, he believes that the problem is widespread, although Frederic H. Wagner (e-mail [email protected]) is professor emer-itus in the Ecology Center and the Department of Fisheries andWildlife, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322-5205. © AmericanInstitute of Biological Sciences.Freeing Agency Researchfrom Policy Pressures: A Need and an ApproachFREDERIC H. WAGNERRESEARCH OBJECTIVITY IN PUBLIC AGEN-CIES, ESSENTIAL TO EFFECTIVE MANAGE-MENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES, CAN BEENHANCED BY ADMINISTRATIVE DISTANC-ING OF POLICY SETTING AND RESEARCH,AND CHANGING FROM INTERNAL TO COL-LABORATIVE PROCEDURES INVOLVINGCONCERNED INTERESTS446 BioScience • June 2001 / Vol. 51 No. 6Articlesgenerally more subtle than indicated by the egregious in-stances described in his book.In those cases, the agencies were facilitating or supportingland-use actions by private economic interests that the sci-entists who spoke out considered detrimental to the naturalresources in their care. In most cases, the economic interestssought the support of politically influential persons to pres-sure the agencies, under the threat of discontinued funding,into silencing, transferring, or dismissing the employees whowere attempting to protect the resources.I argue in this article that agency research is more likely tobe objective if it is conducted at some administrative distancefrom the policymaking process, either in a separate divisionor other administrative structure, or carried out in an orga-nization that does not have sole responsibility for settingpolicy internally. I conclude with a case study of the difficultyof getting scientific objectivity when research is conducted in,or controlled by, the administrative body that sets policy.Changing institutional arrangementsfor setting natural resources policyI propose that one means of preventing the kinds of pressureson science that Wilkinson and other authors describe isthrough organizational structure. Hence it is useful to un-derstand the political history and institutional circumstancesin which these pressures arise. The federal land managementagencies were established in the late 1800s and early 1900s withassigned missions: the Forest Service, under the US Depart-ment of Agriculture, to protect and administer the use of tim-ber resources in the national forests; the Bureau of LandManagement (BLM) in the Department of the Interior, tooversee private livestock grazing and mining on public lands;and the Fish and Wildlife Service, also under the Departmentof the Interior, to protect and administer the use of wildliferesources not under the jurisdiction of the states (Nelson1995a, 1995b). These agencies’ missions were strongly orientedto consumptive use when the nation was largely rural and agri-cultural, and were therefore consistent with societal values.Since the commodity resources of the public lands are ex-ploited by private interests—livestock grazing by ranchers, tim-ber harvesting by timber companies, mineral extraction bymining companies—it was natural that alliances would de-velop between the agencies and the economic interests.At therequests of the latter, these alliances were watched over by lo-cal congressional delegations whose members served on thevarious House and Senate committees that