Robert Antal Kozak

Decentralized forest management is gaining prominence as an effective approach for the sustainable use of forest resources and to ensure the well-being of rural, Indigenous, and resource-dependent communities around the world. In many places, decentralized forest management is carried out through community forest enterprises (CFEs). CFEs are commercial entities which pursue plural goals including resource conservation, economic development, poverty alleviation, and preserving local cultural values and traditions. This dissertation seeks to advance our understanding of how CFEs can overcome management challenges so they can more effectively meet their goals. First, by conducting qualitative meta-synthesis of key works in the social enterprise and CFE literatures, challenges and opportunities facing CFEs were identified, and consolidated to form a set of solutions to management hurdles. Second, using the theoretical lenses of Organizational Hybridity, Paradox and Tensions and Dualities, this research also examines approaches to community engagement in CFEs’ decision-making in the Canadian Province of British Columbia. A qualitative research design was employed which comprised multiple case studies. Results show that CFEs struggle to balance the need for community engagement in decision-making and demonstrating commercial prudence. Some managers reconcile this tension by using separation strategies, with others using integration strategies.Third, drawing from literature in organizational competitiveness, the dissertation also tested the relationship between competitive strategy and CFE effectiveness. This was achieved through the dissemination of a survey among CFEs in Canada and the United States. Quantitative analyses showed that more effective CFEs were more likely to pursue mixed competitive strategies which simultaneously focus on efficiency and low costs along with the exploration of niche markets. Lastly, drawing from upper echelons theory, a sample of CFEs in British Columbia, Canada, the relationship between managerial personal characteristics, and organizational outcomes was tested, showing support for the link between manager profile and performance. Overall this dissertation identifies interventional approaches to enhance community participation, and outlines leadership attributes needed for effectiveness in CFEs. Thus, the dissertation advances knowledge about what CFEs can do, how this can be done, and who can be entrusted to manage them.

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Jurisprudence and international agreements have motivated increased recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ rights to lands and waters in Canada and around the world. Consequently, non-Indigenous governments are shifting from top-down approaches to collaborative natural resource governance involving Indigenous communities. Trust is widely recognized as critical to successful collaborative natural resource governance; however, a legacy of marginalization of Indigenous Peoples under federal and provincial laws and policies has created a challenging environment for building trust. Insights into how trust can be created have the potential to improve governance processes and outcomes. The trust literature offers insights regarding how trust is created; however, existing theoretical frameworks and empirical studies are often limited by disciplinary boundaries and few studies focus on collaborations involving Indigenous communities. This research took a multidisciplinary approach to developing and empirically testing a theory of trust in this context using a two-phased, mixed-methods approach. First, a multidimensional theoretical framework for trust was developed based on the literature and case studies of collaborations on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago located off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. Qualitative data were collected using a document review and 32 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with representatives of Indigenous, federal and provincial governments who were involved in three collaborations: the Archipelago Management Board, the Haida Gwaii Management Council and Solutions Table and the Marine Planning Partnership for the North Coast Haida Gwaii Sub-Regional Technical Team. Results showed that trust in this context is shaped by individual, interpersonal and institutional influences. Next, the theoretical framework was tested using a survey of 51 representatives of Indigenous, federal, provincial and territorial governments who are involved collaborative natural resource governance across Canada. Results revealed statistically significant relationships between interpersonal and institutional influences and behavioural trust; however, only experiences of discrimination predicted decreased behavioural trust across both multivariate statistical models. These results show that behavioural trust is linked to interpersonal and institutional influences and that people who have experienced discrimination tend to be less trusting toward collaborators. This suggests that lack of trust will remain a barrier to successful collaborative natural resource governance until discrimination against Indigenous Peoples in Canada is addressed.

