Top-Down vs. Bottom Up: Working Towards Consensus ... - CASIOPA

TOP-DOWN VS. BOTTOM UP? WORKING TOWARDS CONSENSUSON SYSTEMATIC PROTECTED AREAS PLANNING IN ONTARIORiver. This may reflect participants‟ awareness of the Northern Boreal Initiative (NBI) that wasunderway in Ontario at the time of the workshop. The NBI has drawn a great deal of political andresearch attention to land use planning north of the “Area of Undertaking” 1 (approximately the 51 stparallel). The northern bias may also reflect an implicit understanding amongst workshop participantsthat it will be more feasible to establish protected areas in northern Ontario on public land than insouthern Ontario on private land (which has also been subject to a higher degree of anthropogenicchange). It may also be due to the fact that three of the presentations (Kingston and Boan, Iacobelli andAnderson, and Crins and Davis) emphasized planning in northern Ontario.Keeping with the spirit of the workshop, to focus on “research on research”, the various rationale forselecting particular sites was inferred from the summaries supplied by the groups, and compared againstthe augmented “Pressey Steps” developed during day 1 (Table 3). Of course, real-world planning mayinvolve several years of discussion and research to select a single area. Given that the breakout exercisesasked participants to “plan” ten sites in the space of an hour or so, with no extraneous data other than theknowledge that participants brought to the table, it is not surprising that not all of the “Pressey Steps”(especially Steps 7 to 9) were explicitly addressed in the site selection process. Still, a number of siteswere selected where few or none of the “Pressey Steps” were explicitly addressed, particularly thosesteps and directives that had been the focus of quite a bit of discussion on day 1.Two groups considered scoping and costing (and then for only five sites in total), the very first stepidentified by Pressey. The bias toward identification of potential sites in northern Ontario on Crown landmay have suggested implicitly some a priori scoping and costing with respect to political feasibilitywhen compared to southern Ontario; however this was rarely explicitly stated in the rationale forindividual sites. Again, time limitations may have precluded thorough documentation of rationale foreach site selection.One group mentioned stakeholders (Step 2) that could be involved in (and presumably facilitate) theestablishment of five sites. This might reflect the artificial nature of the mock planning exercise in thatparticipants may not have relationships with potential stakeholders in the relevant regions of Ontario, ormay not have felt comfortable speaking for existing partners/stakeholders in the breakout sessions.Very few of the rationales for individual sites made mention of how the site addressed a specific goal(Step 3), and only one group included discussion of the data that existed and/or would need to becompiled to verify the majority of their proposed sites (Step 4). The latter is somewhat surprising giventhe vast amount of Ontario-based knowledge about protected areas that was present at each table.However, participants may have assumed that everyone knew what data exist, and what data are needed,and not had sufficient time to provide detailed information on data needs in the space allowed for theexercise. While the mock-planning exercise did not provide participants with information about existingdata sources, we expected that those at the table would collectively have good knowledge of the dataavailable. Although everyone in the room had been exposed to a sample of the data available via theOntario-based case studies, no group mentioned potential limitations of the data used for any of the casestudies (even though some used the mapped results of the case studies as part of their rationale for siteselection).1 The “Area of Undertaking” refers to the area covered by the Class Environmental Assessment for Timber Management.8 | P a g e