Overcoming the ‘Barriers’ Orthodoxy: A New Approach to Understanding Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Governance Challenges in the Canadian Forest Sector

We respond to Williamson and Nelson (2017) recent comprehensive review, â Barriers to enhanced and integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation in Canadian forest managementâ (47: 1567â 1576). They employ the popular barriers analysis approach and present a synthesis highlighting the numerous barriers facing Canadian forest managers. The underlying functionalist assumptions of such an approach are highly problematic from both a scholarly and a practical policy perspective. We argue that social scientists engaged in climate change research who want to influence policy-making should understand and then empirically apply causal mechanisms. Methods such as process tracing and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) are promising tools that can be employed in national level assessments or at the local-level.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author