An Empirical Evaluation of the Impact of Collaboration on the Pace and Scale of National Forest Management in Idaho

It has been posited that US national forest administration is undergoing a governance transition characterized by an increase in the involvement and influence of non-state actors. One example of this new form of national forest governance is the use of multi-stakeholder collaborative efforts for planning and implementing projects. This has raised normative and positive questions about the value and effectiveness of such efforts and how they compare with more traditional public involvement and planning processes. This study attempts to address the latter questions by analyzing project-level planning and implementation data while comparing collaborative and traditional projects on a suite of metrics related to pace, scale, complexity, and legal outcomes. We used administrative data from the USDA Forest Service to conduct a quantitative analysis of projects over a 14-year period. We found that collaboratively developed projects were larger and more complex than traditional projects and were associated with greater planning efficiency. This analysis responds to the need to systematically assess the impact of collaborative governance and contributes to existing theories of governance, organizational learning, and policy implementation. Study Implications: Public managers and policymakers work and make decisions within a performance-based management context. Given that collaborative governance is one of many tools for achieving policy goals, we evaluated the influence of collaborative governance on a series of performance metrics. We found that collaborative governance of national forests resulted in greater efficiency in planning, increases in the number of acres treated, and the accomplishment of a more diverse set of objectives. We thus dispel conventional wisdom that land management agencies must sacrifice efficiency for greater public involvement.