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

The USDA 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. Study Implications: This study shows that many of the key tenets of the Shared Stewardship strategy have been practiced informally for many years throughout the southern United States. The preponderance of family forestland in the South has led to numerous incentive-based policies and programs designed to work across large landscapes while respecting landowner autonomy. Varied state, federal, county, nongovernment organizations, and private entities have worked together on numerous projects designed to promote landscape-scale conservation and have shown interest in sharing resources and successes in these projects. Informal relationships were identified as keys to the success of these prior and ongoing initiatives.