First Nations and industry collaboration for forest governance in northwestern Ontario, Canada

•We develop and use a conceptual frame adapted from Kooiman's orders of governance.•We examine and map collaborative forest governance in northwest Ontario.•The Ontario tenure system enabled new types collaboration.•Further changes to the tenure system could jeopardize or enhance collaboration.

The focus of this paper is the move towards greater collaboration among First Nations and forestry companies for the governance of forests in northwestern Ontario, Canada. The economic downturn in the forest economy in Kenora, Ontario in the 2000s opened pathways for new collaborative partnerships to emerge in governance systems that include industry and local, provincial, federal and First Nations governments. In order to enhance our collective understanding of collaborative governance in the forest sector we set out to describe the institutions and institutional changes that made cross-cultural collaboration possible and explain cross-cultural collaboration in terms of meta-governance (values, norms, and principles), particularly in relation to substantive decision-making. Using a review of policy and management documents and semi-structured interviews with governance actors, we examined regional shifts in tenure, the governance system of a leading example of collaboration, and procedures, processes, and organizational structures that helped establish equal decision-making authority that facilitated collaborative relationships. We found that tenure reforms allowed for structural changes in the governance system for the Kenora Forest, these led to formal partnerships between First Nations and industry, and the new governance system involved power sharing in decision-making authority. Conclusions of the work include that future tenure reforms should continue to promote collaboration in the region, and that the case study represents a novel type of collaboration between industry and First Nations in Canada.