Policy Design to Support Forest Restoration: The Value of Focused Investment and Collaboration (original) (raw)
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Environmental Management, 2014
The Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP), established in 2009, encourages collaborative landscape scale ecosystem restoration efforts on United States Forest Service (USFS) lands. Although the USFS employees have experience engaging in collaborative planning, CFLRP requires collaboration in implementation, a domain where little prior experience can be drawn on for guidance. The purpose of this research is to identify the ways in which CFLRP's collaborative participants and agency personnel conceptualize how stakeholders can contribute to implementation on landscape scale restoration projects, and to build theory on dynamics of collaborative implementation in environmental management. This research uses a grounded theory methodology to explore collaborative implementation from the perspectives and experiences of participants in landscapes selected as part of the CFLRP in 2010. Interviewees characterized collaborative implementation as encompassing three different types of activities: prioritization, enhancing treatments, and multiparty monitoring. The paper describes examples of activities in each of these categories and then identifies ways in which collaborative implementation in the context of CFLRP (1) is both hindered and enabled by overlapping legal mandates about agency collaboration, (2) creates opportunities for expanded accountability through informal and relational means, and, (3) creates feedback loops at multiple temporal and spatial scales through which monitoring information, prioritization, and implementation actions shape restoration work both within and across projects throughout the landscape creating more robust opportunities for adaptive management.
Journal of Forestry, 2013
In 2010, the USDA Forest Service created the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) to fund implementation of landscape-scale ecological restoration strategies. The program requires landscape projects to engage in collaboration throughout implementation over a 10-year period. A central tension in the program is the extent to which the Forest Service can engage in the collaborative process while retaining authority for management decisions on Forest Service lands and adhering to statutory guidance on collaboration. Drawing on comparative research of the first 10 projects enrolled in the CFLRP, this paper describes how Forest Service personnel navigated this tension and played roles in each collaborative categorized as leadership, membership, involvement, and intermittence. It concludes by suggesting that agency staff engage in collaborative dialogue on substantive issues while operating from an "arm's length" posture procedurally. This approach can minimize time and energy spent dealing with procedural concerns while allowing agency employees and collaborators to share knowledge, information, ideas, and perspectives to make better-informed decisions as they undertake landscape-scale ecological restoration work.
Northern Journal of Applied Forestry
It is increasingly apparent that a shift is taking place in how natural resources are being managed (Mohai and Jakes 1996). The philosophy of ecosystem management is a driving force behind the future management of public lands across federal land ownerships (Cormer and Shannon 1993). The success of ecosystem management will be based on the implementation of its dominant themes, which emphasize changes in the organizational structures of land managing agencies, interagency cooperation, and the incorporation of social values in order to achieve sustainable management of ecosystems (Grumbine 1994).
Managing Public Forests: Understanding the Role of Collaborative Planning
Environmental Management, 1998
As federal land management agencies such as the USDA Forest Service increasingly choose to implement collaborative methods of public participation, research is needed to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the technique, to identify barriers to effective implementation of collaborative processes, and to provide recommendations for increasing its effectiveness. This paper reports on the findings of two studies focused on the experiences of Forest
Issue 1 Spring Article 5 2015 National Forests Land and Resource Management Plans
The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service (Forest Service) manages 154 national forests and 20 grasslands in 44 states and Puerto Rico. National Forest Land and Resource Management Plans (forest plans) form the basis for land and resource management of national forests in the United States. For more than a decade the Forest Service has been attempting to incorporate innovative, collaborative public involvement strategies into the process for revising forest plans. In 2012 and 2015 the Forest Service codified new regulations for developing, revising, and amending forest plans. Collaboration and public involvement are explicit goals of the new regulations. This paper briefly reviews the literature on collaborative planning on national forests and explores a successful collaborative planning process used by the Green Mountain and Finger Lakes National Forests, located in Vermont and New York respectively, to develop their 2006 forest plans. This paper shows how the Green Mountain and Finger Lakes National Forests developed parallel public and internal collaborative
Buffalo Environmental Law Journal, 2013
In 2009, Congress passed the Forest Landscape Restoration Act, a significant new piece of legislation guiding restoration activities on competitively selected National Forest System lands. The Act established the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP), which solicits collaboratively developed proposals for landscapescale ecological restoration projects that are socially and economically viable. In many ways, the CFLRP reflects a number of longer-term patterns in forest governance that have increasingly emphasized large-scale planning, collaboration, monitoring, and restoration. The program also represents an emerging trend of using competitive processes to allocate funding. We begin by providing an overview of the CFLRP's primary objectives and requirements and then discuss how this program and the capacity to make it successful have resulted from a number of past policies and initiatives. We then provide an overview of the first 10 funded projects, which we evaluated based on a systematic review of their funding proposals, followed by a closer look at several of the projects. The piece concludes with a discussion of the primary challenges that lie ahead for the program.
