Social learning by whom? Assessing gendered opportunities for participation and social learning in collaborative forest governance

Collaborative forest governance enables forest-based communities access to and management responsibilities for forestry resources. Researchers argue that processes that enable social learning have the potential to contribute to the sustainable management of forests by engaging local people, helping them identify their collective needs and gain access to resource entitlements, and encouraging them to learn about and implement different management options. Although there is considerable attention to gender in the literature on collaborative forestry, particularly in developing countries, there is relatively little attention to gender in the social learning literature. Furthermore, there is almost no attention to these issues in postindustrial countries. Our purpose was to better understand how gender affects social learning and collaborative forest governance in forest-based communities in Canada and Uganda. Results showed that most participants in both countries started engaging in collaborative forest governance with limited knowledge and learned as they participated in various activities. However, we found that social learning opportunities and outcomes were affected by gender; in addition, they were also affected by the values that people held, education, and literacy. We suggest that practitioners should consider gender and other axes of difference if they want to design collaborative forest governance initiatives that are both participatory and inclusive.