Stakeholders’ involvement: the participation in the development of National Forest Programmes

Abstract

The National Forest Programmes (NFPs) are policy tools that mainly aims to the Sustainable Forest Management (SFM). The sustainability of forest management is composed by several components including social ones. The social sustainability in forestry sector passes through key principles established by Intergovernmental Panel of Forests achievable thanks to participatory approaches.

Accordingly, the participatory approaches are important to define the effectiveness of NFP in the Sustainable Forest Management (SFM). In this study, a questionnaire was administered to 30 European experts involved in the COST Action ORCHESTRA - FP1207. The results show that the level of participation is quite high in all phases of the participatory processes in European countries. The decision-making processes concerning NFPs involve almost of the parties affected by forestry issues. Furthermore, the results show some strengths and weaknesses that are observable in all European participatory processes referring to NFPs. On the one hand, the participatory processes are important because they are the opportunities to involve stakeholders in cross sector processes that review forestry problems and policies. On the other hand, the participatory processes are time, cost, and effort consuming, non-representative, and participants usually have not enough skills and resources. Finally, the analysis shows that the strengths outrank the weaknesses.