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Reconciling conservation of natural resources with rural community empowerment is a much-needed goal, and a global challenge. Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is one attempt to reconcile such endeavours. Attracted by its promises, social capital has become a focus for policy and research in CBNRM and community development in recent years. However, social capital has been approached as a catchall and a decontextualized concept, rendering the term close to unusable for effective management. Furthermore, the tendency to treat communities as homogenous units has created further confusion when examining the role of social capital and devising appropriate actions. In this context, the goal of this doctoral dissertation was to critically investigate social capital as it relates to empowerment and equity impacts to offer new insights for effective and contextually-driven practices, in particular within the context of community-based ecotourism (CBE). As such, this research borrows from the fields of sociology, feminist political ecology and community development, to investigate if and how social capital plays a role in community empowerment in two CBE projects in rural villages in the Volta Region of Ghana by employing a multimethod and multilevel approach. To avoid confounding terms and to navigate the complexity, I separately analyze different social capital and empowerment components. Employing both qualitative and quantitative data sources and analyses (including social network analysis) and incorporating a feminist perspective, I provide a novel, re-politicized and structured approach for the exploration, in the Ghanaian CBE context, of well-established social capital hypotheses that to date, have been primarily applied in Western societies. Overall, research findings show that social capital, social exclusions and empowerment opportunities are all interdependent phenomena occurring concurrently at different ecological scales and in different participatory spaces. I argue that a comprehensive understanding of the merits of social capital in the context of CBE requires a multilevel and multidimensional analytical approach and an interdisciplinary perspective to develop successful community projects that do not further social inequities but rather, enable collective action in, and shared benefits from, natural resource management.

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Community-based forest management (CBFM) projects support communities to take a central role in managing their local forests. Communities are asked to enforce the exclusion of illegitimate forest users and prevent illicit extraction of forest resources. However, the practices that CBFM aims to reduce (deforestation and illicit extraction of forest resources) are often facilitated by the use of direct violence. In seeking to reduce these practices, some participants in CBFM experience violent conflicts over forest use (hereafter, forest-related violence). Such violence presents a threat to the lives and human rights of CBFM participants and has the potential to undermine the effective implementation of forest conservation activities. Yet, the extent of forest-related violence in community-managed forests, exactly how it manifests, who is involved, or the outcomes of such violence for CBFM participants and their CBFM practices are not well known. This dissertation explores these issues in the case study country of Cambodia. I draw on data collected between May and December 2015 through a national survey of eighteen NGOs involved in CBFM in Cambodia, semi-structured interviews with one hundred and fifty participants in forty CBFM sites, and participant observation in forest patrols and CBFM training sessions. I demonstrate that forest-related violence is widespread across Cambodia affecting seventy-five per cent of CBFM groups interviewed and seventy-two per cent of NGOs surveyed. I argue that these ‘incidents’ of violence are not discrete but, rather, are the manifestation of a succession of violent processes in which Cambodia’s neopatrimonial socio-political system is central. Furthermore, neopatrimonialism facilitates processes of structural and symbolic violence that preclude effective responses to direct forest-related violence. As a consequence, forest-related violence acts as a disciplinary mechanism inciting fear and undermining the effectiveness of CBFM practices. Yet, it also acts as a catalyst for the re-politicization of CBFM practices and re-conceptualization of CBFM participants’ relationships with the environment, other forest users, and the government. Thus, this dissertation directs attention to the lived experience of forest-related violence and exposes the ‘tomorrow of violence’ – the enduring legacies of violence that configure the way people conceptualize themselves, their government, and the international development community.

