Federal land management agencies and social scientists have been attempting to understand place meanings
and the perceptions of resource users for decades. In this research,wesuggest that understanding the
relationships between the meanings individuals ascribe to managed landscapes and those individuals’
preferences for management outcomes have become increasingly important. The processes of devolution
and globalization have simultaneously increased the need for locally informed collaborative management
and increased the importance of local ‘place’. Following the cognitive perspective on place, we examine
how individuals’ place meanings affect their desired management outcomes. Data come from a questionnaire
administered to residents living near three U.S. Army Corps of Engineers managed projects
within Illinois’ Kaskaskia River Watershed. Confirmatory factor analysis is employed to validate a sevendimensional
scale of place meanings and a six-dimensional scale of desired management outcomes.
Subsequent structural equation modeling revealed that desiredmanagementoutcomes were significantly
influenced by place meanings (12 significant relationships found). Most notably, the analysis revealed
that believing the managed resource area contributed to the local community’s identity significantly
and positively influenced all of the possible management outcomes. The connection between resource
management and community identity matters. Other findings reveal individuals attached a variety of
meanings to the resource, and that these meanings can affect desired management preferences in distinct
and potentially conflicting ways. In sum, our findings begin to unravel some of the complexities
between the various meanings attached to managed landscapes and their affect on desired management
outcomes.