National Forest Programmes (NFPs) as Forms to Democratise Forest Policy in Europe? Comparing the Procedural Legitimacy and Effectiveness of NFPs

At the UN summit in Rio 1992 governments worldwide committed themselves to sustainable development. National Forest Programmes (NFP) have been widely acknowledged as innovative governance forms to promote sustainable forest management and to democratize forest policy. NFPs have been framed as new modes of governance to open up a traditionally closed policy subsystem to the civil society. At the European level, in 2003 pan-European procedural principles of NFPs have been declared such as public participation, fairness, transparency, etc. Since then NFPs have been formulated and implemented in many European countries differing in contexts such as forest ownership structure, political culture and legal regulations. Despite the rapid diffusion of this rather novel innovative governance forms, there are hardly any comparative analysis of European NFP processes particularly as regards their procedural democratic “quality” and effects. This article examines the achievements of procedural legitimacy as well as effectiveness in NFP processes in Europe. Due to the similar rhetoric commitments and normative impetus for the development of NFPs originating in the international realm, the set of NPFs provide a good comparison of the achievement of the procedural and substantive goals of these sectoral governance processes on national level. First, analytical criteria to operationalise procedural legitimacy and effectiveness are described. The procedural legitimacy derives from participatory procedures that enable different stakeholders to articulate their interests in a governance process considering respective “democratic” procedural criteria (inclusivity, accountability, deliberative quality, etc.). Effectiveness results from the problem-solving capacity of a process and the quality of the final policy output. In a second step the efforts taken to achieve both dimensions will be compared in those countries where a NFP has been formulated and/or implemented.