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This study explored how people-forest relationships are forged around Kenya’s Nyandarwa Forest Reserve, and how Indigenous Knowledge Systems of Agĩkũyũ people around the Reserve might contribute to healthy, sustainable people-forest relationships in light of the country’s changing social, economic, and political situations. The study sought to examine:1) how the indigenous communities around Nyandarwa Forest Reserve traditionally understood and sustained interdependencies with the forest; 2) how these interdependencies have transformed consistent with Kenya’s post-independence changes in social, economic, and political situations; 3) to what extent local, national, and international efforts to promote healthy sustainable people-forest relationships are incorporating local communities’ Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS); and, 4) how these communities’ IKS might inform the proposition of an environmental conservation framework for sustainable people-forest relationships.The study was guided by post-colonial indigenous research paradigms anchored in decolonizing methodologies. These methodologies were buttressed by indigenous theories that consider communities as spiritual beings with multiple relations. The study was informed by the traditions and cultural heritage of the Agĩkũyũ people, and augmented by Afrocentric philosophies that underlie African ways of knowing and value systems. Data were collected from community groups, elders, the Kenya Forest Service, and archives. The data corpus was analyzed using NVIVO consistent with the study’s theoretical framework and generated themes that address the research questions. In addition, the research participants contributed to the process as this study sought to elevate the community to the role of co-researchers and to create mutually beneficial long-term relationships.Results show that the pre-colonial manifestation of Agĩkũyũ people-forest relationships were understood through land, that land continues to be a central pillar of Agĩkũyũ indigenous environmental thought, and that one of the historical values of the forest is its role in sustaining the struggle for independence. Further, the study reveals that some indigenous practices tied to sacred sites and food sovereignty have endured, different governance regimes have shifted the way people-forest relationships are constructed, and the Agĩkũyũ have been continuously mobilizing to protect their landscape. In the end, this study suggests how IKS can contribute to forging sustainable people-forest relationships, arguably the planet’s most threatened resource.

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The transition to a sustainable economic paradigm may be one of the most important issues of our times. This study contributes to the effective communication of ecological economics, by: 1) identifying mental models on people’s perceptions about economic growth and the environment, 2) exploring the prevalence of expansionist and ecological attitudes, and segmenting the audience based on these attitudes, and 3) exploring the effects of different messages (about the transition to economies not centered on growth) on people’s thoughts, emotions and attitudes. Sixty interviews and 1,250 online surveys were carried out in British Columbia and Canada, respectively. Data were analysed with NVivo 10, IBM SPSS Statistics 23 and Latent Gold 5.1. Based on the interviews, five mental models were described. These sat in a spectrum of views anchored to an expansionist or to an ecological worldview. The most expansionist views (Cluster A) expressed great faith in indefinite economic growth and human ingenuity. The most ecological perspectives (Cluster E) acknowledged limits to economic growth, recognized the ecological crisis and expressed techno-skepticism. The other perspectives were in the middle of the spectrum. Based on the surveys, three audience segments were identified. Participants in Cluster 1 (41.1%) were the most optimistic towards technology and indefinite economic growth. Members of Cluster 2 (36.3%) did not express strong opinions. Participants in Cluster 3 (22.6%) acknowledged human unsustainability, expressed higher environmental concern and did not believe in indefinite growth. Sociodemographic factors (e.g. gender, political identification) correlated with the mental models and segments.Regarding the framing experiments, the messages influenced participant’s thoughts and emotions. Environmental messages invoked more references to resources and sustainability, while well-being messages generated more comments about overconsumption and happiness. Loss-framed messages caused greater negative emotions than gain-framed messages and the environmental message focused on losses generated the least hope and the greatest fear and anger among frames. There was no evidence that attitudinal responses were influenced by the frames. Most participants agreed with moving into an economic model with reduced consumption levels. This study provides data on topics that have been little explored and offers insights about the impacts of different post-growth messages.

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Social impact assessment is the primary ex-ante tool for achieving socially sustainable outcomes and for ensuring the equitable distribution of the burdens and benefits associated with major development projects. The objectives of this research project were to evaluate the social impact assessments that are conducted as part of mandatory environmental assessments for proposed major projects in rural and small-town British Columbia (BC), Canada and to recommend practicable changes for improving social impact assessment practice and policy. I addressed these objectives by analyzing the content of social impact assessments, interviewing interested parties with technical knowledge, and conducting a multiple case study evaluation of assessments undertaken for mining projects in Northwest BC. Although my findings show that excellence is possible under the current BC Environmental Assessment Act and supporting guidelines, there is little consistency in the methods, measures, approaches, and overall quality of assessments conducted in BC. A major shortcoming that emerged was the lack of attention to issues of equity, a fundamental principle in sustainable development and social impact assessment. Further, the social impact assessments being conducted in BC are generally not supported by conceptual frameworks or grounded in theory. Ultimately, it is recommended that the provincial government provide greater guidance regarding social impact assessment and examine what appears to be an ad hoc system of professional reliance. Finally, the practice of social impact assessment would benefit from a transparent discussion regarding what constitutes a qualified social impact assessment practitioner and a more in-depth examination of the theoretical foundations of social impact assessment.

