Case Study: The Great Bear Rainforest Story
Ola Tjornbo, Frances Westley, Darcy Riddell
January, 2010
The Great Bear Rainforest Story
Introduction to the Case Study
The Great Bear Rainforest campaign has made a huge impact on the province of British Columbia in the last twenty years. It is a process that is still ongoing, but which must now be acknowledged to have enjoyed huge success. Radical shifts have taken place throughout the social, ecological and economic systems of the area, empowering new groups of actors, creating new decision making processes, allowing for the emergence of new approaches in resource management, and bringing significant new sources of funding to the area. As such, it is a noteworthy example of social innovation and shows us how social innovation can provide a means for tackling the highly complex and critical problems societies are increasingly coming to face around the globe.
Understanding how the actors involved in this shift were able to bring about this change is a vital task in helping the academic community to develop knowledge, and ultimately tools that may help many more such complex navigations to occur in the future. It is no trivial challenge. Social innovation on this scale is a highly intricate process that involved delicacies of timing, interacting forces, agency, invention and dedication by a whole host of dynamic and evolving components which is difficult to understand and impossible to replicate. However, in all of this, there are patterns in types of behavior and situations that can be discerned. It is these patterns that this description attempts to seek out, in the hopes that they may provide clues to the ‘how’ of social innovation, a task that lies at the heart of developing responses to complex global problems.
The information in this case study is largely based on a series of interviews carried out with key participants in the Great Bear Rainforest campaign, in the spring of 2008 and the summer of 2009. Names have been hidden to preserve the anonymity of interview subjects but transcripts are available upon request.