Policy design to support cross-boundary land management: The example of the Joint Chiefs Landscape Restoration Partnership

Land Use Policy 80 (2019) 362–369

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Policy design to support cross-boundary land management: The example of the Joint Chiefs Landscape Restoration Partnership Laren A. Cyphers, Courtney A. Schultz

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Dept of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1472, United States

A R T I C LE I N FO

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Collaborative governance Ecological restoration Cross-Boundary management Policy design Scalar mismatch

There is a mismatch between large-scale, dynamic, ecological processes and the scales at which individual land management agency units have the capacity and authority to work. To improve environmental governance, scholars across disciplines emphasize the need to work across jurisdictional and organizational boundaries to support collective action and address scale mismatches. An important question now is how to design policies that support collaborative management across jurisdictional boundaries to produce improved outcomes. Our research evaluated the Joint Chiefs Landscape Restoration Partnership, a new policy tool in use by the US federal government to support forest restoration activities across the public-private divide, to investigate two research questions: 1) Did the policy design of the Joint Chiefs Partnership effectively support cross-boundary work? And, 2) What underlying conditions helped or hindered the ability of project participants to undertake cross-boundary work using this policy approach? To glean program-wide understanding of the Joint Chiefs Partnership, we conducted 62 semi-structured interviews with agency staff and external participants in the program. We found that the requirement to collaborate and infusion of committed, multi-year funding supported faster implementation of planned work and increased coordination across jurisdictions and partners. Previously established collaborative relationships were reported as the most critical factor underlying success, while limited agency capacity was reported as significantly impeding project success. Our findings suggest that this policy tool, which incorporates proposed policy design principles to support improved governance, was successful for supporting cross-boundary management and collective action. The results from this study also raise practical questions about tradeoffs under programs that prioritize funding investments and about navigating among the variables that affect policy implementation. Our study contributes to the broader literature on policy design for complex environmental governance challenges and provides an empirical evalution of a policy tool in a specific legal, administrative, and land management context.

1. Introduction Environmental governance scholars emphasize the need to work across jurisdictional boundaries so that the scales of management activities are better aligned with those of ecological processes (Cash et al., 2006; Kettl, 2006; Folke et al., 2007; Cumming et al., 2012). An important area of inquiry is how to design policies that support crossjurisdictional planning and collective action in specific legal, administrative, and land management contexts (Rijke et al., 2012; DeCaro et al., 2017). This is a critical challenge in US public land management, which requires that federal land managers coordinate actions across public and private lands at large enough spatial extents to affect processes like fire (Agee and Skinner, 2005; Theobald and Romme, 2007; North et al., 2012; Moritz et al., 2014).

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The US Forest Service, which is the federal agency that manages the US national forests, utilizes multiple tools and authorities that promote collaboration with partners and stakeholders to undertake ecological restoration, and many of these tools focus on fire management (USFS, 2015). The Joint Chiefs Landscape Restoration Partnership, which began in 2014, is a new policy tool to support fuels reduction and ecological restoration on US forestlands, focusing on a heretofore unfunded challenge in fire management: planning and funding a coordinated program of work across the public-private jurisdictional divide. The two partner US Department of Agriculture agencies—the US Forest Service, which manages the National Forest System, and the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), which conducts outreach and assistance with private agricultural and forest landowners—work together with community-based collaborative partners

Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (L.A. Cyphers), [email protected] (C.A. Schultz).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.09.021 Received 16 July 2018; Received in revised form 15 September 2018; Accepted 16 September 2018 Available online 15 October 2018 0264-8377/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Fig. 1. Joint Chiefs Partnership Projects Map. Figure courtesy of Autumn Ellison.

to design a program of work across a contiguous project area (the “Joint Chiefs” are the heads of these two agencies). Together, the agencies submit proposals to an internal review board for up to three years of funding to undertake cross-boundary activities within the project area, which can vary in size depending on the project. In this way, the approach prioritizes funding investments for locations with active collaborative relationships and a plan to conduct cross-boundary work. Projects must prioritize adjacent lands at the public-private boundary and address wildfire risk, wildlife habitat, or watershed health. Investments to date have exceeded $150 million in 55 projects across the nation; between 2014 and 2017, average funding allocated per year to projects was just over $33,000,000 (Fig. 1). We investigated the Joint Chiefs Partnership as a policy tool with the potential to improve the coordination of planning and implementation of fire management projects. In this paper, we address two research questions: 1) What aspects of the policy design of the Joint Chiefs Partnership supported progress in accomplishing cross-boundary work? 2) What other factors helped or hindered efforts to work across boundaries under this policy approach? Our goal is to contribute an empirical review of a nationwide policy tool, specifically designed to improve collective action across jurisdictional boundaries, to inform the ongoing exploration of policy design for improved environmental governance.

