In 2009, Congress passed the Forest Landscape Restoration Act, a significant new piece of legislation guiding restoration activities on competitively selected National Forest System lands. The Act established the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP), which solicits collaboratively developed proposals for landscapescale ecological restoration projects that are socially and economically viable. In many ways, the CFLRP reflects a number of longer-term patterns in forest governance that have increasingly emphasized large-scale planning, collaboration, monitoring, and restoration. The program also represents an emerging trend of using competitive processes to allocate funding. We begin by providing an overview of the CFLRP's primary objectives and requirements and then discuss how this program and the capacity to make it successful have resulted from a number of past policies and initiatives. We then provide an overview of the first 10 funded projects, which we evaluated based on a systematic review of their funding proposals, followed by a closer look at several of the projects. The piece concludes with a discussion of the primary challenges that lie ahead for the program.
Capsule Summary
We found a range of user needs to inform the development of drought monitoring and early warning systems in four countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region through engagement with governmental, academic, civil society, private sector, and international organizations.
Despite incredible strides in transboundary collaborative conservation, many challenges remain. A networked governance approach recognizes a diverse pool of participants, linkages across multiple levels of organization and the diffusion of authority horizontally across spatial scales. Much is understood about the basic form and function of networked governance, namely the ways in which it overcomes weaknesses of traditional hierarchical structures, but less is known about the democratic quality of newer forms of governance. There are implications for traditional forms of accountability for the practice of network governance. They are not lost but their dimensions are changed, hinging less on punishment and more on reward. To examine this dynamic, we use a mixed-methods approach and grounded theory to explore the social relationships that make up a conservation network in the United States and Canada. Interview analysis from the Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent suggests that accountability comes through authentic engagement, is based on a 'logic of appropriateness' rooted in normative persuasion and still draws from traditional hierarchy. Social network analysis shows positions of brokerage and bridging help to maintain network connections between actors. Leveraging these characteristics of the network and the relationships formed through the process of landscape forest governance, we suggest there may be an overall net gain in accountability.
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