Beyond participation! Social innovations facilitating movement from authoritative state to participatory forest governance in Ukraine

Abstract

Tuning participatory processes is often insufficient to achieve transition from authoritative state to democratic and participatory forest governance due to institutional inertia and unwillingness to truly decentralize decision-making power. Social innovations as reconfigurations of relationships between state, market actors, civil society and science can help to meet concerns of local people about forest Ecosystem Services (ES). In Ukraine, the Swiss-Ukrainian Forest Development (FORZA) pilot project initiated a social innovation process complementing regional forest planning with local participatory community development plans in Transcarpathia. This paper examines what kind of changes need to accompany the succession of participatory practices in transition processes from authoritative state to democratic forest governance, and what are the lessons learned for social innovations based on the Ukrainian case study. This paper synthesizes knowledge on the FORZA case analyzed by inductive content analysis, and integrates these local level results with a national survey (N = 244) on Ukrainian forest governance. Transition processes need to go ''beyond participation'' by (i) legal reforms to better acknowledge ES ().,-volV) ( 01234567 89().,-volV) important for local people, (ii) a change from an exclusive focus on timber to acknowledging multiple ES, (iii) changed spatial and temporal rationales of state-based governance, and (iv) recognition of local people as credible experts. Social innovations can detect key barriers to the transition during the policy experiments, and need to pay significant attention on how the novel practices can be sustained after the pilot, replicated elsewhere and up-scaled. Without such considerations, social innovation projects may only remain as a marginal curiosity.

Place Attachment and Its Consequence for Landscape-Scale Management and Readiness to Participate: Social Network Complexity in the Post-Soviet Rural Context of Latvia and Estonia

“…The socioeconomic infrastructure and knowledge base required for participation was lacking, and while this is changing there are still significant knowledge gaps in moving from authoritative state to participatory governance [23]. Top-down authoritarian decision-making-for instance in clear-felling of forests where people collected berries and mushrooms-is evidence of a lack of cooperation between the authorities and the local inhabitants requiring a bottom up social innovation to facilitate trust [23]. As Eiter and Vik [26] also explain, some people do not feel comfortable with the format of public meetings and attendance at meetings can be a problem in rural areas.…”

“…It is widely recognised that administrations need to move from government to governance [9] to improve local knowledge integration, local population empowerment, improved process legitimacy and increased trust [20,22,23]. However, countries, such as Estonia and Latvia, which are transitioning from a strong centralised system with modernist paradigms, often lack the political will, resources or skills to move to an enabling role.…”

“…However, countries, such as Estonia and Latvia, which are transitioning from a strong centralised system with modernist paradigms, often lack the political will, resources or skills to move to an enabling role. This contributes to failures in collaborative policymaking or results in ineffective policies [9,10,23].…”

“…In addition, alienated, distrustful and deprived communities often lack the confidence to participate; they also lack the political or socioeconomic infrastructure and knowledge base required to organise representative citizen groups [23][24][25]. A prerequisite for successful landscape management is the ability of the local population to be able to express their opinions and perspectives about their local landscapes [26].…”

“…A prerequisite for successful landscape management is the ability of the local population to be able to express their opinions and perspectives about their local landscapes [26]. Previous poorly implemented participatory approaches and historical tensions also raise barriers to development [9,25,27], requiring a need for flexible policies and the development of participatory tools [18,23]. The political nature of landscape, e.g., the multiple stakes, power relations and conflicts associated with it, necessitates that these aspects are made more explicit in practical landscape planning [28].…”