Collaborative Implementation for Ecological Restoration on US Public Lands: Implications for Legal Context, Accountability, and Adaptive Management

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.