Book excerpt: Public land managers are confronted with an ever-growing & diversifying set of demands for providing recreation opportunities. Coupled with a variety of trends & reduced organizational capacity, these demands represent a significant & complex challenge to public land mgmt. One way of dealing with this situation is to use a framework to assist in working through this complexity. A framework is a process using a set of steps that assists managers in framing a particular problem, working through it, & arriving at a set of defendable decisions. This report traces the development of each of these frameworks, describes the fundamental premises & concepts used within them, & provides an assessment of the experience with their use. Illus.