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Collaborative forest governance arrangements have been viewed as promising for sustainable forestry because they allow local communities to participate directly in management and benefit from resource use or protection. Such arrangements are strengthened through social learning during management activities that can enhance capacity to solve complex problems. Despite significant research on social learning in collaborative environmental governance, it is not clear how social learning evolves over time, who influences social learning, and whether learning influences management effectiveness. This study investigates how social learning outcomes change over time, using an in-depth study of a community forest in Canada. Personal interviews, focus group meetings, and participant observation revealed that most participants started engaging in community forestry with limited knowledge and learned as they participated in management activities. However, as the community forest organization became effective at complying with forestry legislation, learning opportunities and outcomes became more restricted. Our results run contrary to the prevalent view that opportunities for and outcomes of social learning become enlarged over time. In our case, learning how to meet governmental requirements increased professionalism and reduced opportunities for involvement and learning to a smaller group. Our findings suggest the need to further test propositions about social learning and collaborative governance, particularly to determine how relationships evolve over time.

ABSTRACT. Collaborative forest governance enables forest-based communities access to and management responsibilities for forestry resources. Researchers argue that processes that enable social learning have the potential to contribute to the sustainable management of forests by engaging local people, helping them identify their collective needs and gain access to resource entitlements, and encouraging them to learn about and implement different management options. Although there is considerable attention to gender in the literature on collaborative forestry, particularly in developing countries, there is relatively little attention to gender in the social learning literature. Furthermore, there is almost no attention to these issues in postindustrial countries. Our purpose was to better understand how gender affects social learning and collaborative forest governance in forest-based communities in Canada and Uganda. Results showed that most participants in both countries started engaging in collaborative forest governance with limited knowledge and learned as they participated in various activities. However, we found that social learning opportunities and outcomes were affected by gender; in addition, they were also affected by the values that people held, education, and literacy. We suggest that practitioners should consider gender and other axes of difference if they want to design collaborative forest governance initiatives that are both participatory and inclusive.

Knowledge produced by scientists is essential to the policy and practice of managing natural resources, including forests. However, there has never been systematic mapping of which techniques in knowledge exchange (KE) have been applied in the forest sciences, by whom, and to what effect. We examined KE techniques documented in the forest sciences globally. We used standardized search strings in English and French across two academic search engines (BASE and Scopus) and a specialist website (ResearchGate) to locate relevant items. We screened items, extracted data, conducted qualitative and quantitative analysis, and built a network visualization diagram to demonstrate knowledge flow. Our final map included 122 items published from 1998 to 2020, with most published after 2010. Items mentioned organizations from 66 countries as knowledge producers or users. The interactive network visualization diagram displays linkages between organizations, sectors and countries. We found that most of the KE activity involved the Global North (89%). Governments were the most common knowledge users, and industry was frequently reported as a user but rarely a producer. Academia was both producer and user. Indigenous, local, traditional or community knowledge was included in 24% of items, but these communities were not associated with any coauthor affiliations. Reported funders were universities, governments, non‐profits or foundations. We found 90 unique terms in the items related to KE with less than 25% of terms used in more than one item. Fifteen per cent of item keywords related to KE. The most commonly identified enabling conditions for KE were trust, funding and established relationships, while major barriers were challenges for translation of science and lack of time. To improve searchability of information related to KE and encourage a culture of considering KE in scientific research and forest management work, we recommend a common lexicon of ‘knowledge exchange’/‘échange de connaisances’. We recommend that more effort be given to forest science‐related KE connections between the Global North and South as well as a deliberate collection of evidence for the effectiveness of KE techniques. Researchers and practitioners can use our KE typology to identify their goals and design appropriate evaluation measures.

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