Calls for community forestry on public forests grew in strength in both British Columbia and the United States during the 1990s, as part of a global movement touting the advantages of community control over centralized state administration of forests. Despite structural similarities, the trajectories of community forestry in the two locations diverged sharply, with community forests rapidly becoming a reality in British Columbia while similar proposals in the United States were blocked. This article explains these divergent trajectories by examining the differences in property relations, state institutions, stakeholder interests, and environmental social-movement strategies that led to nearly opposite outcomes in initially similar situations. It also analyzes community forestry in British Columbia relative to current debates over neoliberalism and alternative economies, arguing that detailed examination of such empirical examples demonstrates the utility of neoliberalism as an analytical concept.

Neoliberalism and the Politics of Alternatives: Community Forestry in British Columbia and the United States

The Practice of the Wild

In recent decades, natural resource management (NRM) has embraced community participation and engagement. Despite considerable literature addressing community participation, the tasks of negotiating and integrating diverse community interests, values, goals and boundaries remains a challenge for practitioners. Our view is that NRM discourse is hamstrung by a multitude of overlapping terms and excessive focus on place-based communities. In this paper, we critically review existing strands of community theory and draw on stakeholder analysis and actor-network theory to identify a more effective approach to decisions about who should be involved and how they might participate. We then offer a typology as a conceptual tool for understanding, organizing, mapping and analyzing communities. Examples from NRM in Australia's Murray–Darling Basin are provided to illustrate the potentially multi-scalar nature of communities and their significance in addressing environmental change. As part of our discussion...

Locating Communities in Natural Resource Management

Delocalizing Communities: Changing Forms of Community Engagement in Natural Resources Governance

The international movement toward recognition of indigenous rights over the past thirty years has created a number of complex and compelling issues in planning for the use of land and natural resou...

The Split Personality of Planning: Indigenous Peoples and Planning for Land and Resource Management

This article examines environmental activists' views of place-based collaboration and how they have related to it in the management of U.S. national forests. We first present a brief historical overview of the issues that led to the emergence of place-based collaboration in the U.S. West. We then discuss the main themes in the environmentalist critique of place-based collaboration. Next we present case studies of three prominent examples of place-based collaboration in the West--the Quincy Library Group in California and the Applegate Partnership and Lake County Community Sustainability Initiative in Oregon--to explore the relationship of environmentalists to place-based collaboration. We conclude with a discussion of the possibilities for environmentalists in place-based collaboration.

Environmental Resistance to Place-Based Collaboration in the U.S. West

We were excited to learn that Professor Victoria Sturtevant and Todd Bryan were preparing a commentary on our article. We looked forward to a thoughtful dialogue on substantive issues, and hoped the exchange would help to further the scholarly discussion of community-based natural resource management. We are disappointed to find instead an assault on our personal integrity and scholarly ethics. Rather than engage our article at the level of ideas, Sturtevant and Bryan evidently decided to attempt to discredit our work. In this response we hope to accomplish three objectives. First, we provide a brief review of our study and its key findings, emphasizing the purpose of the research. It appears that Sturtevant and Bryan fundamentally misunderstood the intent of the study, and that this misunderstanding is at the root of many of their criticisms. Second, we revisit the Applegate Partnership and Quincy Library Group cases. Sturtevant and Bryan accuse us of not having our facts straight. Our position is that Sturtevant and Bryan simply accept interpretations of the facts that differ with the perspectives reported in our study; also, they quibble over a few minor issues that do not stand as significant challenges to our study and its findings. Third, we address the very serious charge that we behaved unethically in the conduct of our research. In making this accusation, Sturtevant and Bryan set a dangerous precedent of unjustly invalidating legitimate scholarship via unsubstantiated claims of impropriety.

Jeremy Madsen

Papers

Environmental Resistance to Place-Based Collaboration in the U.S. West

Response to Sturtevant and Bryan