Sustainable Forest Management from Policy to Landscape, and Back Again: A Case Study in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains

Abstract

AbstractTo implement sustainable forest management (SFM) policies in actual landscapes, policy actors and managers exercising governance, and different forest stakeholders need to be provided with empirical information of how different SFM dimensions are understood and develop locally. Focusing on the state and trends of SFM implementation in the Ukrainian Carpathians we analyze the barriers and bridges at multiple levels from the national to the local management unit. First, we review the national Ukrainian policies relevant for forest and woodland landscapes, and describe how the involved stakeholders implement policies top–down. Using the Skole district in the Carpathian Mountains as a case study, we then describe the status of SFM dimensions, and evaluate the implementation process bottom–up. Interviews and analyses of official statistics show that three types of gaps need to be bridged: (1) a policy creation gap between the local level situation and ecological, economic and socio–cultural needs at the national and regional levels; (2) a policy implementation gap between the official definition of SFM, and how its different criteria and objectives are understood by forest stakeholders; (3) a knowledge gap between the need of a holistic transdisciplinary approach for SFM implementation, and the present sectoral approach to governance of forest landscapes and disciplinary research. Ways of bridging these gaps are capacity building, introducing arenas for collaboration, and applying a zoning approach at multiple scales to satisfy economic, ecological and socio–cultural dimension of SFM.KeywordsForest ManagementForest ResourceForest PolicySustainable Forest ManagementCarpathian MountainThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.