European Forest Issues and Territories: European Actors in an Era of Multiscale Regulation

Grounded in my PhD work, this presentation aims at contributing to the study of the European actors, their mobilization, influence and strategies at local, European and international scales. Through analyzing the regulation of forest-based industries and the globalization of forest issues, I identify how both have been constructed as a European public problem. This is implemented around a central hypothesis: forest territories are institutionalized by actors who participate in its regulation. In order to ascertain the ability of actors to move between scales of regulation, the thesis is grounded on theoretical tools derived from the Theories of international relations and Public policy analysis. From a constructivist and neoinstitutionnalist approach (Hassenteufel, 2011), actors had to legitimize their practices and instruments through undertaking the political work (Jullien and Smith, 2008) of problematization (Rochefort and Cobb, 1994) and politicization (Lagroye, 2003) regarding their territorialised forest issues (Carter and Smith, 2008). From this perspective, I follow actors’ representations of ‘problems’, and how they built interests and political work across scales of regulation from local to global, and this in order to understand how public policy instruments were defined and implemented. Grounded in three case studies of European public policy (forest protection against fire, renewable energy and actions to counter the trade of illegal wood), I show the ability of actors to territorialize a forest issue. I grounded my work in qualitative methodology by using material drawn from scientific and expert’s literature and interviews with stakeholders representatives and employees in charge of the FLEGT action plan within the EU’s institutions.