Forests are being increasingly studied within the framework of social sciences, especially in relation to environmental problems and global climate change. This article deals with the perception of Czech forests and their management at two basic levels: at the level of sociological analysis of in-depth interviews with experts in the field of forestry and at the level of public opinion research. The main aim of this study was to describe the attitudes of professionals and the general public towards forests and forestry, especially with regard to climate change. Qualitative analysis of interviews with professionals discerned two main categories of opinion: ecological realism and social constructionism. The results of the study show that the Czech public, in agreement with ecological realists, considers it highly important to preserve and support the non-productive environmental functions of forests. The public also prefers close-to-nature forest management practices. Czech Republic is witnessing a fundamental shift in the mindset about forests. Although the public still expects forests to retain their production function, it perceives their environmental functions as increasingly important.

This article deals with the factors influencing the degree of trust in political institutions at three levels of government in the Czech Republic (national, regional and local) in two dissimilar regions in the time of economic crisis in 2009, the year when citizens of the Czech Republic experienced the negative impacts of growing unemployment and a substantial decline in real GDP. Two competitive theories - the cultural and the performance explanation - were used as a theoretical framework. The results show that there are significant differences among particular levels of government as well as regions. The influence of both institutional performance, including factors related to economic crisis, and cultural background were found. The influence of contextual factors was also confirmed.

No abstract

This article sets out to identify the factors that can help explain trust in selected political institutions in the Czech Republic-the Government, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, regional assemblies, and municipal assemblies-and determine what kind of infl uence certain factors have on the overall level of trust in the population. The lifetime learning model devised by the American sociologists Mishler and Rose, who combine cultural and institutional approaches to explain trust in institutions, was used as the theoretical framework for this investigation. Logistic regression models were created for each of the observed institutions. The data used to build the models were drawn from a series of surveys conducted under the 'Czech Society' project by the Public Opinion Research Centre at the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences. The results of the logistic regression analyses showed that the particular level of trust in an institutions is infl uenced more by institutional performance (and this infl uence most pronounced in the case of the Government and the Chamber of Deputies) than by the effect of socialisation within the predominant political culture, which was not very strong. Nevertheless, the effect of culturally dependent variables such as gender and religious confession is not negligible.

The aim of the article is to describe the relations between institutions in the public, private and non-profi t sectors that are considered the most important actors of negotiation and decision-making in local development. These institutions and the relations between them are defi ned as a social network. A study was carried out in the small Czech towns of Blatná, Český Krumlov and Velké Meziříčí, and data were collected in 2007 and 2008. The fi rst part of the article describes the institutional actors, the collection of the relational data, and the context of the three towns that were studied. The analytical part consists of social network analysis. Basic quantitative characteristics are used to describe and compare the social networks of the institutional actors in the local development of the three towns. The conclusions indicate the unconditional signifi cance of local public administration institutions and the signifi cance of other local institutions; relations to extra-local institutions are rather weak. A section on methodology at the end of the article contains methodological notes on Hellinger divergence and SNA.