Forestry governance is never simply a question of more regulation or less regulation. States and provinces can impose different constraints on public land, private land, Crown land, harvest size, regeneration, planning, reporting, professional credentials, and the way people participate in markets. From a distance, one jurisdiction can look restrictive and another can look loose, but the moment a forester starts asking where they are standing, who owns the trees, how large the harvest is, what market the wood is entering, and what the local public understands good forestry to look like, the comparison gets less tidy in a hurry.

That is probably the basic premise I keep circling around here. Every state or province has different mandates, reporting requirements, professional norms, and policy traditions, and all of those have been formed by years of political pushing and pulling. They have also been formed by the different masters that foresters have had to answer to. Agencies, landowners, mills, certification bodies, municipalities, markets, Indigenous governments, local publics, and professional organizations can all shape the space where forestry happens. Over time, those pressures create different outcomes across the landscape.

Political science gives us a little language for this, although the lived reality is usually more practical than theoretical. Multi-level governance describes the way authority moves across national, provincial, state, local, and sometimes non-governmental levels (Hooghe and Marks 2003). Polycentric governance describes systems where multiple actors at different scales make decisions, experiment, adapt, and sometimes conflict with one another (Ostrom 2010). Policy design scholars also talk about policy instruments: rules, incentives, reporting systems, standards, penalties, planning requirements, and voluntary programs that work together in particular contexts (Howlett 2009). I like that framing for forestry because the daily reality of governance is often a stack of obligations, permissions, habits, expectations, and workarounds.

I think about Ontario here because it gives such a clear example of a layered system. In parts of Ontario, there are county or municipal rules that can shape what happens on private lands, province-wide professional structures, forestry marking certification programs, and substantial requirements for reporting and planning. Ontario’s tree-marking program, which I wrote about earlier in this series, is a good example of incrementalism in professional oversight: a targeted credential for a specific task, rather than a single all-encompassing license for every part of forestry practice. A person can be trained and certified to do a particular piece of work within a particular institutional setting because the policy landscape has decided that task deserves its own standard.

Then you can hop the border into Michigan and the policy texture changes quickly. Michigan still has forestry programs, public agencies, professional foresters, management expectations, and its own systems for private-land incentives. The same province-wide structure of professional marking certification does not simply carry across the line. There are different mechanisms, different incentives, and different assumptions about how to guide practice. Michigan’s Qualified Forest Program, for example, creates standards around private-land tax incentives and management plans without recreating Ontario’s credentialing architecture. That difference does not mean one place cares about forests and another does not. It means the systems have developed different ways of steering behavior.

Maine complicates the story in another direction. It is easy to think of Canadian provinces as the more heavily governed comparison, especially when talking about Crown land, long-term forest management plans, and provincial oversight. Yet Maine has a very specific clearcutting framework that applies across state, local, nonprofit, and private forest lands. Chapter 20 of Maine’s Forest Practices Act rules says that, in general, if timber harvesting creates a clearcut larger than five acres, separation zones and regeneration standards come into play. Category 1 clearcuts are larger than five acres and up to 20 acres, while Category 2 and Category 3 clearcuts begin above 20 acres and require site-specific harvest plans signed by a licensed forester (Maine Forest Service 2014). That kind of threshold feels small when compared to the scale of industrial forestry in other places. It is also a good reminder that private-land governance in the United States can become very specific once a state has decided that a certain kind of harvest needs a particular review, standard, or follow-up.

The larger Canada-U.S. contrast sits underneath all of this. Canada just having so much Crown land is a stark difference when compared to an American context where much of the northern hardwood forest is held in private land ownership, with smaller sets of national forests, state forests, county forests, conservation lands, and other public lands mixed in. Natural Resources Canada reports that about 94 percent of Canadian forest land is publicly owned, with provinces and territories owning about 90 percent of the national forest land base (Natural Resources Canada 2020). On those public lands, provinces and territories can set licences, timber supply agreements, forest management plans, monitoring systems, reporting requirements, royalties, and regeneration obligations. The public owner has a long reach, and the forester or company operating on that land is often working inside layers upon layers of governance.

In much of the American northern hardwood context, the policy question starts from a different ownership pattern. A state, county, municipality, tax program, voluntary certification program, or professional norm may be trying to influence thousands of private decisions made by landowners, consulting foresters, loggers, mills, and local communities. The scale of governance is still real, but the levers are different. Instead of asking how a province governs a massive Crown land base through tenures and forest management plans, the question may become how a state shapes private decisions through forest-practice rules, tax incentives, professional licensure, landowner education, extension programs, or market expectations.

This is where importing policies from one place to another can get dangerous. It can ignore climatic, ecological, historical, and local sensitivity issues that matter very much for successful management of the forest resource. A policy might not fit with what the local population understands good forestry to look like. To adapt a model of a highly industrialized area to a highly public and densely populated area may simply not work, and in some cases it simply cannot work. It can also burden foresters with the need to explain why a policy does or does not fit, especially when the policy arrives without the incremental level of local input that would make it legible.

