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The Influence of Context on Deliberation and Cooperation in Community-Based Forest Management in Ontario, Canada

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Abstract

The development of cooperation depends on the nature of deliberations among and between local stakeholders and the state as well as the context of deliberations, especially whether larger scale governance helps, hinders or overrides deliberative processes. However, the context of deliberations has not been a focus of past research on deliberation. The paper identifies the key context criteria that influenced deliberation and the development of cooperation in a comparative case study of two forest advisory committees in Ontario, Canada. The study uses cognitive mapping and network analysis techniques to identify key context criteria and concludes with five inferences regarding the influence of context on deliberation and cooperation that have implications for deliberation and decentralization theories.

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Notes

  1. Community informants were an independent group of interviewees identified by LCC members and District Office support staff as having a “balanced” perspective on the general relationship between the District Office and local communities.

  2. Categories were based on a division of criteria into low, medium and high rankings. This categorization was considered optimal since parsimony was balanced with precision in terms of the final number of key context criteria identified.

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Correspondence to Mark Robson.

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Robson, M., Kant, S. The Influence of Context on Deliberation and Cooperation in Community-Based Forest Management in Ontario, Canada. Hum Ecol 37, 547–558 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-009-9251-4

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