THE election of Governor Clinton and Senator Gore alerts us to a new environmental movement. They claim to be seeking innovative and efficient ways to achieve environmental goals. For the past 20 years such an alternative approach has been developed. It may at last receive the attention in Washington that it has earned in universities and think tanks.

It is called the New Resource Economics (the NRE). It is based upon incentives and voluntary action. It recognizes the role property rights and markets play in coordinating and rationing valuable resources.

But other than professional analysts and economists, few people understand the logic or applications. Much of the writing has been scholarly and highly specialized, read only by graduate students under duress. Through this and future columns, I will attempt to bridge this gap between academia and the concerned citizen.

Most people in the Northwest are familiar with the battles over timber, spotted owls, and salmon. Traditional lawmaking and regulatory schemes have yet to find productive, mutually acceptable solutions. But there is another way, a win-win approach. It can lead to more environmentally sensitive management. The focus is upon how information and incentives affect decision-makers. There is explicit recognition that differing institutional arrangements generate different incentives and therefore different management decisions.

Our natural resources are managed by a variety of legal and economic institutions, including markets, private companies, nonprofit corporations and government. Each has different but predictable benefits and flaws. Markets can only work when we can establish clear and transferable property rights and do so at a low cost. Nonprofits have problems motivating and monitoring their staffs and volunteers. Governmental agencies suffer from bureaucratic inefficiency and often turn into captives of special interests and engines of plunder. When advocating environmental reforms we should recognize that no institutional form is perfect, and consider the information and incentives of each in terms of the goals.

This care is required because good intentions are not enough. The forces of self-interest are relentless. Over the long run, if environmental reform is to be successful, our institutions must direct this individual self-interest to environmental quality.

Last summer's revelations about political pressures on U.S. Forest Service and Park Service regional leaders are compelling testimonies to the importance of this focus. When our resource and environmental agencies are dependent upon politics, their leaders face incentives to yield to political pressures. When existing incentives remain constant, merely changing agency personnel to those more "committed" will not solve the problem. Only changing the institutions will produce lasting changes.

Many of our existing institutions work against environmental stewardship. When decision-makers are insulated from the costs of their actions, or denied access to the benefits, problems follow.

For example, when individuals are not rewarded for preserving habitat, it is under-produced. When pollution is "free," it is overproduced.

Take the case of the Forest Service. Because it gets money from logging, not recreation, it is no surprise that it zealously promotes logging and road-building. A way to make the Forest Service more responsive to the public is to collect user fees from hikers, bikers, and campers. In a majority of National Forests, recreation could easily generate more net dollars than timber. And in areas where logging continues to be profitable, forest managers would face incentives to reduce its visual and environmental impact to retain their recreation income. In such ways, institutions can be arranged to make economic progress and environmental quality complementary.

Private property and markets can be used to foster these mutually beneficial agreements and accommodations. For example, limited oil drilling allowed on the Rainey Preserve, an Audubon-owned migratory bird sanctuary in Louisiana, is an example of this. Oil companies compete to drill and produce in environmentally sensitive ways and Audubon gets royalties with which they expand sanctuaries. In a few more years the wells will be played out but the sanctuary will remain.

Contrast this with oil exploration on government lands. Audubon raises money to fight such development. The NRE enables us to see why: By seeking to protect bird habitat on federal lands, Audubon signals environmental concern and generates income. However, it pays none of the opportunity costs of not exploiting that land.

Good institutional arrangements, like Audubon's ownership of Rainey, make decision-makers responsible for both costs and benefits of an action, lessen political confrontation, and foster cooperation. Markets and property rights help weigh trade-offs. Because of political pressures, this is exceedingly difficult in government institutions.

No institution is perfect, and a mix is required. But private property rights, incentives, voluntary action and entrepreneurial creativity are under-appreciated tools for the environmentalist. They foster the economic progress that encourages environmental concern and the capacity to act upon that concern. These are the features of this new approach that make it attractive to environmental economists and policy analysts. The question is whether the Clinton/Gore administration will demonstrate the political skills required to deliver the outcomes they claim to seek.