We comment on the recent comprehensive review “Barriers to enhanced and integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation in Canadian forest management” by Williamson and Nelson (2017, Can. J. For. Res.47: 1567–1576, doi:10.1139/cjfr-2017-0252). They employ the popular barriers analysis approach and present a synthesis highlighting the numerous barriers facing Canadian forest managers. The underlying functionalist assumptions of such an approach are highly problematic from both a scholarly and a practical policy perspective. We argue that social scientists engaged in climate change research who want to influence policy-making should understand and then empirically apply causal mechanisms. Methods such as process tracing and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) are promising tools that can be employed in national- or local-level assessments.