Enabling community forestry in Northern Ontario

Abstract

The forestry crisis that crippled the forest industry in northern Ontario in the new millennium led to a province wide forest tenure reform that created new forest governance institutions and a resurgence of a long-standing interest by communities in community forestry. Although research on this alternative approach to forest management from the conventional command-and-control paradigm has accompanied the global policy trend, this research has been minimal in northern Ontario. The tenure reform process driven strongly by renewed community advocacy for community forests presented an opportunity for this research. This dissertation has four distinct but interrelated components that explore the evolution of community forestry practice and advocacy in northern Ontario using critical qualitative inquiry: 1) Community forestry theory is used to assess the perspectives of northern Ontario communities regarding their visions for the management of their local forests in response to the forestry crisis and forest tenure reform; 2) A complexity lens and theories of community forestry and democratic decentralization are used to evaluate Ontario’s forest system from its inception to the present in terms of how, as a social-ecological system that moves through an adaptive cycle, it has embraced community forestry; 3) transformative community organizing theory is used to evaluate the emergence of a community organization that advocates for community forestry in northern Ontario; and 4) an access approach and complexity theory are used in an in-depth exploration of a developing forest governance model proposed as a community forest for implementation under Ontario’s new forest tenure policy framework. The research has determined that the new forest tenure system remains deficient in both enabling democratic local forest authorities and in supporting a broader range of forest values than timber alone. Despite the persistent limitations of the forest tenure system, community forestry in the area of forest development in northern Ontario has progressed from a single case in the early phase of the forest system’s adaptive cycle to the emergence of multiple regional initiatives in the current reorganization phase that has followed the system’s collapse and subsequent reform. A number of community forestry initiatives have been proposed as collaborative models between municipalities and First Nations to foster regional diversification in the forest-based political economy. Community advocacy for community forestry has similarly increased from an early idea to an active movement that includes the emergence of a community organization and social change movement that challenges the assumptions of the dominant forestry system and advocates for community forestry. Access theory has identified tangible economic, social, environmental and cultural benefits that are being obtained by a group of First Nations in the Northeast Superior region of Ontario through the development of a new forest governance model. The main mechanism they have used to achieve these benefits is investment in social relations. Additional mechanisms used are access to capital, labour and knowledge to build capacity and resources to help position the First Nations to assume full responsibility for forest management in the region. A power shift is evident in the region’s forest-based political economy that has recognized the First Nations as equals in forest management decision-making. The development of the forest tenure initiative has also resulted in the building of adaptive capacity that has seen transformative and social learning by the other actors.