Evaluating the effectiveness of stakeholder advisory committee participation in forest management planning in Ontario, Canada

Abstract

The study evaluates the success of Ontario's forest SACs (Local Citizens Committees), including public involvement in open houses for forest management planning using a content analysis of third party audits. Evaluations are discussed in terms of five established components of success: conflict resolution among competing interests, building of trust in institutions, incorporating public values into decisions, improving the substantive quality of decisions and informing and educating the public. Also discussed are the four established process components that facilitate success: responsiveness of the lead agency, motivation of participants, quality of deliberation among participants, and degree of public control over the process. The study has four findings. First, audits did not explicitly address components, were inconsistent, and lacked comprehensiveness, reporting on all four evaluative components that facilitate success but only four of five evaluative components of success. Consequently, our ability to determine overall success was highly constrained. Second, despite the constraints, given three of five outcome components were either not achieved, undermined or limited, and that a fourth was mixed, it appears that effectiveness of LCCs during the study period reflects more failure than success. Third, the component most associated with facilitating success, responsiveness of the lead agency, was generally high. Fourth, the key lesson is that the inability to re-frame citizens as integral participants in civic discourse may have been the weakest point in supporting the strong democracy so critical for deliberation between agencies and citizens.Keywords: deliberation, advisory committees, public involvement, content analysis, auditing, evaluation, government learning résumé Cette étude évalue le succès des comités locaux de citoyens (CLC) sur la gestion des forêts de l'Ontario, notamment la participation du public lors des portes ouvertes sur la planification de l'aménagement forestier au moyen d'une analyse du contenu des vérifications faites par des tiers. Les évaluations sont discutées selon cinq composantes prédéterminées du succès : la réso-lution des conflits entre les parties ayant des intérêts divergents, l'instauration de la confiance envers les institutions, l'inclusion des valeurs publiques au sein des décisions, l'amélioration de la qualité intrinsèque des décisions, ainsi que l'information et la sensibilisation du public. L' étude révèle quatre faits saillants. Premièrement, les audits n' ont pas explicitement abordé les composantes, ils étaient inconsistants, manquaient d' exhaustivité, faisant état des quatre composantes d' évaluation qui facilitaient le succès mais de seulement quatre des cinq composantes rattachées au succès. En conséquence, notre capacité à déterminer le succès global était grandement réduite. Deuxièmement, malgré les contraintes, étant donné que trois des cinq composantes étaient soit non atteintes, sapées ou limitées et que la quatrième était mitigée, il semble que ...

Building trust, building futures: Knowledge co-production as relationship, design, and process in transdisciplinary science

“…An organized, consistent, and (ideally) representative group of stakeholders that can co-design and co-generate knowledge in a sustained manner, that is a stakeholder advisory group (SAG), has the potential to provide multi-method engagement in FEWS research resulting in co-produced knowledge and validated models. Stakeholder advisory groups, research advisory councils, and citizen advisory committees have been used since the 1940s in the Cooperative Extension Service (Kelsey and Hearne, 1949;Franz et al, 2015;Garst and McCawley, 2015), and from the 1970s to support planning studies (Ertet, 1979;Lafon et al, 2004), environmental policy development (Lynn and Busenberg, 1995), forest management (McGurk et al, 2006;Hunt and McFarlane, 2007;Robson and Rosenthal, 2014), phosphorus management (Iwaniec et al, 2016), coastal risk management (Creed et al, 2018), and more recently in FEWS research (Bielicki et al, 2019). The scope of advisory groups has typically been nominal engagement (e.g., (Ertet, 1979;Lynn and Busenberg, 1995;McGurk et al, 2006;Bielicki et al, 2019), or instrumental engagement (e.g., (Lafon et al, 2004;McGurk et al, 2006;Hunt and McFarlane, 2007;Robson and Rosenthal, 2014), with few advisory groups that are set up to provide representative engagement (McGurk et al, 2006;Creed et al, 2018) or transformative engagement (Iwaniec et al, 2016).…”

Evaluating the transition to sustainable forest management in Ontario’s Crown Forest Sustainability Act and forest management planning manuals from 1994 to 2009

“…Public participation is more inclusive and provides more opportunities for more power sharing; however, Robson and Rosenthal (2014), in their study of LCC effectiveness, reveal that despite widespread evidence in MNR audits of the need to improve effectiveness, little feedback about what has been learned about public involvement has been scaled up to the provincial level and incorporated into revised versions of the FMPM. Consequently, although Robson and Rosenthal reveal bureaucratic responsiveness to be "generally good" at the district office level, the lack of scaling up of feedback from LCCs and lack of responsiveness at the provincial level undermines, to a significant degree, the development of an organizational culture of increased responsiveness and representativeness provincially.…”