Governance Structures for Partners Working Across Large Landscapes: Key Takeaways

The following summary was developed from two peer-learning sessions organized by Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition and Oregon State University Extension/the Ecosystem Workforce Program. The sessions in January and March, 2021, were attended by members of four landscape-scale, restoration-focused partnerships operating in northern Colorado, northern Arizona, southern Oregon and northeastern Oregon. These takeaways reflect our discussions about how to create and improve governance documents and structures to better support partners working together across large areas, particularly in considering potential or current CFLRP awards.

Participating partnerships:

Four Forests Restoration Initiative (AZ)

Front Range Roundtable (CO)

Northern Blues (OR)

Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative/Rogue Forest Partners (OR)

→ Determine the scale, scope and desired outcomes of the partnership’s work. Several partnerships found it helpful to develop an overarching framing strategy that helped guide their restoration work. This type of strategy, and the process of creating it, helped partners collectively define a vision for what they hoped to do and achieve across a landscape, draw on relevant science/information, and set a scope of work and general sideboards. Attendees said this type of document can also be useful for guiding prioritization of work in a transparent way and can inform public lands planning processes. 

→ Know why you’re working together. Partners said it was important to clearly define the purpose of the partnership (e.g. peer learning, landscape prioritization, coordination, networking, political advocacy) and how it compliments, supports and interacts with other more localized or project-specific groups and activities. 

→ Create multi-scalar structures. Each of the partnerships structured themselves with several interacting tiers and configurations of groups and people to connect more localized community-based or project-level work with landscape-level planning and coordination. In addition to large stakeholder groups for example, many collaboratives had some sort of executive committee or overall leadership team, and multiple topical or resource-focused working groups. They also incorporated or interacted closely with more localized project-focused groups or efforts.   

• Northern Blues structure: place-based groups tied to a certain project and geography; multi-partner “resource teams” focused on themes like private landowner motilization, monitoring, and communication; all-lands leadership team; and a larger stakeholder group associated with the Northern Blue Mountain Cohesive Strategy Partnership. 

• Front Range Roundtable structure: multiple place-based and/or issue-focused collaboratives/working groups; sub-groups of the FRRT collaborative focused on community protection and landscape restoration; FRRT executive team; and a larger stakeholder group. 

• 4FRI structure: 4FRI topical working groups (focused on stakeholder engagement, final EIS, industry/biomass, multiparty monitoring, and comprehensive implementation); 4FRI steering committee; and a larger stakeholder group. 

• Southern Oregon structure: multiple community and valley-focused collaborative and partnership efforts; basin-wide implementation-focused partnership (Rogue Forest Partners); nonprofit entity (Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative) that represents a broad cross-section of interests across the Rogue River basin and works strategically across the basin to facilitate the Rogue Forest Partners and support strategic planning, zones of agreement, and collaboration. 

→ Create some structure for how partners work together. Partnerships found value in establishing principles and standards for how the partners work together and make decisions (e.g., how communication happens, what engagement looks like, what mutual learning should occur, how to reach decisions or some level of agreement). 

→ Define roles and responsibilities of partners. Some partnerships created specific documents detailing partner roles and responsibilities as they related to accomplishing specific tasks. Others used charter documents to outline more general roles and responsibilities for partners (e.g., communicate with the USFS, mentor new members, deliver recommendations, actively participate). Some people emphasized the importance of defining partner roles and responsibilities in such a way that partners can have different and evolving roles with various groups and projects while maintaining involvement in the partnership. 

→ Document partners’ commitment. Partnerships emphasized the need to establish expectations for partners related to joining and continuing involvement in the partnership. Making those commitments clear can help maintain consistent engagement even as representatives from each partner organization cycle in and out. 

Other takeaways...

→ Importance of adaptability and responsiveness. Partnerships recommended regularly revisiting and being willing to change partner roles and responsibilities, the purpose of the partnership, partnership focus, or structure. Questions to ask to prompt a reevaluation might include: are some working groups no longer relevant? Are the structures for working together no longer applicable to current scope or focus of work? Does the partnership look different with or without certain funding sources or programs like CFLRP? Partnerships have used surveys to evaluate the state of the partnership’s work. 

→ Importance of intentional prioritization, planning, evaluation by the larger partnership to avoid random acts of restoration and competition among partners. This prioritization also has to navigate between the need to take advantage of opportunities (funding, shelf NEPA etc.) and being more intentional with design and prioritization. 

• One strategy is to map past, current, and planned restoration or wildfire mitigation activities across the entire area of the partnership’s work. This can reveal how or if the partnership’s work is achieving desired outcomes at the necessary scale and can also be useful to identify gaps in restoration across the landscape. 

• Strategic plans can also be useful for transparent and intentional prioritization.

→ Importance of documentation. Recording partner roles, commitment, standards for working together, and decision-making can be especially helpful if partners are operating in a low-trust environment. Documentation is also important to help maintain consistency through turnover.

