The Shared Stewardship Strategy in the Southern United States: Lessons Learned

The USDA Forest Service (Forest Service)'s Shared Stewardship strategy, announced initially in 2018, is built on a vision of advancing federal partnerships with states and other entities to better accomplish shared forest management priorities at the landscape scale. Early implementation of the strategy provides a glimpse into how these partnership dynamics differ both among states and among geographic and jurisdictional regions. Building on a prior assessment of early Shared Stewardship implementation in the western states, this Brief Communication article provides insights from a parallel analysis in the Southern Region (Region 8) of the Forest Service. Our results highlight the fact that informal relationships and ways of doing business can be as important as formal policies in shaping the ways that federal, state, and other entities work together in practice.