“There's a Lot of Public Beaches, So There's No Reason Anyone Can't Go Out if They Want To”: Conservation Stakeholders’ View of Access in the Iowa Great Lakes

There is little understanding of how conservation managers conceptualize, much less manage for, public access to natural resources. This is particularly true within privatized agricultural landscapes facing environmental pressures such as the Iowa Great Lakes (IGL) region. This research uses Ribot and Peluso's A Theory of Access as a framework for analyzing interviews with IGL conservation actors to examine how actors conceptualize access and how they manage it. While the semi-structured interviewees conceive of access in diverse ways, most understand public access as a structural-relational issue, and identify capital, technology, and knowledge as the principal mechanisms that mediate the public’s ability to access the IGLs. Respondents nonetheless feel limited in their capacity to enhance access given their conservation work is on private lands. Despite these feelings, participants expressed practical steps that could help improve access in the IGL. We summarize these practical steps and those from previous studies to improve access management in the IGL and elsewhere. These include increased multilingual signage, recreational programming centered around access, and increased communication with key stakeholders. Finally, this study highlights how others can use Ribot and Peluso's (2003) mechanisms of access as a framework when addressing access issues.