Abstract
In the last two decades, attention on forests and ownership rights has increased in different domains of international policy, particularly in relation to achieving the global sustainable development goals. This paper looks at the changes in forest-specific legislation applicable to regular productive forests, across 28 European countries. We compare the legal framework applicable in the mid-1990s with that applicable in 2015, using the Property Rights Index in Forestry (PRIF) to measure changes across time and space. The paper shows that forest owners in most western European countries already had high decision-making power in the mid-1990s, following deregulation trends from the 1980s; and for the next two decades, distribution of rights remained largely stable. For these countries, the content and direction of changes indicate that the main pressure on forest-focused legislation comes from environmental discourses (e.g. biodiversity and climate change policies). In contrast, former socialist countries in the mid-1990s gave lower decision-making powers to forest owners than in any of the Western Europe countries; over the next 20 years these show remarkable changes in management, exclusion and withdrawal rights. As a result of these changes, there is no longer a clear line between western and former socialist countries with respect to the national governance systems used to address private forest ownership. Nevertheless, with the exception of Baltic countries which have moved towards the western forest governance system, most of the former socialist countries still maintain a state-centred approach in private forest management. Overall, most of the changes we identified in the last two decades across Europe were recorded in the categories of management rights and exclusion rights. These changes reflect the general trend in European forest policies to expand and reinforce the landowners’ individual rights, while preserving minimal rights for other categories of forest users; and to promote the use of financial instruments when targeting policy goals related to the environmental discourse.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, the emerging political agendas of biodiversity conservation, climate change and bio-economy has increased political attention on sustainable forest management (Winkel, 2017)
Our analysis shows a marked distinction in the mid-1990s, between the forest governance approaches applied in western Europe, and countries from the former socialist bloc
We have shown that the degree to which changes occurred in property rights between the two time periods depends on the degree of restrictions existing in the mid-1990s: the higher the Property Rights Index in Forestry (PRIF) value was in the mid-1990s, the more stable property rights were at the end of the two decades
Summary
Over the last two decades, the emerging political agendas of biodiversity conservation, climate change and bio-economy has increased political attention on sustainable forest management (Winkel, 2017). A complex system of political, social and scientific interactions from inside and outside of the forest sector is increasingly influencing forest policies (Klapwijk et al, 2018). This is reflected in country specific governance frameworks, with different combinations of mandatory or voluntary, public or private policy instruments (Nichiforel and Hujala, 2019; Pülzl et al, 2013). The “de jure” property rights are guaranteed and implemented by the state They are reflected in national or regional regulatory frameworks defining what a forest owner may or may not do in relation to her/his forest. In the European context, the forest-focused regulations impacting on the de jure distribution of PFOs rights include forest codes, forest acts, forest-related acts, technical prescriptions, and operational guidelines (Pülzl et al, 2013)
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