7393

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 7393
• Author: Harrington, W.
• Title: Endangered Species Protection and Water Resource Development.
• USFW Year: 1980.
• USFW - Doc Type: LA-8278-MS,
• Copyright Material: NO

found useful in other situations are effectiveness, efficiency, and distribu-
tional effects, each of which will now be examined in the context of endangered
species protection.
1. Effectiveness. A policy is effective if its implementation success-
fully achieves its objectives. It would be embarrassing, not to say a waste
of time and resources, to have an endangered spec ies policy that fails to
preserve endangered species. This means that a policy must offer a mechanism
for identifying species or populations whose survival is threatened, as well
as a means for protecting species thus identified. If the species is to be
preserved in its natural habitat, suitable areas where its members can live
undisturbed must be provided either by direct acquisition of such areas or by
regulation of human activity in them.
Perhaps because of the irreversibility of species extinction, most of the
discussion of endangered species protection has been expressed in either/or
terms: either we save this endangered species or develop that project, but
not both (see Bishop, 1978). However, one thing that makes thinking about
endangered species so difficult is that the issue does not often arise in such
stark, absolute terms. Far more common (and interesting) situations are (1)
the development in question will, with certainty, extirpate only certain indi-
viduals or subpopulations of the species, or (2) the impact of the project on
any individual is uncertain. Presumably, a policy that prevents (or at least
eliminates the undesirable characteristics of) such a development is more ef-
fective than one that does not because large populations have a better chance
of survival than small ones, other things being equal. (Also, larger popula-
tions may be "better" from the standpoint of the objectives of endangered
species protection quite apart from the probability of survival.)
Now suppose we have a set of projects ranked in order of their probable
impact on the survival of an endangered species, which we can regulate one by
one. This image suggests that whenever there is uncertainty about the impact
of a project, the more effective policy is to regulate it. It also suggests
that the more activities subject to regulation, the more effective the policy.
Finally, it suggests that extending the scope of regulation to projects of
increasingly uncertain impacts has decreasing marginal returns in effective-

ness.

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