How western states are stepping up to accelerate wildfire mitigation:

Last month, Utah and the U.S. Forest Service announced a new partnership to accelerate forest restoration, reduce wildfire risk, and improve forest management across the state. Known as a shared stewardship agreement, the partnership establishes a long-term cooperative framework through which the state and federal government jointly set restoration priorities and coordinate the use of existing authorities to carry them out.

Utah’s agreement is the latest—and most ambitious—in a growing wave of shared stewardship partnerships between western states and the Forest Service. Similar partnerships have recently been signed with Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming as part of a broader effort to expand cooperative approaches to wildfire mitigation and forest health.

While such agreements are gaining traction, critics have portrayed them as a shift toward state control of federal lands—a flashpoint in western politics. But that framing misses the central issue. Shared stewardship is not about who governs federal lands; it is about how they can be managed at the scale needed to restore America’s forests and reduce extreme wildfire risks.

Shared stewardship agreements do not transfer ownership or decision-making authority over national forests. Rather, they address a more basic issue: the gap between the scale of pressures affecting western forests and the institutional capacity of the agencies responsible for them. Severe wildfire risks extend across ownership boundaries, yet management responsibilities remain fragmented across jurisdictions and agencies.

The Forest Service estimates that roughly 80 million acres of national forest land are in need of some form of restoration. A century of fire suppression, combined with drought, insects, and fuel accumulation, has left many forests vulnerable to severe wildfire and watershed degradation. At the same time, the agency faces chronic staffing shortages, contracting bottlenecks, and planning backlogs. Even where there is broad agreement about the need to act, the Forest Service often struggles to move projects from planning to implementation at a meaningful scale.

Shared stewardship agreements are best understood as an attempt to close that gap. At its core, shared stewardship is a framework for cooperative federalism. Rather than managing forests in isolation, federal agencies work with states, tribes, and other partners to identify shared priorities that cut across political and ownership boundaries. After all, forests, watersheds, and wildfires do not respect jurisdictional lines, and neither should the strategies used to manage them.

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Importantly, shared stewardship agreements do not authorize specific projects. They do not waive environmental review or alter statutory responsibilities under laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). As Utah Governor Cox noted, “This agreement does not change land ownership, does not alter NEPA review, and does not limit public input.” Rather, shared stewardship agreements establish a framework for states and the Forest Service to “work faster and smarter,” aligning priorities, resources, and existing legal tools more effectively.

One of those tools is Good Neighbor Authority (GNA), which allows states to help carry out certain restoration activities on federal lands with Forest Service approval. GNA does not transfer decision-making authority to states; federal agencies still retain oversight and final approval. What GNA does is expand implementation capacity, allowing states to contribute crews, contracting expertise, and administrative bandwidth that federal agencies often lack.

Utah’s agreement reflects this approach. It establishes a 20-year partnership focused on forest health, wildfire mitigation, watershed protection, and related land management challenges. It also reflects an evolution in how shared stewardship is being applied. 

While the state’s original 2019 stewardship agreement focused primarily on timber and wildfire management, the new 20-year partnership takes a more holistic approach. For example, the agreement also allows the state to play a larger role in supporting recreation management—an area where the Forest Service has struggled with overcrowding, deferred maintenance, and inadequate staffing. Under the new agreement, Utah will help provide additional resources for basic operations that federal agencies are often unable to meet on their own.

Montana’s shared stewardship agreement, signed last year, similarly emphasizes landscape-scale forest management and wildfire risk reduction. But Montana’s agreement goes further by using Good Neighbor Authority to address staff capacity constraints. It requires the Forest Service to identify critical staffing shortages and allows both entities to use GNA authority to hire or contract personnel and services to address these gaps. 

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Idaho’s agreement includes an ambitious commitment to double timber sale volume offered through GNA to 100 million board feet within five years—an ambitious but concrete target that demonstrates how shared stewardship can accelerate active forest management.

Much of the criticism directed at shared stewardship rests on an assumption that centralized federal control alone is sufficient to protect public lands. But the current wildfire crisis suggests otherwise. When millions of acres require active management and agencies lack the resources to act, insisting on rigid jurisdictional silos is not a recipe for conservation success.

The wildfire crisis facing the West demands new approaches. Traditional federal forest management, constrained by limited budgets, simply cannot keep pace with the scale of the problem.

Shared stewardship will not eliminate wildfire risk or resolve every conflict over forest management. But it represents a pragmatic shift toward institutions better aligned with the realities of managing dynamic landscapes across mixed ownerships. If we’re going to truly address America’s wildfire crisis, we need more—not fewer—of these pragmatic, collaborative agreements.

Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.