Working Group 5.1

Towards sustainable forestry? Innovations for institutional adaptation in forest policy and management

Convenors:
Eeva Primmer, Finnish Environment Institute, Helsinki Eeva.Primmer@ymparisto.fi
Sabine Weiland, Catholic University Louvain, Belgium sabine.weiland@iddri.org


The recent decades have seen a general trend towards greater integration of societal concerns in natural resource management. Also forest governance has witnessed tremendous changes in Europe as well as world-wide. Demands for integration of ecological and socio-economic aspects have required institutional adaptation at various policy levels and across previously segregated actors and functions. In many countries we can discern major revisions of forest policy design and implementation. Forestry departments are moving away from a tradition of centralised, technically-driven forestry, where ‘command-and-control’ type policy has dominated. Instead of establishing and enforcing regulations, they are now providing an enabling environment for broader-based and more inclusive management of forests. The evolution of a more adaptive and pluralistic vision of their role goes along with a shift towards the broader paradigm of multi-functional landscapes. At the international level, attempts have been made to establish a global regulatory framework for forests, which have thus far led to United Nations soft law and regional criteria and indicators processes.

With the broadening of forest management objectives, forest owners and managers are urged to deal with a much broader range of social and environmental issues than in the past. Forests are now seen for their values within the landscape, for hydrology and amenity. Forests also have global value as habitats for biodiversity and as carbon storage. Society in turn is making more explicit demands for longer temporal scales and larger spatial scales to be addressed in forest planning and management. The actors involved, however, may have very different objectives and thus different accounts of sustainability. Forest owners, for example, may want to reduce costs and maximise their profits; local people want to defend rights and assets, sometimes maintenance of landscape and access to recreation, other times jobs and local infrastructure; environmental groups want to ensure long-term sustainability and promote best practice by all forest users; and governments want to apply norms and capture rents for publicly owned forests. Running through all of these evolutions are questions of governance: How can the conflicts between different actors and functions of the forests be resolved or eased? How are the different actors and levels of administration involved in forest management related? How can they be coordinated? How can sustainable forest management be attained?
The purpose of this working group is to scrutinise innovations in forest policy and management with regard to their contribution to sustainable forestry. We invite papers that address one or more of the following key questions:

1) Horizontal perspective: How are different objectives and stakes in forests brought together and integrated? What forms of networks or cooperative and participatory forest management and joint resources mobilisation of actors are emerging? What are the conditions for their success? How do these innovations challenge technology/science-driven forestry?

2) Vertical perspective: How are the different levels in forest management, from local to global, related and coordinated? How are international and national forest principles implemented at the local levels? And how do innovations at the local level feed back to the national and international levels?

3) Conceptual perspective: How can these new and emerging multi-actor and multi-level arrangements be theorized? We invite especially, but not exclusively, papers that make use of the concepts of multifunctionality, network governance, institutional adaptation or reflexive governance and discuss their analytical value to address these questions.