Diagnostic reframing of intractable environmental problems: case of a contested multiparty public land-use conflict.

Intractable conflicts are omnipresent in environmental management. These conflicts do not necessarily resist resolution but need to be fundamentally transformed in order to reach agreement. Reframing, a process that allows disputants to create new alternative understandings of the problem, is one way of transforming these conflicts. Cognitive and interactional reframing are the two major approaches to conflict transformation. These approaches have some drawbacks. Cognitive reframing does not guarantee commensurate consideration of all disputants' views about the problem. Interactional reframing is prone to inter-disputant influences that interfere with presenting the problems as accurately as they exist in disputants' minds. Inadequate consideration of other disputants' views and inter-disputant influences often lead to inaccurate problem identification and definition. This in turn leads to solving the wrong problem, enabling intractability to persist. Proper problem identification and definition requires commensurate consideration of all sides of the conflict while minimizing inter-disputant influences. From a problem diagnosis perspective, we show how Q methodology is used to reframe environmental problems, rendering them more tractable to analysis while minimizing the influence of who disputants are talking with, and without ignoring the perspectives of other disputants. Using a case of contentious All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV) use in a state-administered public land, conflicting parties reframed the problem by prioritizing issues, outlining areas and levels of consensus and disagreement, and revealing inherent unrecognized and/or unspoken agendas. The reframing process surprisingly revealed several areas of common ground in disputants' diagnosis of the problem, including lack of emphasis on environmental protection and uncoordinated management factions. Emergent frames were misaligned on some issues, such as the behaviors of ATV riders and the role of management, including political and economic influences on decision making. We discuss how the reframing process enhances tractability of multiparty environmental problems. We point to some limitations of Q methodology as a tool for the diagnostic reframing of such problems.

Prognostic framing of stakeholders' subjectivities: a case of all-terrain vehicle management on state public lands.

Management of all-terrain vehicle (ATV) use on Minnesota state forest lands has a contentious history and land managers are caught between ATV riders, non-motorized recreationists, private landowners, and environmental advocates. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of framing distinct perspectives about ATV management on Minnesota state public forests, understand the structure of these management perspectives, identify areas of consensus and disagreement, specify which stakeholders hold the various perspectives, clarify stakeholder perceptions of other stakeholders, and explore the implications for ATV planning and management. Using Q methodology, three distinct perspectives about how we should or should not manage ATVs resulted from our analysis, labeled Expert Management, Multiple Use, and Enforcement and Balance. A surprising degree of unanimity among the three management perspectives was found. Although some of the areas of agreement would be difficult to implement, others would be relatively simple to put into place. We suggest that land managers focus on widely accepted management actions to ameliorate commonly recognized problems, which may ease tensions between stakeholders and make tackling the tougher issues easier.

Forest-linked livelihoods in a globalized world.

Forests have re-taken centre stage in global conversations about sustainability, climate and biodiversity. Here, we use a horizon scanning approach to identify five large-scale trends that are likely to have substantial medium- and long-term effects on forests and forest livelihoods: forest megadisturbances; changing rural demographics; the rise of the middle-class in low- and middle-income countries; increased availability, access and use of digital technologies; and large-scale infrastructure development. These trends represent human and environmental processes that are exceptionally large in geographical extent and magnitude, and difficult to reverse. They are creating new agricultural and urban frontiers, changing existing rural landscapes and practices, opening spaces for novel conservation priorities and facilitating an unprecedented development of monitoring and evaluation platforms that can be used by local communities, civil society organizations, governments and international donors. Understanding these larger-scale dynamics is key to support not only the critical role of forests in meeting livelihood aspirations locally, but also a range of other sustainability challenges more globally. We argue that a better understanding of these trends and the identification of levers for change requires that the research community not only continue to build on case studies that have dominated research efforts so far, but place a greater emphasis on causality and causal mechanisms, and generate a deeper understanding of how local, national and international geographical scales interact.

Forest value orientations in Australia: an application of computer content analysis.

This article explores the expression of three forest value orientations that emerged from an analysis of Australian news media discourse about the management of Australian native forests from August 1, 1997 through December 31, 2004. Computer-coded content analysis was used to measure and track the relative importance of commodity, ecological and moral/spiritual/aesthetic forest value orientations. The number of expressions of these forest value orientations followed major events in forest management and policy, with peaks corresponding to finalization of Regional Forest Agreements and conflicts over forest management. Over the time period analyzed, the relative share of commodity value orientation decreased and the shares of the ecological and moral/spiritual/aesthetic value orientations increased. The shifts in forest value orientations highlight the need for native forests to be managed for multiple values and the need for continued monitoring of forest values.