ABSTRACT
Collaboration occurs when individuals voluntarily work through their differences and share knowledge and resources to achieve goals that they could not achieve alone (adapted from Gray, 1989, and Daniels and Walker, 2001). Developing long-term management plans for public forests in the US is a context in which collaboration among stakeholders is essential. The issues are numerous, frequently interconnected and defy the capacity of any one entity to address holistically (Daniels and Walker, 2001). Participants come with incomplete knowledge and hold values and expectations that are not always well defined and/or conflict with one another. However, studies have shown that through an adaptive collaborative process, participants can engage in social learning about the issues and one another’s perspectives, thereby facilitating the development of shared knowledge of, and goals for, the resources in question (Daniels and Walker,1996; Blatner et al, 2003; Bouwen and Taillieu, 2004; Schusler et al, 2003).
