Of Parks, Politicians and People

Paper Summary:

This paper studies the process of policy making within the national park program. Yosemite National Park is used as an example to illustrate environmental policy. It looks at how land has been changed since the influence of the National Park Service. It shows how the national park service's manipulation of land parallels broader policy-making and deals with the levels of public awareness and action.

From the Paper:

"The process of policy making within the national park program follows the "issue-attention cycle" proposed by Anthony Downs in 1972. This sequence includes problem identification and agenda setting, followed by policy formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation (Switzer 3-5). The history of policy making for the national parks has repeated this process several times, with a significant reevaluation of the National Park Service's agenda approximately every decade. The major shifts in policy emphasis from tourism to wildlife biology occurred after World War II, when families increasingly took advantage of the national parks, and continued through the environmental awakening of the 1960s and 70s, at which time much of today's broader environmental policy was implemented".

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