An obituary for national forest programmes? Analyzing and learning from the strategic use of “new modes of governance” in Germany and Bulgaria

Forest owners and power: A Foucauldian study on Finnish forest policy

“…Our study complements previous findings that demonstrated that technical and scientific language is still widely used in forest owners' forest policy discourses in Finland (see Berglund, 2001). These findings complement the recent findings obtained in the analysis of cooperative National Forest Programmes (Winkel & Sotirov, 2011) as well. According to these studies, the policies continued to maintain the divisions between the environmental and forestry coalitions and could not overcome the power struggle between these two.…”

“…Discourse analysis can be used to suggest institutional practices that can facilitate the implementation of natural resource management in a more democratic way (Hajer & Versteeg, 2005). Previous cooperative National Forest Programmes attempted to offer equal discursive positions to participants but they failed because the participants brought old discourses with them (Primmer & Karppinen, 2010;Winkel & Sotirov, 2011). Even if the power of economic and conservation coalitions cannot be eliminated, perhaps their effect could be altered by offering new discursive positions that encourage cooperation.…”

“…Foucault's concept of discourse is rather distinct and it is increasingly gaining popularity within the analysis of forest and environmental policy issues (Darier, 1999;Fischer and Forester, 1993;Hajer, 1993Hajer, , 1997Humphreys, 2009). Winkel and Sotirov (2011) describe the Foucauldian discourse as a large stream of spoken or written language that provides meaning for the interpretation of social or physical events. As contrast to "discourse as text," Foucauldian discourse analysis can be described as "discourse as social practice," and such is located at the "broad" end of the discourse analysis spectrum (Arts and Buizer, 2009;Foucault, 1984).…”

“…However, a number of participatory National Forests Programmes did not succeed in changing the political practices more participatory and pluralistic because of complex power disputes between the coalitions of stakeholders (Kouplevatskaya, 2006;Primmer and Karppinen, 2010;Winkel and Sotirov, 2011). Before the recent renewal of forest conservation policies in Finland, some forest owners have forcefully expressed the view that they have not perceived themselves as sharing power with environmental authorities (Hiedanpää, 2002;Paloniemi and Varho, 2009).…”

Public Participation in Forest Landscape Management Planning (FLMP) in Italy

“…The NFP is a political instrument designed to establish a workable social and political framework for effective sustainable forest management (Puelzl & Rametsteiner, 2002;Winkel & Sotirov, 2011). EU Forestry Strategy (1998) identified NFPs as a tool to implement international principles and recommendations (Hogl, 2002).…”