Project Details

Guided by 3 workshops with designated themes and planned outputs, our project will focus on:

1. Defining social sustainability in the context of natural resource management;
2. Developing innovative measures for social sustainability; and
3. Interpreting the implications of these definitions and measures for resource managers.

The workshops will involve researchers and resource managers from partner and other agencies, to help ensure that our research is relevant, and that we convey our results in ways that resource managers find useful and understandable.

We plan to examine 3 aspects of social sustainability, mainly (but not exclusively) at the community level:

1. Governance (rights, responsibilities, decision-making, tenure, equity, and management authority);
2. Social structure and values (public perceptions, opinions of resource management (satisfaction, dissatisfaction, levels of knowledge, interest, etc.), and the ways in which forest values are distributed, communicated, and formulated); and
3. Adaptation and resilience (the ability to adapt positively to change).

Results from our research will be made available through: (1) synthesis reports that summarize and translate findings from the social science literature into usable information for resource managers; (2) conceptual pieces that deal with the fundamental definition of social sustainability, and that may suggest new ways to approach the concept; and (3) empirically-based work that tries to demonstrate new tools and approaches to measure social sustainability.