Policy Goals For Endangered Species Recovery

Little attention has been given to establishing goals for the recovery of species listed under the Endangered Species Act. This article examines how alternative policy choices for recovering endangered species affect policy outcomes, in terms of which species and taxonomic: groups receive priority for recovery funding. Ten priority ranking systems, designed to achieve different policy goals, were proposed and analyzed to determine how funds likely would be distributed among the various taxonomic groups. The major conclusions are: (I) single objective systems are much more selective than multiple objective systems and can be very effective in bringing about specific desired policy goals; (2) widely different multiple objective systems that use the same variables result in similar policy outcomes; and, (3) the addition of a highly selective variable is more effective for changing the outcome of multiple objective systems than changing the system structure.