Policy Challenges for Collaborative Forestry: A Summary of Previous Findings and Suggestions

After several years of effort, many collaborative and community-based forestry groups that formed in the 1990s are still struggling to implement their land management projects. The combined impact of several factors, including legal challenges, funding problems, agency history, bureaucratic processes, and poor internal communication, seems to conspire against collaborative solutions for today's land management challenges. Several efforts have been made in recent years to identify barriers to collaboration and to identify various solutions to these complicated public resource issues. As part of this chain of examinations, the Ecological Restoration Institute, in cooperation with the Pinchot Institute, the Society of American Foresters, and American Forests, has organized a 2-day workshop to clarify policy and procedural factors that hinder collaborative forestry efforts and suggest policy changes to address those factors. This document, which summarizes the findings and suggestions from previous workshops and policy analyses, has been prepared for participants in the September 2003 workshop. In order to facilitate discussion, this document is divided into three sections. The first section reviews legal and regulatory problems faced by collaborative forestry groups. The second lists various funding challenges faced by agency partners and collaborators. The third section summarizes barriers to collaboration that have been attributed to Forest Service culture and practices. Each problem statement is followed by an explanatory discussion from the literature, and, where available, suggestions for policy changes that could alleviate the problem