RVCC Partners with Forest Stewards Guild for SW Peer Learning Exchange

Written by: Kendal Martel, Southwest Program Coordinator for The Forest Stewards Guild

December 2018

In late October, the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition partnered with The Forest Stewards Guild Southwest chapter and Oregon State University to host an All Lands Peer Learning Exchange in Grants, NM.

RVCC has led the way in convening practitioners engaged in community based natural resource management and restoration across the West. The exchange was part of the All Lands Learning & Innovation Network (ALL-IN), a peer-learning effort that supports successful all lands planning and implementation and improves practice through multiple tools, strategies, and resources. The exchange welcomed participants from Oregon, New Mexico, California, and Alaska.

The goals of the peer learning exchange were to:

• Expand upon new tools & ideas available to improve the practice of all lands work.

• Connect to a community of practitioners and forming new peer relationships.

• Improve the understanding of the strategies, programs and authorities for operationalizing All Lands work.

• Increase capacity to solve problems.

Broadly, the All Lands* approach is about creating a common vision among differing positions in order to generate innovation, codify policy, and facilitate partnerships. In addition, this approach can leverage resources and local knowledge that people who live, work, and manage on the land need to implement restoration of that land.

RVCC’s All Lands management ALL-IN approach revolves around three key assumptions:

1. How we manage land on one ownership will ultimately affect management on other ownerships on shared landscapes.

2. Our management objectives should be addressed at the landscape scale and across boundaries.

3. We will achieve better ecological and social outcomes if all stakeholders collaborate and work together to achieve common objectives.

Throughout the day, we prioritized several key themes for further discussion. These include leveraging different sources of funding; the role of community-based organizations and other intermediaries; collaboration and cross-boundary planning; and leadership and risk-taking. One commonality across these topics was a reassertion of the importance of partnerships. No single organization has enough funding to implement landscape restoration. Planning together can produce efficiencies of scale, produce new ideas, and build community support. At the same time individuals, such as grants and agreements specialists, are critical to create an enabling environment. Tribes came up as potent but sometimes underappreciated partners. Knowledge about funding sources such as 477 self-sufficiency funding for tribal interns needs to be shared more widely.

“Our shared vision begins with restoration… the threats facing our forests don’t recognize property boundaries. So, in developing a shared vision around forests, we must also be willing to look across property boundaries. In other words, we must operate at a landscape scale by taking an ‘all-lands approach’.” - Tom Vilsack, US Secretary of Agriculture, 2009

We also spoke about challenges to achieving outcomes, and this commiseration was an important tool as we worked through these challenges. We identified common limiting factors such as the difficulty of filling positions within federal agencies, leading to staff shortages that in turn limit collaboration, and how new, top-down goals, such as timber targets, are discouraging all lands work. In addition, because targets come up so frequently, a show me tour highlighting the multiples values of restoration, and the need for different targets, might be warranted.

By nature, this All Lands approach can be multifaceted if not amorphous. However, Emily Jane Davis, a researcher at Oregon State University, shared the findings from a recent study with RVCC on keys to implementing successful all lands projects.

Many will attest that one of the best activities that a group can do together is to get out in the forest, see the landscape, and have a conversation.

So for the finale, we drove to the heart of the Zuni Mountains Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Project. The trip passed through a checkerboard of ownerships where the New Mexico State Land Office, Cottonwood Gulch Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, the Forest Stewards Guild, New Mexico State Forestry, and others have implemented treatments for multiple objectives. One such project is the Bluewater NEPA that was completed in 2003, but not prioritized at that time. This project is an example of NEPA gaps for the landscape and areas that need treatment, most notably, a recent controlled burn. The Forest Stewards Guild and The Nature Conservancy were only able to burn up to a USFS boundary because the NEPA was not completed. This dramatically increased the complexity and cost of burning.

The exchange was attended by USFS staff from the Cibola National Forest who have shown a steadfast commitment to supporting partnerships in the Zuni Mountains. However, if Congress rewrites the CFLR program, there is some risk that a focus on flagship targets would disadvantage landscapes like the Zuni Mountains, which has little valuable timber. This challenge led participants to discuss the importance of building support for the benefit of restoration.

The thing that stood out the most was a shared sense of responsibility among people who had a palpable love for the land and the communities on it. All the planning and workshops in the world would fail if not for the fact that people connect to the land, and through those connections across ownerships, we are connected to each other, whether we yet know how to work together or not.

Through this work, we not only scale up our capacity to implement physical change across the landscape, but we strengthen the connections and relationships among our communities.

Ultimately this work creates tangible change such as sound policy and legislation, a restoration economy, and a social and ecological adaptive process for future generations in the face of global change. It is a reminder that, even across time and space, the land is affected by all of our hands.

*Several management programs have been promoting this “All Lands” approach, including the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration program, the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, the Joint Chief’s Landscape Restoration Partnership, the Forest Service’s 2012 Planning Rule, and the Good Neighbor Authority.