CHALLENGE

Ten to forty percent of the forest area in Macedonia, Albania and Serbia is privately or community-owned. Due to poor governance and institutional shortcomings as well as the lack of capacities, small-scale private and community forestry has had difficulties accessing the forest products’ and services’ markets and meeting criteria for sustainable forest management. This has led to mismanagement and illegal activities perpetuating disinterest in sustainable forest management and endangering the execution of property rights. As a result, private and community forest owners have faced major difficulties in participating in national and cross-sectoral policy discussions such as national forest program implementation.

APPROACH AND RESULTS

PROFOR helped to address these issues by working through the Confederation of European Forestry Owners (CEPF) to do several things.

First, CEPF developed assessments of the status of non-state forestry in Macedonia, Albania and Serbia. This initial stock-taking was essential to understand and update the knowledge available of non-state forestry in those countries as well as begin to identify problems.  Those assessments are available here:

Next, working through its website and series of regional conferences organized by CEPF in close collaboration with the FAO’s National Forest Programmes (NFP), the activity began to develop networks of information exchange at the sub-regional level.  The first such occasion was in Skopje, Macedonia in late June 2008. Here representatives of forest owner associations, responsible ministries from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, met to discuss the situation on non-state forestry for the first time at a regional scale. Discussions revolved around property rights on non-state forest land, the role of forest owner associations at the local, regional and national levels, the forest management regulation features of small-scale forests and policy options for financial incentives for private/community forestry.

CEPF also worked with the FAO’s NFP staff to conduct workshops at the national level in the three countries to address country-specific issues. Legislation issues, livelihood generation from small-scale forestry by cleared property rights and financing SFM in non-state forestry were the main common issues in all workshops.