Three decades of forest policy studies in the countries in the former socialist countries of Europe: A review

Since the late 1980s, the transformative changes in former socialist societies have provided a unique context for forest policy research. However, a comprehensive review of this body of scholarship has been lacking. This paper addresses this gap by by reviewing forest policy studies for 19 countries of the ex-socialist realm. We identified 285 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, published in 1990–2024. Bibliometric and narrative analysis revealed several positive trends including rapidly growing number of publications, and between other aspects, improving gender balance in the authorship. There is an evident increase of the research capacity as the domestic contributors clearly prevail over the foreign authors since 2015. The output, measured bythe number of published studies, differs remarkably among the analysed countries. The Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia lead in publication numbers, while Montenegro, Moldova, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Belarus rank at the bottom.

“State forestry” (42 % of the total count) and “private forestry” (30 %) are the two prevailing thematic hubs among the sampled studies. Our review confirms substantial influence of ideological and institutional legacies from the socialist period with such outcomes as the dominating power of state actors, prevalence of strong regulatory approaches and limited decision space for private forest owners. Important topics for future research include, among others, deeper sociological understanding of forest restitution and of reform processes in state forestry; red tape and corruption in the forest sector, trust between private and state actors; better balancing of regulatory, economic and informational instruments; and national accommodations of the forest-related EU policies.