BC Coastal Group

By the late 1990s nearly two decades of conflict and controversy resulted in a stalemate between parties with competing interests in temperate old growth rainforests in British Columbia, Canada. In the years since, collaboration between groups traditionally at odds with each other has created a period during which all parties are able to focus on the innovation of new approaches to forest management. This paper discusses an initial framework agreement reached in 2001 regarding rainforests in seven million hectares on BC’s Central and North Mainland Coasts – an area also known as “The Great Bear Rainforest”. The agreement involved a number of different elements and will take several years to implement. Parties to the 2001 BC Coastal Framework Agreement included local indigenous peoples (First Nations), forest companies, environmental non-government organizations (ENGOs), the BC government, local communities and logging contractors and forest workers. The pathway to this interim required all the different groups involved to come to the realization that though they were each capable of wielding significant power, none was in a position to achieve what they wanted on a unilateral basis. By 1999, parties with competing interests in coastal forest issues concluded that, despite ongoing disagreements, they needed to find a way to work together to develop new approaches to reconciling tensions between conservation and development in coastal BC rainforests. This paper looks at how collaboration between dissimilar, and sometimes even adversarial interests, can be a catalyst for change as well as a strategy for problem solving in situations that have become so complex and interdependent that no individual group or organization can manage change solely through its own action. The BC coastal experience may be helpful to others involved in conflicts over forest conservation and use