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The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) manages one-fifth of the land in the United States, including public lands administered by the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management. Federal agencies have included public input in decision-making since the Administrative Procedure Act in 1946, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Recently, policy and reporting directives have broadened to include possibilities for collaborative conservation. Many disciplines are identifying this rise in collaboration as a new era of governance. Yet, this philosophy has not yet diffused widely throughout DOI agencies in practice. We explored how these concepts might become institutionalized more broadly in DOI agencies by examining legal and policy considerations with respect to governance paradigms and conducting pilot interviews with key informants. As large-scale societal changes continue to affect the way people experience and value public lands, effectively incorporating collaborative conservation will be increasingly important in management.
