The Forest Service (FS) has spent 20+ years and over $250 million developing multi-year plans for managing national forests. This report discusses the internal and external causes of inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the FS's decision-making process: the inadequate attention that the FS has given to improving the process; the lack of agreement, both inside and outside the agency, on how it is to resolve the conflicts among competing uses on its lands; unresolved interagency issues that transcend its administrative boundaries and jurisdiction; and differences in the requirements of laws that help frame its decision-making. Charts and tables.

This book, containing 31 chapters grouped into two parts, provides rich and multi-faceted documentation of current progress being made in creating the political, economic and social conditions indispensable for sustainable and multi-functional use of forest resources, and notes the obstacles that needs to be removed to reach this goal. The first part (chapters 1-9) introduces general and global aspects that have to be considered in the context of cross sectoral policy coordination. This include discussions on the impact of external shocks such as a sudden oil price increase on forest management, the impact of energy or trade policies on global wood markets and the role of decentralization in integrating multiple demands on forests. The second part of the book deals with regional, national and local issues of cross-sectoral policy linkages. The chapters on Africa (chapters 10-15) focus largely on the improvement of land management practices such as agroforestry, land tenure and gender issues, more integrative policies in promoting reforestation and afforestation, multiple stakeholder planning processes and external policy impacts in protecting and managing Miombo forests. In Asia (chapters 16-20), important subjects appearing in several chapters are the need to develop environmental and economic accounts for forestry, and to demonstrate more clearly the great importance of non-timber forest product linkages, road construction and population effects of forest conversion, community forest management contributions to the local and national economy, and cross-sectoral policy links in the development of mountainous areas are other issues addressed. In the Europe part (chapters 21-24); both environmental problems as well as strong trends towards developing a competitive forest and wood-processing sector determine public policy development to a considerable extent. This can be seen from leading policy scenarios that have been identified from the changes in perceptions with regard to the forest sector and from the policy issues at national level that are presented. A somewhat similar pattern of competing policy demands between resource use, industrial expansion and strong environmental demands emerges from the contributions dealing with the Americas (chapters 25-31). These chapters contain the experiences of the USA in cross-sectoral impact analysis, the lessons to be learned from the long and confliction history in managing the national forests, as well as from the resource conflicts described between forestry uses, oil and gas development and environmental protection in the boreal regions of Canada.