The eight contributions in this special issue have been elicited from the First IUFRO All-Division-9-Conference, held in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina, during 8-11 May 2012. The special issue subscribes to the tradition of assessing forest governance within the scientific realm. Further, the papers...

With the book publication "Forest and Nature Governance - A practice based approach" (Arts et al., 2013, Eds.) the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group of Wageningen University, The Netherlands demonstrates its high aspirations of developing a new research approach. This article aims at...

Community forestry has been described as a decentralised mode of forest governance that only partly lives up to its expectations. The power of important actors to misuse the community forestry approach for their self-interests has been reported as a major obstacle to comprehensive success. Hence,...

The methodologies and operational instruments for the assessment of forest governance are still under development. While there are some advanced initiatives focused on forest governance assessment at international/national scale, there are relatively few at local level. However, assessments of...

'Forest governance' refers to new modes of regulation in the forest sector, such as decentralized, community-based and market-oriented policy instruments and management approaches. Its main theoretical basis consists of two mainstream models: rational choice and neo-institutionalism. Since these...

This special issue contains 18 papers divided into two sections: (i) analysis of the role of discourse in forest and environmental governance; and (ii) role of expertise in governance processes. Each section starts with an article reviewing the current state of the art in the respective field of...

This special issue contains papers focusing on or strongly relate to policy and institutional issues in the field of climate mitigation and adaptation of forests and forest management.

This paper aims to assess the emergence of the concept of forest governance in the field of forest policy analysis. This assessment is mainly theoretical in nature. The various meanings and main criticisms of forest governance will be dealt with. In so doing, the paper applies the so-called 'Triple ...

There is much talk about the need for stakeholder participation and inter-sectoral coordination in forest policy and management. But there is limited understanding about forest agencies' role in the adoption of new governance modes and their contribution to policy delivery. By drawing on a...

Leaving the centralized and trying to embrace the market economy, the forestry sector of the country has been brought to a challenge of moving from government to the new trend of governance. The paper examines whether governance principles of participation, accountability and transparency are...