Learning Through New Approaches to Forest Governance: Evidence from Harrop-Procter Community Forest, Canada

Abstract

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.

Unraveling the Relationship between Collective Action and Social Learning: Evidence from Community Forest Management in Canada

“…Three of the outcomes of social learning were central to enabling the collective action outcomes (data) presented above: (new) knowledge, improved or better understanding, and relationship building [14,18,19]. Table 1 shows the social learning outcomes that drove the collective actions found in the data.…”

“…Natural resource management/governance approaches that are collaborative and deliberative in orientation are recognized as encouraging social learning [11][12][13]. Research shows that community forestry, which devolves forest management responsibilities to communities, is an example of a governance approach that can combine collaboration, deliberation, and learning effectively at a regional scale [4,14]. In Canada, the community forestry model offers local citizens and forest stakeholders, who hold a broad array of knowledge, expertise, and experience, the opportunity to collaborate around the management of local forests and make management decisions for the benefit of the community at large.…”

Reimagining Community Relationships for Organizational Learning: a Scoping Review With Implications for a Learning Health System

“…All ve natural resource management texts held broad conceptualizations of community, de ning it as the public or other interested stakeholders [55,58,74,77,79]. They emphasized social processes of dialogue and transformative learning at the organizational and societal levels, where the organization must resist imposing its own structures in its external environment, or else marginalize the community's ability to solve problems.…”

“…They emphasized social processes of dialogue and transformative learning at the organizational and societal levels, where the organization must resist imposing its own structures in its external environment, or else marginalize the community's ability to solve problems. Only one of these articles emphasized 'learning from' community preferences rather than 'learning with' the community in relationship and dialogue [58].…”

“…As for the role of community in organizational learning, in most texts this was either not mentioned (n = 13, 31%) or described as a passive role of allowing data collection, consultation or information use by the organization (n = 16, 38%). A minority of texts described community as having a more active role in addressing its own problems [74,78], thus driving innovation [87] or collaborative design and management [22,58,76,88], yet they nonetheless offered limited detail to understand this role.…”