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The phrase, “please consider the environment before printing this email” has entered the common vernacular. It suggests that when I consider the environment, paper media is of particular concern, and by inference, digital media is not. This thesis tackles the legitimacy of this claim by examining how media sustainability operates from three critical perspectives: industry, consumers, and academia. To measure the paper industry’s perspective, a series of interviews with business executives along a supply chain were conducted. I found that collaboration between supply chain actors is a prerequisite for improving environmental performance. To gain insight on the consumer’s perspective, I surveyed 1,400 individuals in North America, investigating media habits and environmental values. I found that consumers are shifting from paper to digital media, but that environmental values have no influence over this shift. This suggests that consumers could be detached from the environmental impacts of their media choices. Finally, the academic perspective was analyzed through a comprehensive review of life cycle assessment (LCA) research that compares paper and digital media from an environmental perspective. The studies found that digital media is almost always preferable to paper, requiring less energy and materials. However, they did not assess the assumptions required in order to compare such different products. More worryingly, the context of media consumption – the industrial systems that produce paper and digital products – was never taken into account. I conclude that since a significant media shift is underway new methods are required to consider sustainability. The new methods should be anchored in two concepts that could improve considerations of the environmental performance of industrial systems. First, industrial ecology, the idea that industry might mimic nature, can strengthen initial assessments of environmental performance. Second, capability maturity models can assist in gauging the ability of industrial systems to manage and improve environmental performance over time.

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In the past, forested areas have been used primarily for timber production. However, the recent growth of nature-based tourism has given monetary value to the recreation and scenic characteristics associated the forests in many places. This can lead to conflicts between forestry and tourism raising questions relating to the management of these two industries. What impact does forestry have on the perception of tourists in region’s that promote natural landscapes? Are certain tourist segments affected differently by the impacts of forestry in regions that market natural landscapes? How can forests be managed to ensure that tourism values are not compromised by other forest interests? To gain a better perspective of tourism and forestry related conflicts this investigation utilized a comparative case study method. The case study locations selected include Vancouver Island, Canada and Tasmania, Australia. At each destination visitors were surveyed at three types of attractions to understand differences in forestry perceptions between user groups. Forestry and tourism professionals from both regions were also interviewed. Vancouver Island and Tasmania were chosen because of the important role that both forestry and nature-based tourism play in shaping the economies of both places. Despite these similarities, differences exist in the way these two industries are managed. These differences were important for providing insight into management strategies that could be used to address these conflicts. Results suggest that forestry impacts have the potential to negatively impact upon visitor perceptions. However, this seems partly dependent upon the type of impact observed, as differences were noted between harvested areas, tree plantations, logging trucks and saw/pulp mills. Results from the different sample groups were compared to learn whether or not differences exist in the way that tourist user groups are affected by exposure to forestry impacts. Findings provided a limited amount of evidence to support this. Through the analysis of the semi-structured interviews a set of recommendations were developed to help assist forestry and tourism managers who may be dealing with similar land use conflicts. These recommendations would be useful for land managers in other jurisdictions where similar conflicts between forestry and tourism exist.

