A growing number of political scientists have taken an active interest in interagency cooperation—a subject once considered too tedious and arcane to be worthy of sustained attention. In thinking about these issues, some scholars have borrowed heavily from “network theory,” while others have utilized familiar public administration concepts in new ways to better understand the causes or consequences of interagency cooperation.

Craig Thomas, representing the latter camp, has chosen a fascinating conflict for an in-depth investigation of interagency cooperation—the struggle over biodiversity, where litigation has triggered growing interest in such cooperation. By focusing on several case studies involving biodiversity disputes in California, Thomas illuminates the shifting terrain admirably and helps to vindicate his thesis that incentives to cooperate vary sharply within agencies, across agencies, and over time. California is a particularly appropriate choice for in-depth analysis, because it has more endangered and threatened species than any other state except Hawaii.

Unlike other scholars, who stress disincentives for interagency cooperation, Thomas argues that administrative agencies often cooperate. To understand when and why this occurs, he argues, we must look at exogenous factors, such as lawsuits, and the incentives of different types of agency officials.

Line managers, he posits, focus primarily on their agency and its well-being and seek to advance their agency by protecting its autonomy. For them, interagency cooperation is not particularly appealing.

Professionals, he asserts, have dual loyalties, to their agency and to their profession. When professions are dispersed across agencies, as is the case with natural-resource and wildlife agencies today, professionals can be avid promoters of interagency cooperation.

Field staff, he maintains, tend to identify closely with the community in which they reside. If interagency cooperation poses a threat to their local community, it inspires nervousness; if it offers benefits to their local community, it has some appeal.

Because line managers ultimately make policy for the agency, the key is for professionals to convince the line managers that interagency cooperation is in the agency's best interest. Less importantly, it is also useful for professionals to persuade field staff that interagency cooperation will enhance the socioeconomic development of their community.

According to Thomas, litigation under the Endangered Species Act in the 1980s and 1990s enhanced the ability of conservation biologists and other ecologists to win over line managers to the cause of interagency cooperation. That is because some of the lawsuits focused on the failure of government agencies to obey legal requirements that they “consult” with the Fish and Wildlife Service concerning the impacts of agency policies and practices on biodiversity.

In Thomas's narratives, the often-maligned Bureau of Land Management (BLM) emerges as a surprising supporter of interagency cooperation to promote biodiversity. As the target of more lawsuits than any other natural-resources agencies, the BLM and its California director, Ed Hastey, saw interagency cooperation as a benign method for taking ecological impacts into account on favorable terms and for avoiding lawsuits in the process.

But the BLM was not alone in promoting interagency cooperation. Prodded by conservation biologists and other professionals, a number of federal and state agencies embraced interagency cooperation, gingerly at first, but eventually with some conviction. By 2002, for example, 39 government agencies had become members of the California Executive Council on Biological Diversity (p. 148).

The case studies that comprise the core of this book are unusually rich and well documented. Interviews with nearly a hundred public officials provide most of the evidence for the author's conclusions, but he supplements the interviews with government documents and other sources. For example, he utilizes data on the attendance and participation of agency representatives at meetings of the state Executive Council on Biological Diversity.

In a commendable departure from custom, Thomas quotes the overwhelming majority of his respondents by name. As a result, it is possible to trace specific milestones and interventions to particular individuals. An additional advantage of this technique is that it humanizes the bureaucracy and makes it relatively easy to discern how civil servants actually shape administrative decisions.

Although impressive in many respects, the book does have some limitations. First, the author does not explicitly compare his analytical framework with others available to students of interagency collaboration. One wonders, for example, whether the author's framework yields more or less analytical leverage than resource dependence theory, organization theory, institutional theory, or an organizational culture perspective. Second, the author sidesteps a question of critical importance—namely, whether interagency cooperation actually produces good results. Are public policies more efficient, more equitable, or more sustainable as a result of interagency cooperation over biodiversity? The author believes that the answer is yes, but his research mainly tells us why cooperation occurs. In fact, one prominent state official resigned from the Executive Council on Biological Diversity because he thought it legitimized gubernatorial inaction on biodiversity (p. 119). Other fragmentary evidence also lends some credence to allegations that interagency cooperation often amounts to “symbolic politics.” Finally, the book sometimes suffers from a surfeit of detail. Although the author's enthusiasm for his subject is contagious, some readers will wish for a little more attention to the forest than to its trees.

Despite these limitations, the book is noteworthy for the spotlight it throws on civil servants and political appointees whose role in public policy innovation is often overlooked. Thomas makes it clear that these individuals, motivated by different impulses, pushed California and the nation to pay closer attention to the ecological implications of land management decisions. Moreover, they pushed harder when certain external conditions were met. Thus, although he focuses primarily on factors internal to the bureaucracy, he does give external factors their due, especially in his narratives.

Bureaucratic Landscapes has considerable potential for classroom use, in courses on public administration and environmental policy. Students who anticipate careers in the civil service will find good role models in this book. And students who care about environmental politics will discover that the best way to influence line managers at administrative agencies may be through agency professionals who act as “moles” within organizations whose primary mission has little to do with biodiversity per se.