Forestry and Government

Confusion over how forces from beyond state borders affect domestic policy occurs because analysts often conflate different nondomestic factors, or focus on particular sources of influence to the exclusion of others. To remedy this problem, the authors make a distinction between the structural economic forces associated with rising levels of trade, finance and investment (globalization), and the increased activities or influence of transnational actors and international institutions, and the ideas they promote (internationalization). A focus on how transnational actors and international institutions influence domestic policy reveals four distinct pathways through which internationalization produces policy change-the use of markets, international rules, normative discourse and infiltration of domestic policy-making processes. The authors develop hypotheses to show the conditions under which influence is successfully achieved along each path. The case of ecoforestry policy change in the 1990s in Canada’s Pacific Coast province, British Columbia, is used to illustrate the validity of the hypotheses.

This study concerning Indian place names and land use in the Clayoquot Sound area was initiated at the. request of MacMillan Bloedel Limited. Subsequently, Fletcher Challenge Canada became a major co-sponsor, and more recently, the British Columbia Ministry of Forests has shared in the funding of this project.
The research involved eliciting information from present day Westcoast Indian communities and collating it with previously-recorded ethnographic data to determine sites of cultural significance. This report presents the results of that research.

A thorough and unrivalled study of the disposal of crown lands in early British Columbia, Land, Man, and the Law provides the background for such topics of current debate as timber and mineral rights and Indian Land claims. During the Hudson Bay Company’s years, when trapping and trading were the only concerns of the few white occupants of British Columbia, land tenure was of little interest and few provisions were made for it. With the arrival of settlers, the officers of the colony were forced to act. An analysis of Governor James Douglas’s policies, many of them hurriedly established when he was faced with an influx of gold miners, precedes a survey of the situation that existed when British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871. Encouraging settlement, forestalling speculation, and securing revenue were the three aims of Colonial and early Provincial legislatures. This book examines their success in the face of rapid exploitation of natural resources. Conflicts between the dominion and provincial governments and between well-known public personalities were frequent. The successes and failures of the men in office determined the future of
the province — for example, had early governments not retained rights to timber, forests would now be in private
hands as most of them are in the United States and the government would not be able to plan changes in the forms of
tenure as it is now doing. The three chapters in which the author treats aboriginal land claims are essential background for an understanding of the present debate.

This article uses British Columbia forest policy to test our ability to distinguish between policy change and policy learning using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) developed by Paul Sabatier. The authors find the ACF a useful way of approaching policy change in this sector, but argue that finer discriminations are needed to detect policy learning. They argue that Sabatier underestimates the extent to which the legitimation function of key ideas forces dominant advocacy coalitions to respond to criticisms in ways that promote learning. They conclude that, in this case, adaptive strategies undertaken by a dominant advocacy coalition in response to criticism has resulted in policy-oriented learning that may cause a major policy shift without an externally induced crisis in the forest policy sector.

The wider forestry community is struggling to define what the third leg of sustainability—social sustainability—actually means. While work is now underway to develop better social Criteria and Indicators for sustainable forest management in BC and elsewhere, it is already becoming clear that the social process of decision-making and management can be as important to society as the social outcomes. This has significant implications for a results-based system such as certification or a new Forestry Code in BC. This paper explores what a truly open and accountable planning process might look like. The achievement of social sustainability depends in part on society seeing tangible proof that forestry is ecologically sustainable and carefully designed. For many of the local and global publics, the forest landscape itself provides strong evidence of forest manager’s performance. The concept of Visible Stewardship, the obvious expression of care and commitment to sustainable forestry, and emerging tools such as computer visualisation of future forests, may be vital to building trust in sustainable forestry.

While there is an increasing demand for active public involvement in forestry decision-making, there are as yet few successful models for achieving this in the new sustainable forest management (SFM) context. This paper describes the special needs of forest managers conducting participatory SFM planning in a sometimes-polarized public context, and outlines criteria for designing decision-support processes to meet these needs. These criteria were used to develop a new approach to public participation in British Columbia, by means of a pilot study using multi-criteria analysis of forest management scenarios while integrating public priorities. Researchers, working with stakeholder groups in the Arrow Forest District, obtained public weightings of criteria and indicators for SFM. Alternative forest management scenarios were presented using realistic 3D landscape visualisations. Modelling-based expert evaluations of the scenarios were weighted according to the priorities of the stakeholder groups, in order to test implications for scenario preferences. There was considerable commonality of results among groups, with general agreement between experts and stakeholder groups on scenario preferences. Based on the results and participant evaluations, techniques such as this appear effective as decision-support tools in conflict-prone areas. Pilot studies like these can play a vital role in developing a more comprehensive, engaging, open and accountable process to support informed and socially acceptable decision-making for sustainable forest management.