Drill baby drill: an analysis of how energy development displaced ranching's dominance over the BLM'S subgovernment policymaking environment

Academic literature analyzing the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land-use subgovernment stops at the Taylor Grazing Act and concludes that the historical development of administering grazing on public lands led to the capture of the BLM by ranching interests. Using a two-pronged methodological approach of process tracing and elite interviews this dissertation seeks to advance our collective knowledge of subgovernment theory by a) clarifying the impact executive decision-making has on subgovernments and b) identifying the conditions under which strategically competitive behavior between two competing subgovernment actors occurs. The dissertation seeks to update the literature by explaining what has caused the BLM to shift from a rancherdominated agency to an energy dominated agency by identifying conditions under which subgovernment actors strategically respond to a political conflict.