Ecology and Society
The USDA Forest Service is encouraging the restoration of select forest ecosystems through its Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP). Collaboration is often necessary to implement landscape-scale management projects such as these, and a substantial body of research has examined the benefits and limitations of using collaboration as a tool for improving relationships, trust, and other outcomes among stakeholder groups. However, limited research has investigated the use of collaboration to achieve large-scale ecological restoration goals. Restoration poses some unique conditions for a collaborative approach, including reaching agreement on which historic conditions to use as a reference point, the degree of departure from these reference conditions that warrants management intervention, and how to balance historic conditions with expected future conditions and current human uses of the landscape. Using a mental-models approach, semistructured interviews were conducted with a total of 25 participants at three CFLRP sites. Results indicate that collaboration contributed to improved relationships and trust among participants, even among stakeholder groups with a history of disagreement over management goals. In addition, a shared focus on improving ecosystem resilience helped groups to address controversial management topics such as forest thinning in some areas. However, there was also evidence that CFLRP partnerships in our study locations have primarily focused on areas of high agreement among their stakeholders to date, and have not yet addressed other contentious topics. Previous studies suggest that first conducting management in areas with high consensus among participating stakeholders can build relationships and advance long-term goals. Nonetheless, our results indicate that achieving compromise in less obviously departed systems will require more explicit value-based discussions among stakeholders.
Ambio, 2021
Conflict in US forest management for decades centered around balancing demands from forested ecosystems, with a rise in place-based collaborative governance at the end of the twentieth century. By the early 2000s, it was becoming apparent that not only had the mix of players involved in forest management changed, but so had the playing field, as climate-driven disturbances such as wildfire and insect and disease outbreaks were becoming more extensive and severe. In this conceptual review paper, we argue that disturbance has become the most prominent driver of governance change on US national forests, but we also recognize that the governance responses to disturbance are shaped by variables such as discourses, institutional history and path dependence, and institutional innovation operating at different system levels. We review the governance changes in response to disturbance that constitute a new frontier in US federal forest governance and offer a conceptual framework to examine how these governance responses are shaped by multi-level factors.
Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies
The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service (Forest Service) manages 154 national forests and 20 grasslands in 44 states and Puerto Rico. National Forest Land and Resource Management Plans (forest plans) form the basis for land and resource management of national forests in the United States. For more than a decade the Forest Service has been attempting to incorporate innovative, collaborative public involvement strategies into the process for revising forest plans. In 2012 and 2015 the Forest Service codified new regulations for developing, revising, and amending forest plans. Collaboration and public involvement are explicit goals of the new regulations. This paper briefly reviews the literature on collaborative planning on national forests and explores a successful collaborative planning process used by the Green Mountain and Finger Lakes National Forests, located in Vermont and New York respectively, to develop their 2006 forest plans. This paper shows how the Gre...
Ecosystem Workforce Program Working Papers, 2018
Over the last decade, the U.S. Forest Service has been implementing a series of new initiatives designed to accelerate cross-boundary, collaborative, integrated restoration.1 Many national forests have applied for and been awarded funding for projects under competitive funding initiatives, like the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and the Joint Chiefs’ Landscape Restoration Partnership (Joint Chiefs’), which are represented on the majority of national forests. However, some forests have not had projects under these initiatives. Along with our prior research investigating the CFLRP and Joint Chiefs’,2 we were also interested in understanding how forests that have not participated in either of these initiatives conceptualized, planned for, and engaged in collaborative, landscape-scale restoration efforts. We identified forests that did not have CFLRP or Joint Chiefs’ projects and randomly selected three from each region to contact for interviews. We conducted 29 interviews with 37 people, including Forest Service personnel and external collaborative partners, on 18 national forests. Our objectives were to: 1. Understand interviewees’ perspectives about their eligibility for competitive funding and the effects of the CFLRP and Joint Chiefs’ initiatives on their programs of work. 2. Describe how forests without either Joint Chiefs’ or CFLRP funding approach collaborative, landscape restoration projects and define restoration goals. 3. Examine the factors that facilitate and inhibit success of restoration projects and objectives on these forests. 4. Synthesize recommendations offered by interviewees for the agency to support future landscape-scale collaborative restoration projects and goals across Forest Service and adjacent lands.