and conditions resulting from climate change have caused a rise in the extent and frequency of high-severity wildfires in the United States (Omi and Martinson, 2004; Donovan and Brown, 2007; Jolly et al., 2015). Addressing these challenges requires greater tolerance of natural fire and the use of other fuel reduction strategies, like mechanical thinning and prescribed fire, to reduce hazardous fuel build-up (Seielstad, 2014; Steelman, 2016; Stephens et al., 2016; Schoennagel et al., 2017). To date, forest managers have struggled to implement enough effective fuel reduction and forest ecosystem restoration treatments to address these issues, particularly at the intersection of public and private lands (Schoennagel et al., 2009). Near communities, the potential for use of natural fire to reduce fuel loads is limited because of the increased need for suppression near the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) (Calkin et al., 2014; Stephens et al., 2016). The WUI, most simply, includes areas of human development that intermingle with wildlands (Reilly, 2015). Because special efforts are often made to protect homes and property values, the presence of a WUI exacerbates the wildfire paradox (i.e. the fact that suppression today leads to a greater need for and cost of suppression in the future) (Reinhardt et al., 2008; Gorte, 2013). The WUI likely will continue to expand, particularly in the Intermountain West, and more than 65 percent of the WUI is in wildland vegetation types classified as high hazard for wildfire (Theobald and Romme, 2007). Wildfire will continue to threaten life and property if land managers cannot work across the public-private boundary at large enough scales to reduce fuel loads in a way that will reduce fire hazard (Agee and Skinner, 2005; Theobald and Romme, 2007; Moritz et al., 2014; Schoennagel et al., 2017). In addition to addressing the challenges of fire management, national forest management today is oriented around restoring ecological integrity, which is the guiding framework in the regulations that interpret and implement the National Forest Management Act of 1976

2. Literature review 2.1. Fire management and forest restoration in the United States Across much of the Western United States, average fire season length, number of large fires, and annual area burned are increasing (Calkin et al., 2014; Stephens et al., 2016). Increased fuel continuity 363

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(NFMA) (also known as “the planning rule” and at 36 CFR 219 et seq.). Planning for ecological integrity focuses on the restoration of natural processes, like fire and other disturbances, that drive the structure and composition of ecosystems; ecological integrity also focuses on the conservation of native biodiversity, which often requires work across jurisdictions (Wurtzebach and Schultz, 2016). In addition, protecting watershed conditions plays a central role in the planning rule and through broader use of the Watershed Condition Framework to guide work on national forests (see, e.g., the focus on watersheds in sections 36 CFR 219.6 and 219.8). Increasingly, the Forest Service, communities, and water utilities are focusing on restoration and fuels reduction to reduce the risk of fire and its subsequent effects in watersheds that include national forestlands and serve as municipal drinking water sources (Huber-Stearns et al., 2015). Thus, forest restoration efforts often necessitate activities across jurisdictions to address vegetation conditions that constitute a fire hazard to ecosystems, ecosystem services, and communities.

coordination and conflict may arise, particularly without dedicated bridging forums or boundary spanning staff (McGuire, 2006). Another challenge is finding both capacity and legal space for interagency coordination and collaboration under current environmental planning laws, like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and NFMA, both of which rest the authority for decisions with a lead federal agency and limit the space for influence by non-state actors (Klyza and Sousa, 2008). Sharing responsibility with stakeholders and other agencies also involves some surrender of authority and poses accountability issues for public agencies (Bryson et al., 2006). Another significant obstacle in the federal lands context, when attempting to work across the public-private boundary may be lack of participation from private landowners, lack of access to these individuals through standard agency channels, and distrust among landowners of the federal government (Fischer and Charnley, 2012). Supporting cross-boundary work will stretch the expertise and resources of any one agency and force collaboration and partnerships, which brings both opportunities and challenges.

2.2. Governance design for cross-boundary work

2.3. Summary and research questions

Addressing fire and other large-scale ecological processes presents a significant governance challenge, precisely because it requires work at a variety of spatial extents and across diverse actors and jurisdictions (Folke et al., 2007). The scholarship in this area emphasizes the need to work across multiple types of boundaries (e.g. across jurisdictions, agency units, or broader social and epistemological boundaries) and the nimbleness to work at a variety of spatial extents aligned with various ecological processes (Cash et al., 2006; Folke et al., 2007; Cumming et al., 2012). This issue also is at the center of today’s most pressing public administration challenges, which require greater interorganizational coordination and networking among public and private sectors to address multi-sectoral, complex problems (Goldsmith and Eggers, 2004; Kettl, 2006; Koppenjan and Klijn, 2015). Additional empirical research and theory development are needed to build our understanding of potential policy approaches that can allow for the scale flexibility and collaboration needed to work across boundaries in specific governance contexts (Rijke et al., 2012; DeCaro et al., 2017). The existing literature highlights the importance of engaging non-state actors to leverage resources, participatory decisionmaking, and flexible authorities with broad goals that leave space for tailoring specific implementation strategies to local contexts (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Craig et al., 2017; DeCaro et al., 2017). Innes and Booher (2003) note that “the way to build societal and institutional capacity, and the learning processes that are essential to them, is through collaborative planning and action,” which in the US context requires specific policy tools that create space for collaboration in a state-dominated system designed to limit the influence of special interest groups (Klyza and Sousa, 2008). Tangible support, in the form of resources, information and training, and clear roles and responsibilities for both federal and non-state actors are also important (Decaro et al., 2017). The literature emphasizes the importance of bridging organizations or forums, which are groups or venues that allow diverse actors to come together to coordinate work and share knowledge (Berkes, 2009). Organizations or actors that facilitate this work can serve as trusted liaisons among different centers of activity or knowledge, supporting networks and partnerships by facilitating communication and mediating differences (Weber and Khademian, 2008; Decaro et al., 2017; Abrams et al., 2017a). Involving multiple actors also allows for social learning and co-production of goal-setting and planning documents, potentially transforming attitudes and fueling motivations to engage in ongoing work together (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Cumming et al., 2012). While the involvement of multiple actors leads to greater potential for collective action, it also increases the likelihood of conflict and power imbalance (Bryson et al., 2006; DeCaro et al., 2017). When working across diverse federal agency cultures and capacities, poor

