Informing Forest Service Environmental Policy through Meaningful Outreach
Connecting Community with Policy Innovation
through Strong Stakeholder Engagement
BlueTerra Partners’ founder managed two regional workshops that embedded partner feedback into the U.S. Forest Service’s Environmental Analysis and Decision Making reform. This work helped infuse community perspectives into recommended policy changes. This successful outreach shapes BlueTerra Partners’ stakeholder engagement services today.
The Challenge
By 2017, the Forest Service recognized that environmental analysis and decision protocols had become slow, heavy, and misaligned with on-the-ground realities. The Environmental Analysis and Decision Making (EADM) reform effort emerged to modernize and streamline procedures, improve business practices, and increase participation from partners and other stakeholders. Reform, however, meant navigating institutional inertia and diverse regional practices while ensuring community perspectives were embedded in suggested policy reforms.
The Approach
As part of the Forest Service EADM team, BlueTerra Partners’ founder provided leadership for two of the regional partner roundtables (among ten held nationally). Contributions included:
Workshop design and structure: collaborating on agendas, participant invitations, facilitation methods, and feedback mechanisms to generate a genuine understanding of diverse perspectives.
Supporting on-site facilitated sessions: participated in dialogues with session invitees to identify barriers and opportunities for meaningful reforms to Forest Service policy.
Synthesis and translation for action: reviewed distilling regional workshop outcomes and themes to identify leverage points and understand final recommendations for Forest Service executive leadership.
Results
Workshop outcomes were integrated into final recommendations, ensuring local, community-based insights informed national reform efforts.
Internal “cadres” were mobilized across the agency and fostered greater emphasis on transparency, collaboration, and accountability in the policy reform initiative.
Diverse ideas and perspectives that were surfaced in the roundtables were elevated to the most senior officials in the Forest Service, ensuring community voices informed the modernization process.
Why It Matters
The EADM roundtables bridged technical expertise with community voice, grounding agency reforms in real-world perspectives. That ethos—co-design, accountability, and adaptive feedback—now defines BlueTerra Partners’ stakeholder engagement work, helping clients surface critical perspectives and ensure community voices are not only heard but acted upon.
Let’s work together to build your success story.
The experience gained through the Environmental Analysis and Decision Making process informs how BlueTerra Partners helps clients link stakeholder voices, institutional strategy, and process design—so they can achieve resilient, measurable outcomes.