Environmental Bargains: Power Struggles and Decision Making over British Columbia's and Tasmania's Old-Growth Forests

Abstract

Over the past few decades, conflicts over resources have increased in scale and intensity. They are frequently dominated by environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) that fight, boycott, lobby, and negotiate with other interest groups to privilege nonindustrial, particularly environmental, values of resources. This article proposes an environmental bargaining framework to analyze the many and varied forms of interactions and processes through which ENGOs seek to change existing practices and decision structures. Drawing on political economy and political ecology approaches, environmental bargaining recognizes the importance of multiple perspectives, strategies of actors, and the regional context. Conceptually, the article interprets environmental conflicts along two dimensions: the distribution of power between actors and forms of interaction ranging from confrontational to collaborative. Examples from British Columbia, Canada, and Tasmania, Australia, reveal the value of comparative perspectives and the importance of the regional context that determines behavior and relationships between actors. While confrontational action has brought considerable change to Tasmania's forests, the example from British Columbia suggests that collaborative forms of decision making that are based on a balance of power have more potential to protect environmental values and bring peace to the woods.

Environmental Bargaining and Boundary Organizations: Remapping British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest

“…Resource conflicts and environmental bargaining are frequently intense, deeply felt, prolonged, and complex struggles (Wilson 1998;Affolderbach 2008Affolderbach , 2011Widick 2009). They involve a wide range of different actors with different goals and attitudes; they seek to redress a wide range of economic and noneconomic values and the latter are especially hard to quantify; deadlines might have little meaning for key actors; ENGOs themselves are single minded, and many require conflicts to sustain themselves from a funding perspective; and debates about remapping are fundamentally normative and moralistic, involving difficult issues related to environmental and cultural justice (Sachs and Santarius 2007;Schlosberg 2007).…”

“…Environmental bargaining describes the strategic interactions and power struggles that underlie and shape remapping processes that seek to enhance environmental values (Affolderbach 2008(Affolderbach , 2011. The proliferation of ENGOs, and of associated resource conflicts, has been driven by the scale and scope of resource exploitation during Fordism, the maturation of resource cycles and impending depletion of resources once thought inexhaustible, and the recognition of the globalization of environmental problems (Clapp 1998;Hayter 2003).…”

“…It draws directly from forest policy documents, records of the formal negotiations, analyses of the region's ecological values and socioeconomic structure, and other records and reviews of the extended process. Indirectly, it draws from field investigations in the region by each of the authors that have focused on ENGO activities, local community agencies, industrial firms, and the longevity of the underlying conflicts (Hayter 2000(Hayter , 2003Clapp 2004;Affolderbach 2008Affolderbach , 2011Clapp andMortenson 2011, Hayter andBarnes 2012). This article, however, is focused on the development of environmental policy through a bargaining approach to conflict resolution that emphasizes the roles of bargainers, brokers, and boundary organizations.…”

Impacts of nonstate, market-driven governance on Chilean forests

“…agenda setting/negotiation, implementation, and monitoring/enforcement (25). In the first stage, NGOs must decide how to balance confrontational and collaborative strategies (26). Similarly, industry participants can choose the level of collaboration with which to respond; either participating in multistakeholder negotiations or developing their own standards to compete for legitimacy (4).…”

Environmental and evolutionary economic geography: time for eeg2?

“…Studies that have focused on local or regional levels while still incorporating global interdependencies into their explanations include Adger et al's (2009) dis cussion of nested and tele-connected vulnerabil ities, Affolderbach's (2011) investigation of the interrelations between local populations, MNCs and ENGOs in Tasmania and British Columbia, and Agrawal's (2005) conceptualization of how the de volution of scientific forest management resulted in the creation of environmental subjects. Studies that have focused on local or regional levels while still incorporating global interdependencies into their explanations include Adger et al's (2009) dis cussion of nested and tele-connected vulnerabil ities, Affolderbach's (2011) investigation of the interrelations between local populations, MNCs and ENGOs in Tasmania and British Columbia, and Agrawal's (2005) conceptualization of how the de volution of scientific forest management resulted in the creation of environmental subjects.…”