Policy Networks and Paradigm Change in Ontario Forest Policy 1988-2014
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation was developed from documentary research, analyses of public hearing transcripts, and a case study examining 25 years of forest policy change in Ontario from 1988 to 2014. The ideas and actions of the actors in the policy network, and the political, social, and economic structures in which they operated, are investigated using the Dialectical Model of Policy Networks. The relationships among the key policy actors are traced through significant events and legislation: the Timber Management Class Environmental Assessment (1988-1994), the Crown Forest Sustainability Act (1994), the Living Legacy-Ontario Forest Accord (1998), The Endangered Species Act (2007), the Far North Act (2010), and the Ontario Forest Tenure Modernization Act (2011.) The results of the analyses indicate that Ontario’s forest policy evolved over the study period. The policy focus was on timber supply for the forest industry in 1988. This gave way in 1994 to sustainable forest management, which also served environmental and social values. By 2007 the ecological values of forest policy began to predominate. The analyses reveal that as the ENGOs in the forest policy network gained strength, their ideas and their successful political advocacy drove ecological changes. In contrast, the network influence of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources was weakened by ongoing budget cuts and confusion about its mandate. The forest industry lost its historical power in the network due to the economic crisis and downsizing of the industry and by tactics that caused further estrangement from the government. Professional foresters lost their prominence in the network as decisions about forests became associated with political rather than technical and scientific values. Aboriginal Peoples were unable to break into the network for purposes of furthering their treaty and Aboriginal rights and to obtain economic benefits for their remote communities. Questions are raised about the persistence of the new ecological forest policy network and the acceptance of the network of further reform. The result, however, of these shifts in network dynamics is that Ontario forest policy has experienced a paradigm change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".