The Joint Chiefs Landscape Restoration Partnership as a policy tool incorporates many of the aforementioned principles, including: tangible support in the form of committed funding for multiple years, requirements to work with local collaborators and across two federal agencies, and program goals and requirements that can be tailored to local contexts in terms of the involved partners, specific objectives, and spatial extent of projects. We investigated the Joint Chiefs Partnership as a policy tool to support collective action and address ecological processes like fire that require coordination across jurisdictions. Our research focused on two primary questions: 1) What aspects of the policy design of the Joint Chiefs Partnership supported progress in accomplishing cross-boundary work? 2) What other factors helped or hindered efforts to work across boundaries under this policy approach? Based on the literature, we looked for several indicators of success, including: collaboration, relationship building, and collective action among the involved agencies and partners. Established relationships, use of bridging structures, supportive leadership, and sufficient capacity would likely be facilitators, whereas landowner distrust, interagency differences, and lack of capacity and coordination were likely to limit success. 3. Methods This research was funded by the US Forest Service, as part of a broader study on national forest restoration policies (see Schultz et al., 2017). The funders provided guidance on topics of interest, encouraged their staff to participate in our study, and invited us to present our findings to agency staff and leadership; we retained control over our research design and the presentation of our findings. Our goal was to get a program-wide understanding of the Joint Chiefs Partnership, and we took a pragmatic approach to answering our research questions (Creswell, 2009). In addition to the qualitative interviews that we report on in this paper, we also conducted a survey of agency staff involved in the Joint Chiefs Partnership as part of our broader study (see Schultz et al., 2017; 2018). In the Summer of 2017, we conducted semi-structured interviews, using an interview guide and allowing for some variation in the emphasis on certain questions and order of questions. We interviewed participants from 17 Joint Chiefs Partnership projects, sampled from the 28 projects that were awarded funding in 2014 and 2015 (Fig. 1). Sampled projects included eight projects from fiscal year 2014 and nine projects from fiscal year 2015; we selected projects for diversity across geographic regions and had no prior knowledge of the Joint Chiefs Partnership or of individual projects. We focused on 2014 and 2015 projects because these would have been ongoing for about two or more years at the time of our work (2016 projects were awarded funding less 364

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restoration project leader explained, “Working with private landowners has given us access to a whole other element of the community, especially those lands that directly border the federal ownership” (#48). A collaborative participant noted, “The Joint Chiefs offered us the ability to do that cross-boundary work—to line up work on public lands with what we were doing on private lands areas. In that way, we have more of a landscape scale approach to protecting water and protecting our communities” (#101). Speaking to the cross-boundary component, another Forest Service employee commented, “To me the biggest value added with this is working across borders.. . . The forest doesn't stop at an arbitrary political boundary and the work needs to be done across borders” (#74). Another major theme regarding the value of the Joint Chiefs Partnership approach revolved around improved relationships and coordination between the Forest Service and NRCS. One Forest Service employee explained, “I think it helped build new relationships and facilitate some successes that we probably couldn't have had if we had just stayed in the same old stovepipes. So, it broke down barriers” (#30). A Forest Service District Ranger on another project said, “It really brought the NRCS and the [Forest Service] together, sister agencies, that, to be quite honest, probably didn’t have a whole lot of understanding about our potential overlap, in terms of our missions, or at least the clientele that they work with. . . . [B]ringing the NRCS into the equation brought a connection with the private forest landowners” (#33). In addition, several interviewees said that the technical forestry capacity of NRCS was expanded through coordination with the Forest Service, a state’s forestry department, or a NRCS forester from another area. On most projects, people commented on the value of building collective capacity through the involvement of state agencies, community leaders, and NGO partners. Most interviewees discussed the value of working cooperatively to achieve more than any single entity could, as well as the importance of collaborative efforts when dealing with complex, large-scale problems. For example, one project manager explained, “Our capacity to get work done has just grown so immense through the partnerships that we have. . . . We all have the same purpose and goals in mind, and we kind of have become a little bit interchangeable” (#24). One NRCS team leader stated, “None of us is strong individually, but [we are] stronger together, and we can pull our staff resources, our technical resources, our financial resources together to make an impact” (#23). Projects involved various external groups, including Native American tribal crews, private landowners, state agencies, collaborative stakeholder groups, and volunteers to get work done on the ground, which included inventory, technical assistance, monitoring, and identification of priority landscapes. Multiple projects leveraged the science, monitoring, and implementation capacity of local universities and NGOs. One NRCS Project Manager said, “In our partnership group, we've really played to our strengths. . . we're all invested in all parts of the program but in different ways. Great communication is important—working to understand each other’s roles so that we can fill that need. I think that that's really made it more efficient, because we can all lean on each other to meet different needs” (#56). Another major theme from interviews was how valuable it was when collaborative groups, external partners, or landowners acted as bridges to provide trustworthy outreach and education to the public and other landowners. On the majority of projects, non-federal partners were involved in outreach when they had established trust or communication with landowners or more sophisticated outreach strategies than the Forest Service or NRCS. On one project, a local natural history museum conducted outreach to the public, which added credibility to the project and garnered community buy-in. As one District Ranger working on that project explained, “People trust them more than they trust us” (#105). Another project benefitted from a city-led community outreach strategy, which included engagement with local breweries to discuss the importance of the local watershed. Other interviewees pointed to partners like the local fire department or restoration crews;