The best forest policy imaginable is probably created through incrementalism, local input, and support. I do not mean that every local system is good. Every system might be imperfect. Some are too fragmented, some are too rigid, some rely too heavily on voluntary compliance, some create barriers to entry, some fail to guide markets in a way that rewards good work, and some ask foresters to answer to a confusing collection of overlapping authorities. Through those imperfections, comparison can still improve all systems in the end. When we compare outcomes and the systems that helped create those outcomes, we can start to see what policies enable good forestry and good forest practice, and what policies get in the way.

That is one of the tensions inside the Northern Hardwoods Resilience Study. The project looks across a forest resource that does not stop at political boundaries. Sugar maple, beech, yellow birch, hemlock, red maple, basswood, and associated species do not care very much whether they are in a state, a province, a county, or a municipality. The people managing those forests absolutely operate within those boundaries. A forester in Ontario, Maine, Michigan, New Brunswick, Vermont, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, or Massachusetts is working inside a different policy landscape, a different market, a different ownership pattern, and a different local culture of what good forestry is supposed to be.

That makes the project exciting, and it also creates a built-in limitation. The Northern Hardwoods Resilience Study is primarily a study of management and practice across the northern hardwood resource. As this part of the project works on analyzing the state of management and the state of practice in northern hardwoods, we are trying to capture differentiation in what actually happens on the ground. Policy can be a huge part of that process. It can shape what gets marked, what gets harvested, what gets regenerated, what gets reported, what gets certified, what gets funded, and what gets avoided.

At the same time, the study cannot differentiate every single practice or every single policy landscape. Depending on how one counts them, the northern hardwood region crosses around a dozen or more states and several provinces, and those broad political units contain counties, municipalities, watersheds, public forests, private woodlots, industrial ownerships, conservation lands, agricultural landscapes, and transition zones. Southwestern Ontario has agriculturally dominated landscapes and Carolinian forest influences. Northern Maine has industrially dominated landscapes. Other parts of the range move through Allegheny hardwoods, boreal softwoods, mixed pine components, and all kinds of transitional forests. There are very few places that are purely and solely northern hardwood forest without some mosaic of other forest types and land uses around them.

That is why local knowledge deserves some defense here. A forester who has worked in an area for a long time may understand things that never show up cleanly in a regional comparison. They may know which local policies actually matter, which rules exist mostly on paper, which mills are shaping decisions, which landowners need more explanation, which regeneration problems are recurring, which county ordinances have teeth, and which practices are technically allowed but socially impossible. Knowing each individual landscape might take a lifetime’s worth of effort to understand.

There is no single resource that can really point you to how to be a forester across such a diverse landscape as we find with the northern hardwoods. A silviculture manual can describe treatments. A policy document can describe requirements. A certification program can describe standards. A research project can compare outcomes. The actual practice of forestry happens in the overlap between ecology, markets, ownership, law, professional judgment, and local trust.

So the point of comparison should not be to flatten all of that into a universal truth. If the Northern Hardwoods Resilience Study finds that certain practices or policy environments are associated with better outcomes, then by all means, those findings can become part of the process of advocating through scientific finding for what would benefit the resource. The better goal is to highlight positive scenarios that exist, along with scenarios that could use improvement. Those are two good frameworks to operate within.

The strongest comparisons will probably be the ones that keep their humility. They will recognize that a governance system can be strict in one place and flexible in another, even within the same jurisdiction. They will recognize that public land, private land, Crown land, small woodlots, and industrial ownerships all create different policy problems. They will recognize that local people have their own sense of what good forestry looks like, and that a policy with no local legitimacy may struggle no matter how elegant it looks on paper.

Forestry across the northern hardwood region is a study in ecological variation, but it is also a study in political variation. The forest changes across the landscape, and so do the rules, markets, customs, and expectations that shape how people work in it. Comparing those systems carefully may be one of the ways we learn how to make them better. There shall be no universal manual for northern hardwood governance, but there can still be better ways to learn from one another.

Works Cited

Hooghe, Liesbet, and Gary Marks. 2003. “Unraveling the Central State, but How? Types of Multi-Level Governance.” American Political Science Review 97(2): 233-243. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055403000649

Howlett, Michael. 2009. “Governance Modes, Policy Regimes and Operational Plans: A Multi-Level Nested Model of Policy Instrument Choice and Policy Design.” Policy Sciences 42: 73-89. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-009-9079-1

Maine Forest Service. 2014. “Chapter 20: Forest Regeneration and Clearcutting Standards.” Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry. https://www.maine.gov/dacf/mfs/publications/rules_and_regs/chap_20_rules_05012014.pdf

Natural Resources Canada. 2020. “Forest Land Ownership.” Government of Canada. https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/forests/sustainable-forest-management/forest-land-ownership/17495

Natural Resources Canada. 2024. “Canada’s Forest Laws.” Government of Canada. https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/forests/sustainable-forest-management/canadas-forest-laws/17497

Ostrom, Elinor. 2010. “Polycentric Systems for Coping with Collective Action and Global Environmental Change.” Global Environmental Change 20(4): 550-557. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.07.004