What is equitable urban forest governance? A systematic literature review

Abstract

Urban forest governance comprises the formal and informal rules, institutions, and processes that influence collective decision-making in urban forest management. As such, it shapes key processes and outcomes that are implicated in urban environmental justice, including whose priorities and values are reflected in urban forest management and how and where urban trees are distributed. Despite its central role in determining urban forest processes and outcomes, equitable urban forest governance remains an underexplored topic. To fill this gap, we conducted a literature review to identify how equitable urban forest governance is conceptualized and evaluated in the literature, and to determine what gaps in knowledge remain. Our review found that while distributional justice was the prevalent framing in the urban forest governance literature, recommendations for collaborative governance approaches reflect a shift towards procedural and recognitional justice. Most studies, however, used a top-down approach to evaluate policy outcomes and few incorporated community experiences or involvement within governance processes, leaving the roles and experiences of community actors underexplored. Our findings suggest that urban forestry has so far failed to integrate procedural and recognitional justice into governance arrangements and practices, despite decades of scholarship and activism focused on these dimensions. This highlights a critical need to more clearly incorporate procedural and recognitional justice themes and approaches into future urban forest governance research and practice.