Extension, advice and knowledge systems for private forestry: Understanding diversity and change across Europe
Section snippets
Rethinking forestry extension as a system
Society has high expectations of forests to deliver a wide range of ecosystems services, in the context of sustainable forest management and the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015), and policy has to balance the expectations of different stakeholder groups. In Europe, where more than 53 % of the forest area is owned by private owners, of which in turn at least 65 % is owned by individuals and families (FAO, 2015; UNECE, 2020), forest management outcomes depend on the decisions
COST Actions as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research
This work was facilitated by a COST Action project, FACESMAP (Forest Land Ownership Changes in Europe: Significance for Management and Policy). COST Actions are networks dedicated to scientific collaboration, funded by the European Union, explicitly designed to complement national funding sources. The funding covers networking tools, such as meetings, conferences, workshops, short-term scientific missions, training schools, publications and dissemination activities. Participants’ travel and
Results
Information about these four dimensions of the FOKIS are summarised for ten countries in Europe in Supplementary Table 1. In the following sections we describe the main findings for each dimension. We then summarise with an overview of geographical variations, and of key trends over recent decades. A central interest of the AKIS / FOKIS approach is innovation, and we conclude the results section with an example of innovation in each country, as a pointer to further lines of research. Fig. 1
Consistent trends in FOKIS
Despite the diversity of historical, social, economic and political contexts, analysis of the FOKIS in these ten European countries reveals a consistent move away from traditional extension based on technology transfer. A more diverse range of services and providers is emerging, in parallel with the pluralistic approach in agricultural advisory services (Birner et al., 2009; Faure et al., 2012). This move is characterised by five trends typical of the majority of our ten countries:
- 1
FOKIS have
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Anna Lawrence: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Philippe Deuffic: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Teppo Hujala: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Liviu Nichiforel: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Diana
Acknowledgements
The work on this article was supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) through COST Action FP1201 - Forest Land Ownership Changes in Europe: Significance for Management and Policy (FACESMAP)CGA-FP1201-3B. We thank two anonymous referees for their careful reading and helpful suggestions.
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2022, Forest Policy and EconomicsCitation Excerpt :This could be facilitated by more open analysis of stakeholders interests and by a revised socio-spatial understanding of production/consumption spheres based on a sustainable place-making rooted in (and reliant upon) rural region (Marsden and Farioli, 2015; Halonen et al., 2022). A second implication is a more positive way of seeing the diversity of PFOs and the need for forest professionals and advisory services to provide a portfolio of options and solutions that really meets PFOs’ expectations, takes into account their synergistic practices and acknowledges their constraints and contributions to sustainable management of natural resources (Arnould et al., 2021; Lawrence et al., 2020; Sutherland and Huttunen, 2018). As suggested by Lawrence (2017), this will not be enough to cope with extreme uncertainty of sustainable transition pathways, but it is certainly part of what is needed.