than one year prior to our study). To identify study participants, we started by contacting all Forest Service and NRCS leads for interviews via email, and upon interviewing them, we asked for recommendations of additional internal and external contacts with a strong knowledge of the project. Therefore, we employed purposive sampling and aimed to interview one internal Forest Service staff, one internal NRCS staff, and one external partner—usually a community-based partner from a nongovernmental organization (NGO) or a local/state agency—for each project, to obtain diverse perspectives regarding project success, challenges, and potential improvements to the program and its administration (Patton, 2015). Collecting evidence and perspectives from different participants allowed us to triangulate our data, increasing the credibility of our results (Yin, 2015). We did not target private landowners in this research because we sought community partners that would have perspective on the overall effort; in addition, the NRCS was not allowed to share lists of landowner participants for privacy reasons. Solicitation requests for interviews were emailed to participants twice with a final follow-up call. In the event of non-response or negative response, we worked to identify another potential candidate and solicit their participation. A potential bias in our approach is that we may not have spoken to those least satisfied with the program, if this was a reason for their non-response or if those less-satisfied individuals were no longer participating in the Joint Chiefs Partnership project or were not recommended to us. We conducted hour-long interviews in-person or over the phone and completed 62 semi-structured interviews, including 21 with Forest Service staff, 19 with NRCS staff, and 22 with external partners; we provide the numbers associated with individual interviewees with quotes included in our results. Topics discussed included successes of the partnership, project innovations, collaborative efforts, institutional barriers and challenges, and suggestions for changes to the Joint Chiefs Partnership. We interviewed until we felt we had reached saturation on our research questions, recognizing that, while we identified the major themes, we may have missed some details associated with specific project participants and locations that were not part of our study. All interviews were recorded and then transcribed, following confidentiality procedures approved by our university’s Institutional Review Board. All interviews were coded in Dedoose, an online platform for qualitative research. We used codes to organize our data, and our codes were based on our primary research questions. We then consolidated data excerpts for individual codes and wrote a memo for each code, which provided an additional analytical step to identify the major and minor themes that arose in our data. 4. Results 4.1. Perspectives on the Joint Chiefs Partnership approach and its effects While there was no minimum acreage or scale requirement for projects, almost every project highlighted the value of the Joint Chiefs Partnership for increasing the pace and improving the spatial coordination and extent of activities. We found that the funding allowed for greater pace of work, while the inclusion of work on private lands made for more contiguous treatment landscapes. A Forest Service staff officer explained, “We have projects ready. We’re just looking for funding, and this has given us a great shot in the arm to get this project rolling and going” (#26). A staff officer on another project stated, “We’re making a difference faster and in a more timely way, and sometimes a more holistic way, than we would have if we’d had to nickel and dime this out of the existing appropriation.. . . [W]e were incentivized in a larger way to get something done, and that’s great juice to have” (#30). Another Forest Service employee commented, “I think it’s allowed us to literally think outside the boundaries of the National Forest and look at better ways of accomplishing work” (#24). Many people pointed specifically to the opportunity to work with private landowners as a benefit of the Joint Chiefs Partnership. As a 365

