During the last few decades, both policy practices and policy idioms have drastically changed. Concepts such as interactive planning, network management, stakeholder dialogue, deliberative democracy, policy discourses, governance, etc. have replaced older ones such as public administration,...

The Arctic has rapidly transformed from a “frozen desert” into a theater for high-level politics. Climate change and socioeconomic interdependencies bring the World more and more to the Arctic and vice versa. Increased geological knowledge, new technologies, and high-energy prices make it...

The concept of Reducing Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) dominates international debates on the role of forests in climate change mitigation, but concrete implementation remains a challenge. In contrast to this general trend, Brazil emerged as a noteworthy exception due to the...

The democratic quality of private multi-stakeholder governance is an important subject of academic and political debate. On the one hand, private multi-stakeholder arrangements are seen as a way of democratizing international environmental governance. On the other hand, the democratic potential...

Although the ecological economics (EE) discourse attempts to influence environmental policy, empirical studies have concluded that its success in this endeavour has been limited thus far. In the Netherlands, however, two EE-related policy concepts, Environmental Utilisation Space and Ecological...

The current study is an illustrative example of intersectoral land conflicts in a highly populated region that resulted in the non-implementation of an already agreed-upon policy. More specifically, it evaluates the implementation of the forest expansion policy in Flanders (Northern Belgium) and...

This paper aims to assess the emergence of the concept of forest governance in the field of forest policy analysis. This assessment is mainly theoretical in nature. The various meanings and main criticisms of forest governance will be dealt with. In so doing, the paper applies the so-called...

‘Forest governance’ refers to new modes of regulation in the forest sector, such as decentralized, community-based and market-oriented policy instruments and management approaches. Its main theoretical basis consists of two mainstream models: rational choice and neo-institutionalism. Since...

A new generation of woodfuel studies focuses on the political dynamics behind access to the woodfuel trade, providing better insights into patterns of inclusion and exclusion and options for resource management. Institutional mechanisms that govern access are difficult to untangle in the context...