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Abstract
Governance of multiple use forests is complex and often involves contention among actors with diverging interests, values, and relationships with the landscape. Collaborative and participatory approaches to environmental governance are called upon in the face of such contention and complexity. The lure of collaboration comes in part from its many promises – it can bring in more voices for equitable decision making, bring together diverse perspectives and knowledge to better account for complexity, manage or even transform conflict, and to fill gaps created through neoliberal policies that have decreased the capacity of management agencies. However, collaborative environmental governance is difficult to implement in practice, at times beset by ongoing contention, critiqued as ineffective, or captured by powerful actors for their own ends. In this dissertation, I seek to expand knowledge of collaborative governance and its challenges and tradeoffs through three lines of questioning: how do individuals define and enact collaborative governance, how do individuals forge collaborations amid contention, and what drives intractable conflict amid collaboration. I find that collaboration is fundamentally multiple and individuals may define what collaboration is and ought to do using differing interpretations of collaborative ideals with fundamental tradeoffs among them. These various interpretations of collaboration further have substantive implications for governance, and I argue that the work of forging collaboration must be analyzed in terms of the underlying assumptions and discourses that drive specific, situated collaborative efforts. Finally, I find that even when individuals’ visions for future landscapes overlap, there remains potential for tensions in the form of entangled social and ecological uncertainties that defy technical solutions, such as adaptive management.