Proximity, politics, and preferences: Spatial and contextual patterns in management opinions for an imperiled multifunctional landscape

Landscape governance is challenged by a range of factors, including the uneven spatial distribution of people, their identities, and ecosystems, in addition to mismatches in ecological boundaries, jurisdictional boundaries, and the spatial extent of readily available public opinion data. Using Idaho’s sagebrush steppe as an illustrative example of the patchwork of actors and ownership that exists in imperiled multifunctional landscapes, we aim to identify perceived threats to sagebrush steppe, develop county-level estimates of preferences for and acceptability of sagebrush steppe management strategies, evaluate the roles of political and ecological predictors for attitudes toward sagebrush steppe management, and assess the potential social-ecological implications of management preferences and associated acceptability. We modeled sagebrush steppe management attitudes from a statewide survey (N = 1048) using both multilevel regression and poststratification and multinomial logistic regression. Our results reveal four opportunities and challenges to landscape governance in Idaho’s sagebrush steppe and beyond: (1) the implementation of preferred management strategies may be hindered by a lack of institutional fit, (2) regional patterns in attitudes underscore the need to consider the proximity of the impacts of decisions, (3) spatially-explicit approaches can help to disentangle the relative roles of socio-political and geographic predictors of environmental opinion, and (4) a shared desire to protect sagebrush steppe may transcend ideological differences. These findings underscore the need for collaborative efforts to consider the local and extra-local socio-political contexts, build governance capacity and trust, and focus on finding common ground through shared values for more effective and transformative governance of multiple-use landscapes.