Evaluate the policy that you analyzed for your final project using the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) best practices and leading practices in collaboration. Provide a high-level overview of how you think the policy that you analyzed is performing or did perform on these measures and recommendations for how efforts could be improved.

Best Practices and Leading Practices in Collaboration

· Define and articulate a common outcome.

· Establish mutually reinforcing or joint strategies.

· Identify and address needs by leveraging resources.

· Agree on roles and responsibilities.

· Establish compatible policies, procedures, and other means to operate across agency boundaries.

· Develop mechanisms to monitor, evaluate, and report on results.

· Reinforce agency accountability for collaborative efforts through agency plans and reports.

· Reinforce individual accountability for collaborative efforts through performance management systems.

Congress has set a broad, common outcome for all the efforts towards subsistence fishing (and more broadly, native lifestyles preservation) in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANICLA) of 1980. It states in Title VIII that ” . . . it is necessary for the Congress to invoke its constitutional authority over Native affairs and its constitutional authority under the property clause and the commerce clause to protect and provide the opportunity for continued subsistence uses on the public lands by Native and non-Native rural residents (ANICLA, 1980). However, while the federal government has managed subsistence activities on federal lands in Alaska giving rural citizens a priority, the State of Alaska manages subsistence on State and private lands but gives no priority to native or rural residents (UAF, n.d.).

Despite Congress providing a fairly clear desired outcome, there is an awkward disunity between Federal and State efforts at the big picture level which have resulted in thousands of laws and lawsuits which have ultimately come to an unsatisfactory state of affairs resulting in the 2009 statement of Secretary of the Interior Salazar that the State of Alaska was not meeting its end of the bargain and that the Federal government would review its policies in regards to ANICLA (UAF, n.d.), and the most recent lawsuit regarding conflicting State and Federal fishing orders in a dispute over ANICLA jurisdiction on the Kuskokwim River (Brooks, 2022).