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Abstract
The Shared Stewardship strategy embraced by the United States Forest Service (USFS) emphasizes partnerships with states, Tribes, and other partners to coordinate work across
jurisdictions and leverage capacities to accomplish landscape-scale restoration. The Forest Service
and states are in the early stages of translating the strategy into action, building upon existing state
and regional efforts and partnerships. This research effort seeks to assess the opportunities and
challenges associated with the Shared Stewardship strategy and a comparative analysis of
implementation in the eastern United States. It does so via synthesizing experiences and
recommendations from semi-structure interviews conducted with key stakeholders. Our findings
indicate actors have utilized existing programs and partnerships to set the groundwork for Shared
Stewardship. Changes were relatively modest, centered around enhancing coordination and
inclusive representation. In presenting these results, we hope this document will be useful for
academics and practitioners seeking to understand initial Shared Stewardship efforts.