Public Policy and Land Exchange ─ Choice, law, and praxis

This original contribution to the field is the first to bring economic sociology theory to the study of federal land exchanges. By blending public choice theory with engaging case studies that contextualize the tactics used by land developers, this book uses economic sociology to help challenge the under-valuation of federal lands in political decisions. The empirically-based, scholarly analysis of federal-private land swaps exposes serious institutional dysfunctions, which sometimes amount to outright corruption. By evaluating investigative reports of each federal agency case study, the book illustrates the institutional nature of the actors in land swaps and, in particular, the history of U.S. agencies’ promotion of private interests in land exchanges.

The book covers historical development, governmental reports, and the case law of land swaps. While political theory is used to describe a macro-analysis of institutions and organizations and how they relate to land swaps, public choice theory provides an analysis of individuals’ behavior and their impact on the market and its transactions. These two theories provide the foundation of the economic sociology analysis of the practices of federal agencies and their individual employees. Panagia’s dual approach allows for a study of the full spectrum of federal agencies’ behavior, explaining how issues of organizational mismanagement and capture, combined with improper, unethical, and in a few instances criminal, behavior by individual officials, could be the cause of the loss of economic value in land swaps.

Using public choice theory to make sense of the privatization of public lands, the book looks in close detail at the federal policies of the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service land swaps in America. These pertinent case studies illustrate the trends to transfer federal lands notwithstanding their flawed value appraisals or interpretation of public interest; thus, violating both the principles of equality in value and observance of specific public policy. The book should be of interest to students and scholars of public land and natural resource management, as well as political science, public policy and land law.

Giancarlo Panagia is Assistant Professor at Westminster College, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.