Too often environmental policy discussions assume that the only way to advance environmental values is to create a government program or adopt new regulations. The potential for private initiative to conserve environmental treasures is overlooked. Yet where private action is viable, it is often superior to government efforts. Private preserves are generally better maintained than government parks and, where it's been tried, conservation through commerce has been more successul than the species protectionism embodied in the Endangered Species Act.

A new report, Conservation through Private Initiative: Harnessing Amerian Ingenuity to Preserve Our Nation's Resources, by my good friend (and sometimes Commons Blog contributor) Michael DeAlessi illustrates the above point, and suggests that private efforts have the added advantage of diffusing conflict. Whereas politics often produces a zero-sum game, voluntary initiatives can produce true win-win scenarios.

Some excerpts from the Executive Summary

Why have private conservation efforts been successful? Largely because they concentrate on the end result of environmental protection, rather than the bureaucracy of environmental protection, which doesn’t guarantee a result. One of the great shortcomings of many command and control regulations is that they are
more process-oriented than output-oriented. In many cases, success has been measured by permits issued or violations cited, rather than by specific, targeted improvement in environmental quality. Indeed, conservation efforts should be measured against a set of well-defined performance metrics to recover endangered species, protect habitat types, and so on. To prove their contribution to environmental quality, and for private conservation efforts to be more widely recognized (and less onerously regulated), landowners are going to
have to agree on and measure such a set of well-defined performance metrics.

Measuring performance, as well as benchmarking and setting annual performance goals, may be the only way to cut across the partisan lines that have been drawn over environmental protection. Agreeing on how to define success often unites those who are genuinely interested in improving environmental quality. Of course, many measurements are site-specific, but striving to empirically compare different approaches is a vast improvement over rhetorical arguments.

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Human ingenuity and the entrepreneurial spirit underlie most conservation success stories. Under private ownership and stewardship, problem-solvers become remarkably resourceful at protecting and enhancing the value of what they own, for reasons as broad as profit and aesthetics, and ranging from fisheries and forests to backyard gardens. No one questions the impetus for a cleaner, healthier, species-rich environment. How we get there, however, is another question. The most promising efforts to address the perverse incentives typically created by command and control regulation are the use of market mechanisms and performance measures, both of which rely on getting the incentives more inline with the desired results, and on tapping into the same human ingenuity that drives commercial activity. Using performance indicators to measure and acknowledge conservation success, especially in the context of using the land is the next logical step.