by S. B. SHOW, U.S. Forest Service (retired) and latterly of the Forestry Division, FAO
THE procedure used by the United States Forest Service to ensure that research projects and programs of the Forest Experiment Stations are aimed at major rather than minor or trivial problems of the practitioners' world, is to subject the proposals and plans of the researchers to criticism of administrators.
At least once a year, and more often if need be, a program review board, made up of both groups, spends two or three days in thus dealing with the work of each station. Not only the heads of the research and administrative units, but also their principal staff men are expected to attend and take part in the meetings. It is not enough for, say, forest management people to attend while silvicultural projects are considered and then go back to their work. By staying throughout the discussions, they can hardly avoid forming a solid opinion as to the relative attention paid to their special fields compared with other fields which are competitive in terms of men and money. Thus the usual and beneficial result of the reviews is a reconsideration of the relative attention merited by the several major fields, each of which is, to a degree, competitive with all the others.
Within each field of work, attention centers on the merit, urgency and applicability to real life of projects proposed both by researchers and administrators. The retention in a station's program of fascinating and costly forays into academic investigations is unlikely if the chance of practical application of the results cannot be substantiated. On the other hand, it is a good thing for the researcher to know that his opposite number on the administration is committed to a project, can be reasonably expected to aid in its conduct and will be watching for tangible and useful results in due course.
One common, indeed routine, feature of the annual conferences is to find out what finished work and publication each researcher can report, and particularly whether he has redeemed promises of a year earlier to complete certain jobs. There are always reasons why one more year of study seems essential to the researcher to do a finished piece of work, satisfactory to himself and his vocational colleagues. Administrators are commonly cold to such often subjective wishes.
The process goes a long way towards ensuring that there will be a balance between fundamental research - with no immediately foreseeable application - and work specifically designed for immediate use.
In earlier years, the definition of each project and estimation of the time and money needed was often done quite sketchily, with the result that work expected to be completed in a short time by one man stretched out to require years of work by several men. To circumvent this the practice has grown of defining in advance the scope and particularly the boundaries of each project and its costs. There can be no exact precision in this process, of course, but it does give administrative reviewers a reasonably solid basis on which to judge whether a desirable project will be costly beyond its real importance in the whole scheme of things, so that it had better be postponed. The process also serves to avoid the costly danger of slipping into projects which may grow out of hand and must subsequently either be dropped or sustained by robbing other projects. Perhaps, above all, it gives a basis for appraising the degree of rigidity which a program will have in future years, as more and more long-term projects are accepted and become relatively untouchable. Administrators and researchers alike can be expected to favor some degree of flexibility, so that desirable short-term work may be undertaken promptly.
The give and take of debate in such reviews accomplishes no miracles of perfection. But, within the limits of the means available, it gives a far more useful total program than if program and project selection were the exclusive prerogative of researchers, who - perhaps living in ivory towers insulated from the rough and troubled world of the practitioner - might feel impervious to insistence on results from presumptive users of research.
Above all, the mechanism bespeaks the traditional philosophy that continual fact finding, aimed at solving major problems, is the life-blood of a dynamic organization, and stresses that fact-finder and fact-user alike are members of the same organization.
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Reports on the Fourth World Forestry Congress, and on the Latin American meeting of pulp and paper experts held at Buenos Aires in October-November last, will appear in Unasylva, Vol. 9, No. 1. |
