Comment on “Barriers to enhanced and integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation in Canadian forest management”

Abstract

We comment on the recent comprehensive review “Barriers to enhanced and integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation in Canadian forest management” by Williamson and Nelson (2017, Can. J. For. Res. 47: 1567–1576, doi: 10.1139/cjfr-2017-0252 ). They employ the popular barriers analysis approach and present a synthesis highlighting the numerous barriers facing Canadian forest managers. The underlying functionalist assumptions of such an approach are highly problematic from both a scholarly and a practical policy perspective. We argue that social scientists engaged in climate change research who want to influence policy-making should understand and then empirically apply causal mechanisms. Methods such as process tracing and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) are promising tools that can be employed in national- or local-level assessments.