Challenges in the design of performance-based forestry regulations: Lessons from British Columbia

Advocates of regulatory reform have argued for performance-based regulation that focuses on the objectives being pursued rather than the means or process by which they are achieved. The great promise of performance-based approaches is that they are believed to provide a more cost-effective approach to achieving desired objectives. This article examines the challenges in designing performance-based regulatory approaches in forestry by analyzing the case of regulatory reform in British Columbia, Canada, in the 2000s. A key barrier to achieving a more performance-based regime includes the inherent challenge of identifying measurable objectives when the underlying causal mechanisms between forestry and environmental values are so poorly understood. The distinguishing feature of the new framework in British Columbia is not that it is performance-based, but that it provides greater flexibility to foresters in achieving policy goals through management planning. The design challenge is to find performance standards specific enough to be meaningful and enforceable but not so specific that they eliminate the very flexibility in means that performance-based regulation is trying to promote. In forestry in British Columbia, this challenge has proven sufficiently daunting that its new system of forest practices has proven to be far less performance-based than initially envisioned.