ABSTRACT
The CFLRP was the first policy applicable to US national forests that required collaboration with stakeholders throughout the life of the project; from planning, through implementation, and project monitoring. In this chapter, we explore how collaborative implementation of projects, as envisioned in the CFLRP, manifested in practice, based on participant observation and interviews with participants on two CFLRP projects. Utilizing policy implementation frameworks, we examined the extent to which structural, individual, and local contextual characteristics affected collaborative implementation. The way that partners participated in implementation, and satisfaction with involvement in implementation, differed between the two projects, in large part due to collaborative history on each project and stakeholder participation in prior planning processes. Therefore, collaborative group characteristics are essential to understanding the implementation and institutionalization of policy mandates that involve collaboration. For practitioners, we note that collaborative implementation is most likely to be effective when partners and agencies work together through planning processes, and when personnel are committed to collaborative governance approaches.
