Shifting Mandates and Climate Change Policy Capacity: The Forestry Case

Abstract

The original hypothesis is that forests will be a policy subsector in which the challenges of climate change adaptation lead to broader policy mandates but that the declining role of the industry in the Canadian economy will cause departmental resources to be stable or decreasing. The result will be ineffective policy capacity, leading to adaptation policies that are poorly designed, incomplete or missing altogether. This paper provides some evidence to support this hypothesis, though the situation is complicated by the dominant role played by the provinces in both ownership and jurisdiction. While the leading federal department, Natural Resources Canada, has shed other mandates to focus on climate change, provincial agencies are already caught between the added costs of addressing climate change impacts, notably wildfire, and the need to plan for and implement long term adaptive policies with stable or declining resources. Much will depend on coordination between First Nations, the provinces and the federal government in a policy subsector with a history of conflict between the different orders of government.