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Working Party 9.05.04 focuses on forest policy and governance in the Baltic & Central and Eastern European (CEE) region. Its goal is to consolidate the available and encourage the future research regarding actual issues related with this region.
Baltic region includes countries on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In wider sense these countries also belong to the CEE region, together with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic and Slovenia. The common denominator in this region is the unprecedented transition from authoritarian regimes to democracies and from centrally planned to market economies that has been ongoing since 1990s. Yet, each of them went its own way. Today, some of them are parts of the European Union, others not, in some of them private forest owners are stronger than in others, process of restitution is at different stages, etc., which all creates a very exciting variety. The working party "Forest policies in the Baltic and CEE region" has this variety in focus, aiming to consolidate the available knowledge as well as to promote the emerging forest policy research in the region. It focuses on questions, such as: What are the key drivers behind policy stasis versus change? What are effective paths of institutional reforms? What can the (relatively) new democracies learn from each other or from the old democracies?
STATE OF KNOWLEDGE
The current state of knowledge can be roughly grouped into:
(1) Country specific
It includes issues common for the region but having different country-specific emphasis. For example, "Was stakeholder participation in the PEFC revision process successful in Slovakia? (Palus et al, 2024), Motivations behind the forest managers' decision making about mixed forests in the Czech Republic (Janova et al., 2022), forest carbon and sustainable forest management alternatives in Ukraine (Egan et al., 2017), forest scenario modelling in Lithuania (Mozgeris et al., 2017) or strategic options for the state forests in Poland (Chudy et al., 2016).
(2) Comparative studies
* between old and new democracies (e.g. Lithuania and Sweden –Brukas et al., 2015),
* among new democracies, e.g. Compensation Payments Schemes for Ecosystem Services in Czech and Slovak Republic (Balikova et al., 2023); a critical interpretive analysis of Lithuania and Slovakia ("From command-and-control to good forest governance", Makrickiene et al., 2019); how state forest organisations in Czech and Slovak Republic (Krykorkova et al., ) or in Balkan countries (Stevanov et al., 2018) perform; regulatory framework related to private forest management in Slovenia and Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Pezdevsek-Malovrh, Avdibegovic 2021); urban forests in SEE (Krajter-Ostoic et al., 2017); forest owner associations in CEE (Sarvasova et al., 2015); etc.
(3) Overarching studies
encompassing either the whole country (e.g. A Narrative of the Lithuanian Forestry Transition - Brukas, 2015) or part of the whole region (e.g. Multiple use forestry – Hoogstra-Klein et al., 2017).
