Carbon sinks science and the Kyoto Protocol: Controversy as an opportunity for paradigmatic policy shifts

This thesis anticipates a scientific controversy. It proposes that the imminent collision of the climate change policy community and the forest management policy community that lurks over the issue of 'carbon sinks'---forests with the potential to mitigate climate change through the sequestration of carbon---has the potential to trigger a challenge to the dominant policy paradigms in place in both sectors. Questions of how scientific developments influence the policy process are explored, as is the debate over whether 'interests' or 'ideas' are the dominant forces of policy change. Carbon sinks science and the Kyoto Protocol provide a case study in policy development at both the international and domestic levels. The dominant paradigm of our forest management regime---the 'liquidation-conversion' project, and the dominant paradigm of our climate change regime---'voluntary measures' and a reliance on the 'flexibility mechanisms', are both considered in the light of new developments in ecological science that decipher the carbon sequestration potentials of old-growth forests and plantations of trees. I argue in this thesis that the collision of the distinct policy communities around carbon sinks (forest management and climate change) provides an opportunity for previously excluded members of policy communities to gain access to established policy networks and challenge the dominant paradigms.