Rethinking Effective Public Engagement in Sustainable Forest Governance

Abstract

Addressing environmental problems through conventional expert and scientific approaches alone is largely ineffective. Therefore, Canadian forest management has evolved to include governance processes such as public advisory committees. Public participation is mandated by federal and provincial policy and is a key part of forest certification processes. In this context, self-reports of committee effectiveness and satisfaction are common indicators of meaningful governance. Yet we often know very little about what people mean when they indicate that a process is effective. Using a 2016 national survey of PAC members across Canada (n = 345), empirical findings confirm that personal perceptions of fairness, inclusion, and (to a lesser extent) social learning determines individual judgments of committee effectiveness and satisfaction. Policy recommendations include a sharper focus on social learning as a key governance outcome.

Keywords:

• Binary logistic regression
• fairness
• forest management
• social learning
• survey research

Acknowledgments

We thank all of people involved in design and implementation of the national survey including James Robson and Solange Nadeau. We also thank the survey participants for their valuable contributions to this study.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this project was provided by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Insight Grant (435-2012-0619), with Maureen Reed as Principal Investigator.