ABSTRACT
The Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) requires collaboration through implementation and monitoring; domains where US Forest Service staff have little prior experience to draw on for guidance. Simultaneously, the CFLRP does not change the fundamental authority and responsibility of the agency for implementation on the lands it manages. This context creates fundamental challenges in determining what activities constitute collaborative implementation, who participates, and how. This chapter identifies how CFLRP collaborative participants and agency personnel conceptualized collaborative implementation as encompassing three different types of activities: prioritization, treatment enhancement, and multi-party monitoring. These efforts created feedback loops through which monitoring information, prioritization, and implementation actions shaped ongoing restoration work. Collaborative implementation activities had implications for adaptive management and affected the pace, scale and quality of restoration treatments. The chapter also identifies implications for policy and practice, suggesting that collaboration through implementation offers a range of advantages beyond those associated with collaborative planning alone.
