Including aboriginal issues in forest planning: a case study in central interior British Columbia, Canada

Generic criteria and indicator (C&I) frameworks have been the focus of recent work on sustainable forest management. These templates, however, may not be an appropriate approach for directing landscape-level forest management strategies. Instead, many argue that sustainable management should be determined using “bottom–up” approaches rather than standardized frameworks. This requires engaging local expertise in defining sustainability. Having a culturally distinct form of local knowledge, Aboriginal communities have an important role to play in decision-making processes. However, conventional participatory approaches, such as generic C&I frameworks and multi-stakeholder planning processes, are often inappropriate for engaging Aboriginal involvement. We suggest that landscape-level forest planning should highlight rather than assimilate cultural perspectives on sustainable forest management. Using the co-managed John Prince Research Forest in central interior British Columbia as a case study, this paper presents the results of using C&I and a scenario planning approach to describe an Aboriginal perspective of good forest stewardship. These results demonstrate that, in contrast with existing C&I frameworks, locally-based sustainability criteria provide better guidance for developing and adapting landscape-level forest plans.