Task J Findings and Recommendations
J4 Finding
Recommendation Encourage partners to maintain leadership for the duration of large-scale projects. ■ Include a standardized, formal metric within performance reviews for USFS National Forest System line officers regarding tribal partnerships and collaboration as part of their federal trust responsibility as government employees. ■ Incentivize, promote, and encourage ‘champions’ who are succeeding in promoting meaningful relationships with tribal entities. If leadership of partners changes provide thorough training and an adequate transition period for new leadership to maintain project momentum. ■ Ensure that career federal employees who carry out the projects uphold goals of co-management and co-stewardship by making it required on performance reviews. ■ Federal tribal partners should seek to improve employee understanding of tribal needs and priorities as well as baseline federal trust responsibility training to improve employee’s commitment and engagement at all levels. ■ It should be noted that tribal council leadership can also be on a rotational basis, therefore maintaining stability on the tribal side is critical.
Neighboring land management entities often have rotating leadership that hinders project stability. ■ Most commonly, USFS district rangers, which serve as the line officer on largescale projects, rotate frequently and are incentivized to change positions to achieve promotions and grade level increases. This leaves the tribal partner as the remaining constituent and forces the tribal entity to constantly train new leaders and re- educate their partners as projects tend to span multiple years, even decades in some cases. ■ This can lead to burn out and can be extremely taxing on already limited tribal staff who bring immense passion and long-standing devotion to restoration work. Revolving federal personnel causes delays on cross-boundary work, impacts relationships as well as consumes additional resources and time. ■ This also directly affects the ESA and NEPA processes that may arise, further extending the time and resource commitments as well as impacting project success. Navigating the grants and agreements side of cross- boundary work takes immense time and resources and if staff are rotating through it
can create additional challenges. ■ In places where tribal liaisons are
designated and meaningfully engaged, IFMAT discovered the most successful cross-boundary projects, especially those who are long-tenured or are from tribal communities themselves.
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