The coalitional politics of the European Union’s environmental forest policy: Biodiversity conservation, timber legality, and climate protection

Abstract

European forest policymaking is shaped by progressing European integration, yet with notable ideological divisions and diverging interests among countries. This paper focuses on the coalitional politics of key environmental forest issues: biodiversity conservation, timber legality, and climate protection policy. Combining the Advocacy Coalition Framework and the Shifting Coalition Theory, and informed by more than 186 key informant interviews and 73 policy documents spanning a 20-year timeframe, we examine the evolution of coalitional forest politics in Europe. We find that the basic line-up has remained stable: an environmental coalition supporting EU environmental forest policy integration and a forest sector coalition mostly opposing it. Still, strategic alliances across these coalitions have occurred for specific policy issues which have resulted in a gradual establishment of an EU environmental forest policy. We conclude with discussion of our findings and provide suggestions for further research.

Forest environmental frontiers around the globe: Old patterns and new trends in forest governance

“…First, the traditional forest frontier characterized by deforestation, forest degradation, and land use change related to agricultural expansion (but also to urban development, as for instance discussed in Kanowski and Edwards (2021)) is still important and dominates forest environmental policy conflicts especially in the tropics (Pokorny et al 2021;Brockhaus et al 2021;Ramcilovic-Suominen et al 2021). This frontier is connected to a reverse land use change frontier-the restoration frontierthat is increasingly global by nature (DeJong et al 2021;Schultz et al 2021;Sotirov et al 2021).…”

“…Second, another key forest environmental frontier of global nature is characterized by the clashing world views and policy paradigms of nature/biodiversity conservation and forest use actors (Dobrynin et al 2021;Kanowski and Edwards 2021;Pokorny et al 2021;Sotirov et al 2021;Schultz et al 2021). Specifically, controversies between environmental/conservation and forest use (and in some regions broader land use) policy actors are characterizing the forest environmental frontier in many, if not all, world regions and are the dominant conflict pattern in several of them.…”

“…Fourth, climate change (adaptation and mitigation) and its increasing impact on forests across the planet results in an increasingly significant forest frontier that is characterized by the physical impact of a warmer climate (mostly by means of larger, more intense and more frequent disturbances), as well as by the often deeply ideologically rooted conflicts of how to deal with such shifting environmental patterns (Brockhaus et al 2021;Ramcilovic-Suominen et al 2021;Seijger et al 2021;Schulz et al 2021;Sotirov et al 2021;Takahashi et al 2021).…”

“…When the forest area reaches a context-dependent minimum, and re-afforestation begins to occur, the nature of the forest environmental frontier changes slowly, but still conflicts related to land use rights and livelihoods remain critical (De Jong et al 2021). The increasing share of managed forests in the restored forest landscape with usually more affluent societies and higher population densities is then connected to the dominance of the conservation versus forest use frontier, which is the central pattern along forest environmental frontiers in most industrialized countries and regions in the Global North (Australia, Europe, Japan, USA), including in large countries such as Russia (Kanowski and Edwards 2021;Sotirov et al 2021;Takahashi et al 2021;Schultz et al 2021;Dobrynin et al 2021).…”

“…This EU forest policy debate, and the evolution of EU forest environmental policy over time, is the topic of the next paper by Sotirov et al (2021). The authors trace the evolution of the forest environmental frontier in the pluralistic multi-level governance system of the EU.…”