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one city employee working on a project referred to their “on-the-ground capacity and their local cachet with the community.. . . People oftentimes who don’t trust government have a high degree of trust in [them]” (#51). In addition, the majority of individuals said hiring a coordinator or liaison to work between partners or using a trusted partner to encourage communication and trust was often crucial to the success of the individual projects. On most projects, people said that the partnership emphasis and the focused funding commitment to specific places under the Joint Chiefs approach supported collective action and successfully incentivized local community and landowner participation. For instance, one NRCS team leader said, “We wanted to operate on a scale that was large enough to make a demonstrable difference throughout the landscape, and to do that takes big funding. . . . This enabled us to ramp it up, increase the pace and scale, and begin to connect some of the dots. . . [T]hose people that historically weren't interested in participating, once they saw the scope and the scale that we were operating in, they were willing to participate” (#13). As another example, a Forest Supervisor explained, “In most cases people want to see their governments working together. When you have two [agencies] in the Department of Agriculture that are working together and then pulling in both NGO's and state government and university resources . . . it just builds credibility for everybody. And the fact is that you then are looked at as a conservation leader, not just inside the green line, but certainly outside the green line” (#10). A Forest Service participant on a different project explained, “A lot of landowners rely on that cost-share assistance like NRCS and Farm Service Agency and other agencies provide, so that's a big incentive to get landowners to do work that needs to be done across the landscape. Without that funding being available, it probably wouldn't get done on private lands” (#8). In essence, on multiple projects we heard that the commitment of federal funding to a specific landscape drew in the commitment of other partners as well as landowners that were not historically participating in similar programs. However, about a quarter of interviewees suggested that once the funding was gone, so too would be the motivation and partnerships necessary to continue cross-boundary work. As an external partner emphasized, “All of this happened because of a funding source, and if the funding source goes away, then the motivation for maintaining partnerships is lessened” (#51). Reports of future maintenance and monitoring needs in these project areas were discussed by about a fifth of interviewees, the implementation of which will be difficult without additional Joint Chiefs Partnership funding. Additionally, most of the projects sampled reported some level of uncertainty about when funding would come through in the first year or two of the funding cycle; this was an issue which, according to our agency partners, to some extent has been resolved. Our data also indicate that the program built some collaborative capacity that will endure beyond project end-dates. The majority of participants reported that established or improved relationships would lead to some amount of future collaboration and cross-boundary work between the two agencies or with community partners. Almost every participant reported they would like to continue working across the boundary with their partners in some capacity. As one NRCS employee explained, “In today's world, we're going to have to keep those relationships active and continue to collaborate with [our partners]. Because, I think project proposals look a lot better and have a higher chance of working when you have partners on board. When you do it the kind of going-it-alone approach, that doesn't necessarily work. It's strength in numbers” (#55). Similarly, several interviews indicated that working collaboratively toward a landscape-scale approach caused a shift in the way partners on a few projects conceptualized or implemented subsequent management actions. One NRCS State Conservationist explained this, saying, “We've really begun to look at a larger scale of project work. In the past, NRCS has really just focused on private lands …We've kind of been doing our own thing, but now we cooperatively work with the Forest Service and have certainly a better

understanding of what they do and what we do, and I think the strength is certainly in building partnerships with all the federal and local agencies” (#9). 4.2. Underlying conditions that acted as facilitators and barriers According to our interviews, the most critical factor underlying effective cross-boundary work and project success was having established collaborative relationships. When agencies were working with or were part of an established collaborative, coalition, partnership, or informal group of stakeholders, higher degrees of coordination and trust were reported by nearly every participant involved. As one District Ranger noted, “I think if you were trying to start from scratch on the collaborative, and the first time you tried to get people together was around this funding, it may take you a lot longer to really start up and be effective and agree on the best approach” (#105). Established collaboratives or working groups with a track record of success often had greater degrees of credibility within a community and had systems in place to handle dissention or differences in opinion, when they occurred. A major factor that facilitated or hindered projects was capacity. Adequate capacity was rarely reported; instead, limited capacity, gaps in expertise, and frequent staff turnover were reported almost universally as a barrier, especially within the NRCS. Capacity and expertise limitations in both agencies reportedly delayed projects, limiting the degree of coordination possible and causing frustrations between the agencies. This challenge was compounded by the existing hiring freeze at the time of research (six months after the Trump administration began) and perceived instability of government staffing, funding, and organization in general. One external participant emphasized the importance of capacity limitations, saying, “Understanding capacity issues, both from the Forest Service and the collaboratives—that’s going to be important going forward” (#101). Interviewees, including NRCS staff, reported many NRCS offices to be well-funded, but understaffed, overwhelmed, or lacking necessary forestry expertise and capacity to accommodate the increase in funding under the Joint Chiefs Partnership. In some states, NRCS is primarily focused on farmers, and in those cases, had little forestry experience or forestry “customer base;” this was reported by both NRCS and Forest Service employees. If the local NRCS office had few landowner connections before a project or was working with limited staffing, projects took longer to establish. As an NRCS District Conservationist said, “NRCS was facing limited capacity to plan on forest land and kind of start[ed] from scratch in the outreach and customer development phase. That was a huge barrier to overcome” (#17). The receptivity of landowners was essential to successful implementation of cross-boundary work. Landowners were reportedly more willing to work on their own land if work was also being done across the fence on Forest Service land or when state and local entities had some “skin in the game;” people said the Joint Chiefs Partnership’s structure drove participation for those landowners that did not historically participate in similar programs. However, landowner outreach strategies were differentially successful. About a quarter of interviewees reported a lack of landowner willingness to participate in a project, often because the landowner did not trust the federal government or could not afford to participate. A Forest Service District Ranger explained, “NRCS for example, is providing this opportunity through Joint Chiefs to private land owners. . . . From what I'm hearing, there's still some hesitation and mistrust of government to accept that opportunity and funding in these cases” (#20). Sometimes this hesitation to participate affected the ability to work in the highest priority areas. One NRCS State Conservationist working on another project explained this, saying, “We really had to kind of identify which landowners were interested in participating, because even though we may have found a high priority area, if you have a landowner that's resistant to doing anything, we really can't spend a lot of time there knowing that we 366

