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What is shared stewardship?


Shared Stewardship is about working together in an integrated way to make decisions and take actions on the land.
Vicki Christiansen,
Former USDA Forest Service Chief

While on its face, Shared Stewardship sounds like the traditional partnerships or collaborative initiatives that are very familiar to anyone working in Central Oregon. However, the Shared Stewardship approach is much more. The approach asks all involved to consider: “What additional opportunities for restoration might be addressed within this landscape? And which other potential partners should be invited to participate?” 

Shared Stewardship challenges groups to engage in proactive planning and, in so doing, to identify a broader range of potential partners and to consider a wider array of conservation concerns. Partners work together to make decisions about priority projects and design, implement, and monitor work among multiple partners, across multiple jurisdictions, and address a wider array of conservation issues. 

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For example, a State Park manager might work with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council (UDWC), and the Deschutes Land Trust (DLT) to engage in a project that advances watershed health, reduces hazardous fuels in a high-use recreation area, and increases public safety. Without a Shared Stewardship approach, fuels reduction alone might be accomplished between just the State Park and the BLM.


The Need for Shared Stewardship

Small, siloed restoration projects fail to address larger ecosystem needs, leading to a “Swiss cheese” approach to forest health in which a few small parts of the forest benefit but the larger block misses out. Busy resource managers and conservation partners work at the project-scale, without a means of coordinating or communicating about the bigger landscape picture.




Shared Stewardship solves that problem, by engaging multijurisdictional partners in proactively planning together at scale. Together, partners identify priority projects and strategically coordinate work to have the greatest impact.

The Central Oregon Shared Stewardship Alliance (COSSA) is the program created to support the principles of Shared Stewardship in Deschutes, Crook, and Jefferson counties.

Learn more about the Central Oregon Shared Stewardship Alliance (COSSA) here