Policy Design to Support Forest Restoration: The Value of Focused Investment and Collaboration

Courtney Schultz,Kathleen Mclntyre,Laren Cyphers,Autumn Ellison,Chad Kooistra,Cassandra Moseley

doi:10.3390/f9090512

Courtney Schultz, Kathleen Mclntyre + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/f9090512

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Journal: Forests	Publication Date: Aug 24, 2018
Citations: 34	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Colorado State University, University of Oregon

Abstract

To address rapid change and complex environmental management challenges, governance approaches must support collective action across actors and jurisdictions, and planning at appropriate spatial extents to affect ecological processes. Recent changes in U.S. national forest policy incorporate new tools to facilitate collaborative landscape restoration, providing an opportunity to examine the relationship between policy design and governance change. Based on 151 interviews with agency personnel and partners, and a survey of 425 agency staff members, we investigated how two new policy approaches affected the governance of forest restoration and also looked at the other factors that most significantly affected policy implementation. Our findings reveal that, under these policies, multi-year funding commitments to specific landscapes, combined with requirements to work collaboratively, resulted in larger scales of planning, improved relationships, greater leveraged capacity, and numerous innovations compared to the past. A history of collaborative relationships, leadership, and agency capacity were the most significant variables that affected the implementation of policies designed to support collaborative landscape restoration. Our findings suggest that policies that provide focused investment to undertake landscape approaches to restoration, along with specific requirements for interagency and partner collaboration, are yielding positive results and may represent a new era in forest policy in the United States.

Highlights

A central question for policymakers, stakeholders, and governance scholars is how policy can be designed to support governance approaches that better match the spatial extent of management efforts with ecological processes and promote collective action and coordination across jurisdictions [1,2,3].Recent policy changes to support U.S national forest restoration provide an opportunity to study this question [3]
In the context of collaborative landscape restoration, we looked for evidence of improved collaborative structures and processes and whether these laid a foundation for collective action to support work across jurisdictional boundaries and at spatial extents better aligned with ecological processes of interest
On the Joint Chiefs projects, 82% of survey respondents said as a result of the program they were engaging in landscape-scale restoration more than in the past (Figure 1), and 81% said they were accomplishing more work on state and private lands compared to the past (Figure 2; note that working on state and private lands was not a goal of the CFLRP, but using federal dollars to conduct work across federal, state, and private lands was a goal of the Joint Chiefs’)

Summary

Introduction

A central question for policymakers, stakeholders, and governance scholars is how policy can be designed to support governance approaches that better match the spatial extent of management efforts with ecological processes and promote collective action and coordination across jurisdictions [1,2,3].Recent policy changes to support U.S national forest restoration provide an opportunity to study this question [3]. Despite changes over the last several decades in the goals of forest management and growing participation of collaborative stakeholder groups in planning efforts, until recently, there has been little change to the formal institutions that define roles for collaborators, drive project design, or prioritize investments in planning and project implementation. The CFLRP allocated funding through a competitive process to landscape restoration projects proposed jointly by the Forest Service and a group of collaborators on National Forest System lands. The law required collaborators to be involved in planning, implementation, and monitoring of projects that received funding based on a landscape strategy; this was the first program that gave collaborators any formal role in national forest management beyond traditional public-notice-and-comment procedures and was unique in emphasizing collaboration beyond the planning phase of project design

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