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at larger spatial extents, across sectors, and across jurisdictions, with the intent of affecting key ecological processes and valuable ecosystem services (Arts et al., 2017). The environmental governance and public administration scholarships emphasize that interagency partnerships and stakeholder collaboration are critical for accomplishing such work across jurisdictions and with multiple actors (Innes and Booher, 2003; Kettl, 2006; Folke et al., 2007). Drawing upon lessons learned from both US and international research, scholars have offered policy design principles to support improved governance approaches that facilitate collective action; suggestions include increased rights and responsibilities for multiple actors, and a balance between higher level stability and room for local flexibility to facilitate improved governance approaches (DeCaro et al., 2017; Craig et al., 2017). Importantly, policies that include flexibility to work in different contexts and at different spatial extents, and that explicitly support collective action, are essential to addressing problems that require coordinated work across jurisdictions. The challenges of forest and fire management necessitate such approaches, and new policy tools like the Joint Chiefs Partnership are designed specifically to address these needs. Our questions were whether the specific policy approach of the Joint Chiefs Partnership yielded the desired results and what other factors affected its success. We asked these questions to inform the broader literature on policy design to support cross-boundary collective action in land management. Our findings indicate that the infusion of funding and collaborative requirements of the Joint Chiefs Partnership supported faster implementation of planned work and coordination across jurisdictions. While the requirement to work across agencies, with partners, and with landowners led to some coordination challenges, overall, the Joint Chiefs Partnership led to more work across the public-private ownership boundaries and greater capacity through partner coordination. The interagency approach allowed the two agencies to combine capacities and coordinate their efforts across jurisdictions. External partners were used to stretch the capacity of their federal partners, adding expertise and funding. Partners also acted as bridging organizations and actors, providing trusted outreach and communication to landowners and other stakeholders; others have noted that such bridging activities are critical for addressing environmental governance challenges at larger scales (Cash et al., 2003; Decaro et al., 2017; Abrams et al. 2017a). Our findings also indicate that the multi-year funding commitments and collaborative aspects of the Joint Chiefs Partnership led to greater collective action. In addition, some of our interviews indicated that working collaboratively toward a landscape approach caused a shift in the way partners on a few projects conceptualized or implemented subsequent management actions. This type of learning and diffusion of practice is considered a “second-order” outcome of built collaborative relationships and is important for ongoing success (Cash et al., 2003; Innes and Booher, 2003; Cumming et al., 2012). For these reasons, we conclude that the Joint Chiefs Partnership approach was a successful policy tool to support collective action and cross-boundary coordination to address scale mismatches. Multi-year funding commitments made available through the Joint Chiefs Partnership in particular incentivized participation across the boundary by community partners and landowners and supported longer-term programs of work. This is critical to address concerns about fire hazard and watershed condition. Federal programs of this type are also valuable, given that it is unlikely that private landowners will be able to address treatment priorities without allocation of public funding (Theobald and Romme, 2007). However, future policies may need to have more flexible options for the duration of funding. Many projects in our study that were focused on fuels reduction planned a next step of reintroducing fire in areas that they mechanically treated during the Joint Chiefs Partnership funding period, and this would require additional years of funding. Additionally, to support implementation of the Joint Chiefs Partnership, people discussed the utility of hiring dedicated project coordinators and more staff, particularly within the NRCS. However, hiring on of permanent staff is often not sustainable with a

don't have an interest” (#9). Participants stated they would have liked to accomplish more contiguous treatment in high priority areas. A Forest Supervisor explained, “Where it would have been most effective to do a treatment in an area next to a community, well, that landowner wasn't always willing, so we had to do the treatment somewhere else, but we still got it done. It just isn't as beneficial as, you know, doing it in the priority place” (#43). In some cases, working with so many and such a diverse set of landowners posed some logistical issues, requiring an increase in coordination and resources of internal and external partners. A mismatch of Forest Service and NRCS processes was reported by a handful of the projects we spoke to. Staff did not understand the other’s processes in terms of jargon, expertise, funding streams, staff structure, or timelines. One Forest Service employee stated, “Even though we are both federal agencies under USDA, we're pretty different in how we do business” (#8). Most projects said their ability to overcome this mismatch of processes improved as time went on and more coordination and learning occurred. With regard to coordinating with landowners, NRCS privacy rules limited information sharing between partners on a few projects, making it difficult for the Forest Service and other partners to effectively reach out to targeted landowners. Also, about a quarter of participants said that NRCS processes can be cumbersome, lengthy and expensive, often frustrating landowners and driving them away. One coalition participant explained, “From the landowners' perspective, it can be a very time-consuming and lengthy process. . . . A landowner waits around for a year to a year and a half trying to get a [restoration activity] done, and then they just get frustrated and get out of the program” (#92). Having support and committed leadership at every level was reported as ideal, but our findings indicate that local or field-level support was the most important for success. Although projects had national support when they were selected at the national level for funding, projects did not always have clearly established and integrated regional, state-level or local support. If a project’s goals were not seen as a priority at all levels in the area, this posed challenges to work across boundaries. As one Forest Service ecologist explained, “You're overwhelmed as an individual worker, and you're not really inspired to go beyond that because you're just buried all the time. Unless you've got leadership that says ‘Hey, I want this, make this a priority,’ then you can start. Once you do it for a while, then you start seeing outcomes, but until the staff gets to see those outcomes, it's difficult to give them motivation when they're already working so hard” (#82). One project reported a lack of prioritization of project goals by staff at the local level and subsequent inappropriate use of program funding. Policy-related delays were deemed minimally influential in overall project success and reported by few interviewees, suggesting the Joint Chiefs Partnership fit well into the existing legal structure. Requirements to survey for cultural resources delayed projects up to one year, but people were aware in advance that this would be the case. Not having planning and decisions signed under the NEPA was only reported as a problem on a few projects; however, being “NEPA-ready” (i.e. done with the NEPA’s requirements around environmental impact analysis and decision-making) was something many projects said was very important to project success. Reported delays related to policy were a result of limited staff capacity and resources rather than specific challenges in finding ways to comply with policy requirements. As one Forest Service District Ranger explained, “It takes a lot of time, and it costs a lot of money, and so often times we are ready to go, wanting to implement these treatments, but we can't until the heritage surveys have been done, and we have very limited staff and very limited money to do that” (#105). 5. Discussion There is a global trend towards a greater emphasis on “landscape” approaches to land management that tackle environmental challenges 367

