What Promotes Natural Forest Protection and Restoration? Insights from the Perspective of Multiple Parties

Abstract

The natural forest protection and restoration (NFPR) system is imperfect due to contradictions between the objectives of natural forest protection and the reality of situations, outdated cultivation concepts, conflicting interests among participating parties, and the lack of regulation guarantees and assessment criteria. These problems are not only common in China but also in international forest protection. As the NFPR system is more focused on the protection of natural forests, the level of natural forest restoration in China has been poor, with low natural forest quality and forest productivity. At the same time, the value of natural forest ecosystem services does not match the demand of farmers, forest management, and other multiple participating parties. As a result, except for the government, other multiple parties lack the intrinsic motivation to participate in NFPR, ultimately forming a sustainable management dilemma. Under the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, the objective of this research was to explore the influencing factors and outcomes of the participation of multiple parties in NFPR and to construct a multiple parties’ participation mechanism for solving this dilemma. This research found that among external variables, multiple parties’ characteristics, biophysical conditions, attributes of community, and rules-in-use jointly influence and constitute the driving mechanism of multiple parties’ participation in NFPR. The rules-in-use directly impact the participation action scenario and regulate the other three external variables. Various factors and mechanisms in NFPR interact in the action space and produce outcomes that create positive incentives for each external variable, thus promoting the whole mechanism to achieve a virtuous cycle of sustainable management. This study provides a theoretical contribution to understanding the behavior of multiple parties participating in NFPR.