Contested social values in decision-making for Australian native forests

Conflicts at the level of people's deeply-held values about use of native forests present a challenge for decision-makers in countries such as Australia where there are polarised views on such matters. In this paper, social values are explored in two forestry decision-making processes with the aim of reflecting on what can be learnt for the design of future processes. The two cases are the Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) process, a top-down policy process conducted in ten Australian forest regions in the late 1990s, and the Wombat Community Forest Management (CFM), an example of place-based collaborative management developed for a Victorian state forest from 2002 to 2004. Analysis of these cases identified three areas where further attention is recommended: the design of negotiating criteria that can represent the full range of relevant social values; the choice and development of decision-making approaches suited to incorporation of public values in situations of value conflict; and issues of decentralisation in such approaches.