ABSTRACT
Engagement of new actors in policy processes and markets has created new expectations, new accountability demands and new learning challenges. Lack of scientific, organizational, fiscal, and political resources to meet, deflect or integrate competing demands for resource access has served to destabilize traditional institutional arrangements. Convening sets of actors for example, community representatives, scientists, non-governmental organization (NGO) representatives, and public officials and empowering or charging them with development of a resource management plan has the potential to yield both a democratic surplus and an innovation dividend. Such governance arrangement presents an opportunity to bring a broad range of actors into the policy and management process, to enhance public access to information and to activate political processes that, in aggregate, produce accountability. In recent decades, within the North-eastern United States (US), large amounts of land owned by timber and paper companies has been sold off due to changing markets and tax incentives.
