Historical evolution of principles and values of sustainable forest management

 

To understand the complexity of participation in forestry issues nowadays, we first need to have a clear picture of the historical evolution of social awareness concerning forests. Consideration of natural resources by humanity, has evolved in every period. It can be seen from the different perspectives, depending on the religious conception or the cultural manifestation, and on the development of social and political forms of thought (Alcanda 2001). The political fascist, conservative, liberal, traditionalist, progressive ideas, reformists, socialists and communists have resulted in different ways, even in opposition to their own ideology, to use natural and forest resources. Different philosophical ideas throughout history are placed from the mystical and Biblical anthropocentrism, which considers the fauna and wild flora to be in the service of humankind, up to the renaissance and the biocentrism of the romantic period, even of revolutionary origin, which raise the right of nature and the submission of humans.

 

During the transition in the twentieth century and before that, with the return of society to respect nature, institutional and social initiatives developed the branches of forestry science and technology, formulation of the first restrictive laws, the first projects for environmental restoration, and the organization of civil society for defense of the environment, and even the first protected areas or the first lessons in environmental education (Perlin 1999).

 

The social changes in the use of resources, communications and transport that have appeared during the technological revolution of the twenty century have had wide effects on the use of the forests and on the perception of society about nature (Rametsteiner 1999). Direct dependence on the use of the land for subsistence has decreased, while industrial and other activities have notably increased in importance. Consequently, the roots of the environmental movement in the sixties lay in North America, while in Europe public awareness of environmental problems started growing in the seventies, with the Germans as the pioneers. The evolution of environmental education in the eighties and nineties supported the creation of multitude of programs of sensitization related to different subjects.

 

The principles of Sustainable Forest Management arose by consensus at the Summit of the Earth in 1992. These guidelines at the European level were heightened in the Ministerial Conference for the Protection of the Forests in Europe. At the third conference in Lisbon in 1998, one of the central elements was the dialogue between the Governments and the society, assuming commitment to “increasing the social and economic elements of sustainable forest management and to strengthen the ties between the forest sector and the society increasing the dialogue and the mutual understanding on the role of the sustainable forest management on the forests and the forest sector”. This led to hard work in three areas: public relations, public participation and education.

 

Sustainable forest management brings new actors or social agents to the process, with their perceptions, values and interests in forests, which will in turn lead to a wider social base (Berge and Aasen 1999). This sometimes generates opposite opinions however, which means more conflicts, and shows that the opinions within society are not uniform. Even the same person does not always adopt the same values but rather acts according to the roles that he/she is representing at a given moment. Accordingly, what we have nowadays in forestry is a wide variety of stakeholders feeling that they have the right to participate in the planning processes, as they have included nature values among their own values and, therefore wish to play their role in the process. Consequently, communication between stakeholders is a key factor of success which has to be facilitated in a highly-skilled manner.

 

Previous research on this topic

 

The sociological forest research, besides in universities and research centres, is carried on by the political advisers. The results of this research contribute with more information in order to bear the demands of the society in mind for the forest planning and policy decision-making (as it does for any other kind of politics).

 

In the USA these studies of public perceptions on the forests, have been historically well developed and applied. In Europe one of the principal innovations in the last 40 years has been the application of methodologies of the social sciences to the forest sector (Schmithüsen et al. 1998), turning out to be pioneering the Central European countries (p.e. Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Considering the subject, the highest number of surveys has been “the management and the forest conservation for outdoor and leisure purposes”.

 

The European Union has created a unique space for the politics, with major consideration of the public opinion, and thus they have carried on sociological comparative studies related to the forest sector among the countries. An example of it, is a qualitative study to analyze and to understand existing perceptions and to identify how the forest industries are perceived by the population (European Commission, 2002); or another study on the perceptions of the citizens, in which the discussions took place concerning the forest owners and the Forest Service, rural development, forest functions, externalities, etc (Wiersum and Elands 2002). The European Forest Institute dedicated a series of publications to the forest conflicts, which turn out to be an essential topic for the social awareness of the forests. But in Europe, the most complete work summarizing the social forest studies is the publication of “Europeans and their forests ” (Rametsteiner and Kraxner 2003), that uses as source of information 47 representative surveys carried out in 16 European countries from the 70s, focusing on those of the 90s.

 

The scene of the forest international politics established the National and Regional Forest Programmes, as a process of politics heightening the public participation as one of his more important principles (Glück 1999). To compile and to think about the forest culture, it is a good point of item for the future of a forest programme. Being coherent with these representations, and that the adopted measurements reach the necessary consensus. In this way it is increased the social, ecological and economic sustainability.

 

It is the case in Spain, where the first wide sociological research, was carried out at the Forest Programme of Galicia in 1990, followed more recently by the Spanish Forest Programme (2002), and other regional forest programmes (Navarra, Valencia, Cantabria …); where we can find those cases in which the sociological study has been useful to prepare and to complement the public participation and therefore, to fix strategic decisions in forest planning.

 

The theory of environmental sociology and social change

Society is a complex entity, as it is composed not olnly by human beings but also institutional structures created by people as well as the physical environment. Therefore we can split the structure of society in many different ways, but for example into four constituent parts (or sub-sectors of society) to try to analyze it easier: economy, society & politics, culture and environment, as we see in the following table    (Saastamoinen, O 2004):

 

Even if the fundamental values (composing the basic rationale of behaviour) in each sub-sector can be formulated in other ways, and their importance may vary considerably in different contexts. And thus we can guess but not prove that some drivers are more importance that other ones. Either to put in order of importance the 4 groups, and neither the variables (drivers) inside themselves. 

 

Thus, in theories of environmental sociology and social change, we try to find out the variables that act as drivers of that social change, and thus the ones that should affect mostly the citizens’ perceptions on the environment in general, and the forest and forest sector in our particular case.

 

There is not a single theory taht explains the factors that influence perception of a person, or common erception of a society. So we will assume that it is a combination of all factors presented latter on in this article.

 

Even though in the table values are presented in this four thematic sub-groups, but also the classification can be regarded byt he level of instituzionalization:

Instrumental values = means for higher goals

Rationales of behaviour = such as profit and efficiency

Intrinsic values = ultimate goals (justice or existence)

 

For some of those variables we have quantitative data because they are measurable. Even for some other data we got qualitative data. But most of these data are located in the sub-sectors of economics and environment, few in society & politics, and we got almost nothing in the culture sub-sector of society.

 

Besides, for this research we take only as useful que ones that are complete and harmonised at the EU27 level, then we have even less.