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and whether some resources and actors become systematically undervalued going forward. The broader issue for future investigation in landscape approaches to land management is to what extent prioritized investments from government may lead to unanticipated tradeoffs for some resources and actors within the broader system.

three-year funding cycle. If capacity building is a necessary component to the success of a policy, longer investments may be necessary. Longerterm committed funding could create space for reintroduction of fire, hiring of additional staff capacity, increased training, and for industry and market development. While the policy design of the Joint Chiefs Partnership generally was effective program-wide, implementation met with differential success depending on a variety of local conditions. This is not surprising, and there is a wealth of literature that explores factors that explain differential success (Sabatier, 1986; Steelman, 2010; Moseley and Charnley, 2014). What is important for our inquiry is understanding the factors that are most likely to support or hinder the efficacy of a policy approach like the Joint Chiefs Partnership. The most critical factor underlying effective cross-boundary work and project success was having established collaborative relationships. Projects with participants that had established relationships often had greater degrees of credibility within a community and systems in place to handle dissention or differences in opinion. Similarly, it was necessary for the Forest Service and NRCS to understand each other's processes. Established relationships and adequate capacity, including the presence of a project coordinator, facilitated work across agencies. Limited capacity and frequent staff turnover were reported almost universally as the most significant barriers to cross-boundary work, causing project delays, limiting the degree of coordination possible, and causing frustration among participants. Established relationships with landowners were also important. These findings comport with the literature on the challenges of working across agencies and confirm the value of having partners and internal staff members that can serve as “boundary spanners” in interagency and networked contexts (Goldsmith and Eggers, 2004; Kettl, 2006; McGuire, 2006). Collaborative history and established relationships have also been documented as important variables for supporting ongoing collaborative work (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Emerson et al., 2012). Where our work adds to the current literature is by suggesting that for policies that direct multi-year funding to selected locations, agency processes and organizational capacity may need to be reoriented in order to make the most of funding investments. The design of the Joint Chiefs Partnership created space for collective action and overcoming scale challenges, but limitations associated with persistent agency practices consistently inhibited project implementation. Our findings indicate that more needs to be done for efforts like the Joint Chiefs Partnership to ensure that agency capacity and expertise follow focused funding investments. Others have similarly noted that improvements to governance will be limited by agency processes that limit adaptability to new contexts (Abrams et al., 2017b). In addition, to the extent possible, it may be useful to increase coordination of policies, positions, and terminology across agencies that are working closely together (Kettl, 2006). Our research also raises some practical questions for agencies aiming to direct investments to selected locations that are deemed priorities for funding. Places where partners have established relationships are most likely to be able to utilize focused investments effectively to accelerate their activities. However, as agencies move toward prioritization using competitive proposal processes, they will need to be vigilant about examining tradeoffs. Some types of communities may be less able or less likely to organize and compete for targeted investments but may still be priority locations for reducing risks associated with hazards like fire (Paveglio et al., 2015). In addition, we heard reports of some instances of concern about the effects of funding prioritization from other sectors of the Forest Service, either on the same national forests, where programs or other landscapes may have been diminished to support Joint Chiefs projects, or from other national forests that had not received funding under the Joint Chiefs Partnership. This is necessarily a consequence of prioritization, but it raises questions for policy makers, community members, and researchers with regard to whether community capacity must be built in some locations

