How was the National Assessment organized?
A National Assessment Synthesis Team (NAST) was responsible for broad intellectual leadership and preparation of the Synthesis Report. The NAST was a FACA-chartered committee with roughly a dozen members drawn from government, academia, and the private sector. A National Assessment Working Group (NAWG) coordinated the participation of the federal agencies who were sponsoring and catalyzing the assessment and also provided significant intellectual input into the development of the overall assessment strategy. A National Assessment Coordination Office (NACO) linked the various components and tracked progress. NACO helped provide a framework within which the efforts of large numbers of local, regional, and Federal participants interacted with the national assessment process in ways that provided useful insights and results for the National Synthesis, and promoted development of stakeholder networks that developed useful insights for their own purposes, quite apart from any final National
