“Two-Row” cross-cultural learning for collaborative governance of forestland in northwestern Ontario, Canada

This paper investigates learning occurring through cross-cultural collaboration and how learning processes and outcomes of such learning affect the governance of regional lands and resources in the context of a First Nation-industry partnership in northwestern Ontario, Canada. We use transformative learning theory as a basis for critically analyzing individual, social, and structural changes. Transformative theory has been found to be suitable for working with natural resource problems and has evolved over time to include ways for accounting for different cultural frames of reference. We attempted a decolonizing approach in our research methodology hoping to understand learning events and outcomes as expressed by the research participants according to their own worldviews. Thirty-six participants involved in the First Nation-industry partnership were engaged in semi-structured interviews. Our results reveal different events that catalyzed both transformative and culturally framed learning outcomes for participants, such as much deeper appreciation for cultural practices and shared understanding of provincial forest policies. Four types of events were identified as catalysts for such learning outcomes: (i) time spent on the land; (ii) social meetings; (iii) ceremony, and (iv) formal meetings. Each type of learning event corresponded with different learning outcomes that arose from being involved in the partnership. Drawing from the literature on transformative and Indigenous learning, our study resulted in a synthetic “two-row” frame for cross-cultural learning and demonstrates that this learning was important for building cross-cultural collaborations for resource use.