Chaos theory and assessment of forest stakeholder attitudes towards Australian forest policy

The Regional Forest Agreement process has dominated Australian forest policy for the past decade. The RFA process set in place a mechanism by which benchmark conservation values were established for forest ecosystems, whilst addressing the needs of the timber industry. The outcomes of a number of RFA's have been fraught with controversy. Key stakeholder groups have shown disagreement with processes and outcomes of methods employed by government both in establishing conservation reserves and areas allocated to timber harvesting. This research uses non-linear techniques to examine the dynamical behavior in stakeholder responses and to identify patterns of behavior that may lead to prediction of stakeholder responses. The method developed in this research provides a bridge between social sciences and Chaos theory.1