Mobilized Bias and Multistakeholder Protected-Area Planning: A Socio-Institutional Perspective on Collaboration

By examining the Kawartha Highlands Local Stakeholder Committee, this article considers how historical factors impact the efficacy of local collaborations. Tasked with developing an initial planning framework for a new protected area in Ontario, Canada, the design of this largely inefficacious process exhibited several questionable trade-offs between competing procedural objectives. However, these factors were not the sole driver behind the establishment of a second, more regionally driven process; previous planning initiatives were equally important. Ontario's larger history of land use planning contributed to the emergence of rigid discursive constructions among powerful stakeholder coalitions, whose interests were consistently accommodated through closed-door negotiations. Healey's (2006; 2007) socio-institutional approach, which frames such historical factors as part of the informal "infrastructures" of collaboration and as a form of mobilized bias, is offered as a conceptual bridge between the potential scales and units of analysis involved in the study of collaborative natural resource management.