One way to allow some western US national parks to be more effective biological reserves is to selectively subsume adjacent US Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property within park boundaries. This follows the historical American tradition of annexing other federal agency lands to create better national parks.  In this case, however, lands added would be adjacent USFS and BLM tracts where present or future use is not compatible with preserving park biota. The scientific, socioeconomic, legal and political aspects of this option--annexation--are discussed accompanied with the illustrative example of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly bear. Two landless tools are examined (existing authorities or persuasion) followed by three landed tools (BLM national monuments/conservation areas, wilderness areas and roadless areas). Twelve anticipated arguments against annexation are addressed. The American public may wish to consider whether this option is worthy of further consideration.

A profoundly innovative and very different approach to environmental and natural resource governance, referred to in this article as “New Environmental Governance” (NEG), has emerged across the globe. NEG is characterized by a range of innovative elements, including collaboration, participation and learning and adaptation. As with most approaches to governance in the western world, accountability in NEG is vital to prevent the abuse of public authority, ensure that public resources are used appropriately, and secure performance expectations of governance endeavors. However, many scholars suggest that NEG’s innovative properties actually render it vulnerable to being “captured” or perverted into a rent-seeking vehicle. Others claim that NEG can in fact secure accountability through replacing or supplementing traditional accountability controls with “new” forms of accountability, such as “mutual” accountability between collaborators or the “professional” accountability of industry. However, the efficacy of these and other “new” forms of accountability remain under-explored in practice. Drawing on eighty interviews with key stakeholders across three diverse environmental and natural resource case studies, this article provides empirically based insights into these debates by critically examining whether and to what extent a range of NEG accountability mechanisms have been effective in practice. The article finds that all the cases evidenced shortfalls in their different approaches to accountability, giving rise to potential capture, unprincipled deal-making and rent-seeking. This leads the article to identify a number of recommendations for policy makers and scholars regarding achieving effective accountability. These recommendations fall into three main groupings, namely (i) supporting effective monitoring processes; (ii) setting overarching performance goals to “bound”/limit discretion and decision-making; and (iii) fostering effective professional and mutual accountability to subvert “self-interested behavior.” The article also provides some important insights into an issue that has posed significant practical and conceptual challenges for law and for lawyers, namely the nature and role of conventional law and regulation in NEG. Based on the article’s analysis, it argues that a “hybridity thesis” descriptively captures this relationship between law and new governance.