Incorporating stakeholder values into regional forest planning: a value function approach

Forest management involves multiple objectives, multiple stakeholders, complex socio-ecological and political interactions. Public involvement in forest decision making is a challenging task that involves controversies. Various participatory tools such as public consultation forums, public comment processes, opinion polls are used to consult and to obtain inputs from communities. All these methods can provide useful information but they fail to quantify the trade-offs systematically and offer little help in minimizing conflicts. The Australian Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) program was implemented in response to the decades of conflicts and debate between various stakeholder groups and government over the use and management of forest resources. So far, it has not been able to minimize conflicts in the forestry sector, partly due to its poor incorporation and integration of stakeholder values. This paper uses the value functions approach in modelling stakeholder values in regional forest planning. The results of the study indicate that this method can help to incorporate value preferences effectively into the decision making process. It can also increase the transparency and credibility of the forest planning exercises such as RFA process. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.