ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the citizen participation in a broad organizational context and explains how it led to forest plans, as social decision processes, becoming "social contracts" between die government and the public. It examines how the US Forest Service (USFS) responds to expanded citizen participation and the challenge posed by such participation to traditional norms of bureaucratic accountability. The chapter describes the emergence of a natural resource community from the practice of citizen participation. Statutory requirements for citizen participation shifted the point of public access from the Washington, D.C. office to the numerous local offices of the USFS. There are two major categories of public involvement processes in the Forest Service, formal and informal. USFS programs for involving citizens in planning and decision processes need to be cognizant both of how people prefer to participate and of how the very act of participation creates values and interests.
