Preserving Public Lands for the Future: The Politics of Intergenerational Goods

Comparing national efforts to preserve public lands, William R. Lowry investigates how effectively and under what conditions governments can provide goods for future generations.

Providing intergenerational goods, ranging from balanced budgets to space programs and natural environments, is particularly challenging because most political incentives reward short-term behavior. Lowry examines the effort of institutional structure on the public delivery of these goods. He offers a theoretical framework accounting for both the necessary conditions--public demand, political stability, and official commitment to long-term delivery--and constraining factors--the tensions between public agencies and politicians as well as between different levels of government--that determine the ability of a nation to achieve long-term goals.