6. Conclusions This work demonstrates how policy can be designed to support cross-boundary work to undertake restoration and support improved approaches to fire management in the US legal and administrative context. Our research affirms that a successful policy must include or allow for the involvement of non-state actors to coordinate across jurisdictions, bridge across actors, and leverage capacity. Our study contributes to this area of environmental governance scholarship, which has offered candidate policy design principles, but is in need of more empirical work on specific policy tools and study of policy tools in specific legal, administrative, and land management contexts (Huitema et al., 2009; Decaro et al., 2017). In addition, our research supports and contributes to the policy design literature by highlighting the importance of committed, federal funding for multiple years as a facilitator of collaborative efforts and collective action at the intersection of public and private lands; we also note the improtant of supporting funding investments with adequate capacity and people with specific skillsets. This has value for theory building in the scholarship and also for the practical context of US forest management. As fire suppression consumes an ever-greater proportion of the Forest Service’s budget, the agency is looking for new ways to leverage partnerships and external funds and prioritize investments to work at large scales (USFS, 2015). By examining the effectiveness of the Joint Chiefs Partnership policy in tackling the challenge of larger-scale, collaborative, cross-boundary work, we seek to contribute to the ongoing project of finding ways to effectively undertake forest restoration and fire management activities, in particular by improving the fit of management approaches to the scale of ecological processes (Folke et al., 2007; Huber-Stearns et al., 2015). To broaden understanding of successful policy design for land management, it will be important for future studies to understand the effects of prioritization and how they affect different values and actors. Future research also could investigate learning as it pertains to such tools. For US forest policy making, is important to understand how these tools and authorities can be improved upon in the future to support work across agencies and jurisdictions. As the Joint Chiefs Partnership was refunded for 2019, this study can provide a baseline for future research evaluating the long-term success of this program and comparing it to land governance initiatives with similar goals to identify which elements of policy design best support successful large-scale, collaborative, cross-boundary work. In addition, we did not speak to private landowner participants, which leaves space for further research to understand how to better engage landowners and what needs are present in different types of communities to successfully implement policies like the Joint Chiefs Partnership. Finally, we did not evaluate the effects on the ground of implementing a Joint Chiefs Partnership project. Instead, we relied on participant perspective of success or lack of success in terms of improved wildlife, watershed, and fire conditions. A next frontier for research in this arena will be to examine how to capture the efficacy of policies like this for both communities and values on the landscape. Competing interests None. Funding Funding for this work was conducted under a Challenge-Cost Share 368

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Agreement with the US Forest Service (#13-CS-11132420-254). Author’s contributions CS and LC co-wrote this manuscript. Ethics approval and consent to participate None. Consent for publication None. Availability of data and materials None. Author information LC holds an M.S. in Forest Sciences from Colorado State University, where she was a graduate student working with the Public Lands Policy Group; CS is Associate Professor of Forest and Natural Resource Policy and Director of the Public Lands Policy Group at Colorado State University. References Abrams, J., Davis, E.J., Moseley, C., Nowell, B., 2017a. Building practical authority for community forestry in and through networks: the role of community‐based organizations in the US West. Environ. Policy Gov. 27 (4), 285–297. Abrams, J., Huber-Stearns, H., Bone, C., Grummon, C., Moseley, C., 2017b. Adaptation to a landscape-scale mountain pine beetle epidemic in the era of networked governance: the enduring importance of bureaucratic institutions. Ecol. Soc. 22 (4). Agee, J.K., Skinner, C.N., 2005. Basic principles of forest fuel reduction treatments. For. Ecol. Manag. 211 (1-2), 83–96. Ansell, C., Gash, A., 2008. Collaborative governance in theory and practice. J. Public Adm. Res. Theory 18 (4), 543–571. Arts, B., Buizer, M., Horlings, L., Ingram, V., van Oosten, C., Opdam, P., 2017. Landscape approaches: a state-of-the-art review. Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 42 (10), 1–10. 25. Available online at. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-102016-060921. Berkes, F., 2009. Evolution of co-management: role of knowledge generation, bridging organizations and social learning. J. Environ. Manag. 90 (5), 1692–1702. Bryson, J.M., Crosby, B.C., Stone, M.M., 2006. The design and implementation of cross‐sector collaborations: propositions from the literature. Public Adm. Rev. 66 (s1), 44–55. Calkin, D.E., Cohen, J.D., Finney, M.A., Thompson, M.P., 2014. How risk management can prevent future wildfire disasters in the wildland-urban interface. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 111 (2), 746–751. Cash, D.W., Clark, W.C., Alcock, F., Dickson, N.M., Eckley, N., Guston, D.H., et al., 2003. Knowledge systems for sustainable development. PNAS 100 (14), 8086–8091. Cash, D.W., Adger, W.N., Berkes, F., Garden, P., Lebel, L., Olsson, P., et al., 2006. Scale and cross-scale dynamics: governance and information in a multilevel world. Ecol. Soc. 11 (2), 8. Craig, R., Garmestani, A., Allen, C., Arnold, C., Birgé, H., DeCaro, D., et al., 2017. Balancing stability and flexibility in adaptive governance: an analysis of tools available in US environmental law. Ecol. Soc. 22 (2). Creswell, W.J., 2009. Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (Research Design). Cumming, G.S., Olsson, P., Chapin, F.S., Holling, C.S., 2012. Resilience, experimentation, and scale mismatches in social-ecological landscapes. Landsc. Ecol. 28 (6), 1139–1150. DeCaro, D.A., Chaffin, B.C., Schlager, E., Garmestani, A.S., Ruhl, J.B., 2017. Legal and institutional foundations of adaptive environmental governance. Ecol. Soc. 22 (1), 1. Donovan, G.H., Brown, T.C., 2007. Be careful what you wish for: the legacy of Smokey Bear. Front. Ecol. Environ. 5 (2), 73–79. Emerson, K., Nabatchi, T., Balogh, S., 2012. An integrative framework for collaborative governance. J. Public Adm. Res. Theory 22 (1), 1–29. Fischer, A.P., Charnley, S., 2012. Risk and cooperation: managing hazardous fuel in mixed ownership landscapes. Environ. Manag. 49 (6), 1192–1207.

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