| Summary: | In some mountainous areas of Japan, the <i>Ki-no-Eki</i> system, in which wood is collected to thin the forest and is exchanged for community currency, has been specifically designed and implemented as a solution to current and emerging forest governance issues. This study aimed to capture the evolutionary processes of a complete communication network consisting of organizations that joined policy forums to help develop the <i>Ki-no-Eki</i> system. A total of 26 policy forums were held from 2011 to 2019 to discuss the adoption and implementation of the <i>Ki-no-Eki</i> system across Japan, and coattendance and the resultant policy discourses among 62 participating <i>Ki-no-Eki</i> organizations in these forums were regarded as dynamic communication network processes. We analyzed how policy communication networks formed and evolved to understand the underlying network dynamics driven by not only endogenous network processes—bonding and bridging social capital—but also exogenous effects defined by actors’ attributes. We employed the stochastic actor-oriented model for network dynamics to manage the collected longitudinal undirected network data. We found (i) the emergence of bonding social capital and (ii) homophilic and heterophilic connections in communication networks, which provided insightful explanations of the driving forces of social cohesion among <i>Ki-no-Eki</i> organizations engaged in forest management in Japan.
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