Characterizing sustainable forest management at the local-level in British Columbia, Canada

In this study, sustainable forest management (SFM) indicators employed by 13 different forest management entities in British Columbia (BC) have been analyzed according to their use and associated monitoring costs. The analysis revealed significant gaps in the monitoring of many social and economic indicators amongst forestry companies, largely due to a perception that these indicators were not the companies’ responsibilities to monitor. In addition, some widely recognized values, such as the maintenance of soil and water quality, were also not being monitored. This can be attributed, at least in part, to the high cost of monitoring these indicators. Amongst Aboriginal entities, they were also major gaps in the monitoring, often reflecting a lack of capacity or a disagreement with the context in which the indicators were framed. Further exploration of the data through Q-type factor analysis revealed that there are five distinct organizational perspectives on stewardship amongst the 13 case studies. These perspectives are predominantly delineated by causal mechanism related to access and control of resources. These results represent important policy signals for government when attempting to craft a cohesive SFM policy across a broad scale of diverse landscapes and cultures and provide a basis for exploring the relationship between institutional failures and adaptation in SFM. A generic ‘SFM system’ was devised for BC using the theory of Panarchy as an underlying conceptual framework. In this system, the constraints and incentives on SFM monitoring derived from the analysis of the 13 case studies are connected to institutional failures in the SFM system. Relationships between failure and adaption are explored in order to make policy suggestions for better incorporation of a diversity of operational SFM definitions into higher-level SFM implementation and monitoring in BC.