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This investigation assesses British Columbia’s secondary wood products industry, the forest products industries of New Zealand, Chile, and Brazil, and Brazil’s sugarcane-based ethanol and industrial plantation forest industries. More specifically, the dynamic and interrelated concepts of competitiveness and sustainability within the contexts of the BC secondary wood products sector and other competing regions are examined. Manufacturing and business competencies were used to inform the competitiveness construct, while the role that various sustainability issues (i.e. social and environmental) may play on firms’ future strategies was also assessed.key research questions considered were: What are key factors for the future competitiveness of the BC secondary wood products industry? How have southern hemisphere industries been able to successfully enter major export markets and what factors will impact their competitiveness in the future? Is there a potential relationship between sustainability and competitiveness in the forest sectors of the world? Qualitative methodologies of grounded theory and case studies were used to address these research questions.Findings indicate that business-related strategies, as opposed to manufacturing strategies, are the most critical factors that firms must consider for their long-term competitiveness. In the BC secondary wood products sector, improvements in the quality of managerial and entrepreneurial capacity will be particularly important. In New Zealand, forest ownership fragmentation will likely play a role on the business-related strategies of firms, as raw material security may become an issue. Despite Chile’s well-known business orientation, external factors, such as rising input and shipping costs, will have to be taken into account to ensure future success. In Brazil, the need for improvements to the country’s environmental legal framework is considered a critical concern at this time. However, in the long run, business-oriented strategies will become more important to Brazilian firms. In all of the regions studied, participants agreed that the constructs of sustainability and competitiveness will become increasingly intertwined in the global forest sectors of the near future. Finally, a foundation is laid for the theoretical development of a framework for the competitive environment for post-industrial firms, which includes sustainability.

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The adoption of Corporate Responsibility practices is of strategic importance for the new social contract that the forest sector is seeking to establish. This sector has been increasingly under pressure to adopt responsible practices and show commitment to sustainability. However, Corporate Responsibility is not an easy concept for companies to implement. Identifying how this concept diffuses to companies, as well as the way forest companies understand and operationalize Corporate Responsibility practices, is an important first step to improve responsible practices in this sector.This dissertation addressed these issues by proposing a framework explaining diffusion, adoption, and implementation of Corporate Responsibility practices in the forest sector. Content analyses of sustainability reports of the largest global forest companies evaluated this sector’s understanding of concept. Grounded theory methodology was then used to develop a framework based on interviews with forest companies, non-governmental organizations, industry associations, and academics in Brazil, Canada, and the United States.Results show that different factors influence the diffusion, adoption, and implementation of Corporate Responsibility practices in forest companies. While external factors influence the diffusion of Corporate Responsibility practices to companies, internal factors influence the adoption and implementation of these practices within companies. Context influences different aspects of these processes by shaping relevant Corporate Responsibility issues and stakeholder demands in varying places of operation. The diffusion, adoption, and implementation of Corporate Responsibility practices are cyclical and interconnected processes that require continuous improvement efforts. These results advance knowledge on diffusion, adoption, and implementation of Corporate Responsibility practices, especially within the forest sector context. The identification of patterns in these processes should facilitate the management of companies’ response processes for responsible and sustainable practices. For organizations interested in advancing the practice of Corporate Responsibility, understanding the diffusion process can help them to identify more effective means of communicating with potential adopters, as well as positively influencing the uptake of more responsible practices.

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In this study, the stress-reducing effects of wood and plants were studied in the context of an office environment. This study took a psychophysiological approach to stress and attempted to assess the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. Four office environments were studied in this factorial design: wood and plants, wood and no plants, no wood and plants, and no wood and no plants. One hundred and nineteen university undergraduate students were assigned to one of four test conditions. Skin conductance and inter beat interval were continuously monitored throughout the experiment. The experiment consisted of a 10-minute baseline period, a 12-20 minute stressful task, and a 10-minute recovery period. Wood effects were found with respect to skin conductance level (SCL) and frequency of non-specific skin conductance responses (F-NS-SCR), both indicators of sympathetic system activation. Subjects exposed to wood had lower SCL in the baseline period and lowers F-NS-SCR in all periods of the study. No plant effect was found with respect to sympathetic activation. Further, there was no evidence of wood-plant interactions. Spectral analysis of HRV data was used to measure parasympathetic activation. No treatment effects were found with respect to parasympathetic activation. This study provides evidence that wood provides stress-reducing effects similar to the well studied effect of exposure to nature in the field of environmental psychology. The practical implication of this effect is that wood may be able to be applied indoors to provide stress reduction as a part of the evidence-based and biophilic designs of hospitals, offices, schools, and other built environments.

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No abstract available.