An Analysis of Political Identity Development in State Forest Advisory Groups

Purposive stakeholder involvement in public lands management has grown in the United States in recent decades. These collaborative efforts can serve land managers by increasing available resources, fostering creativity, and augmenting public buy-in to processes and outcomes. Whereas such advantages seem to reflect the benefit of democratic norms, few studies have assessed the democratic legitimacy of collaborative natural resource planning initiatives. Additionally, although collaboration on federal lands has been studied extensively, little is documented about stakeholder engagement in state lands management. Through a comparative case study of state forest advisory groups in New York’s High Peaks Region and Oregon’s Elliott State Forest, this article assesses the democratic norm of political identity development by investigating how participants characterize their impacts. Results indicate that participants consistently influenced group processes and outcomes and changed personally through the work of deliberation. However, these impacts were mediated by inclusion and power dynamics at multiple scales. Study Implications: Collaborative forest planning initiatives may benefit land managers by increasing available resources, promoting creativity, and developing public buy-in to processes and outcomes. Such benefits depend on impactful stakeholder participation; if collaborative initiatives only empower the historically powerful, advantages may be limited. This study uses participants’ perceived impacts in forest planning efforts as a partial proxy for the quality of collaboration. We demonstrate that participant perceptions of their impacts are shaped by inclusion, influence, process structure, conversational quality, and the duration of collaborative institutions. By attending to these factors, land managers can bolster the advantages of collaborative planning efforts.