New World, Old Ideas—A Narrative of the Lithuanian Forestry Transition

Abstract

Radical socio-economic transition has brought significant yet vaguely understood challenges for forestry in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. This study narrates the case of the Lithuanian forestry transition, structured along the divides of actor versus structure and material versus ideational world. The narrative exposes remarkably stable forest policy with a significant exception of increased environmental consideration, induced mainly by strong external pressures. The forest policy arena is dominated by state authorities that are grounded in the theory of normal forest, rather distrust private forestry and primarily rely on regulatory instruments. Though the prevailing forestry paradigm has been challenged by researchers, arguing for administrative reforms, increased economic efficiency and larger decision freedom, the alternative ideas were either neglected or denounced fiercely. Such conservatism is a combined effect of ideological heritage of the forestry profession intermingled with vested interests by state forestry authorities.

Key Words:

• social change
• forest policy
• forestry ideology
• narrative analysis

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers, Prof. Gintautas Mozgeris and Dr Marius Kavaliauskas for comments on different versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Vilis Brukas http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2424-1354

Notes

1. By substantive is meant real policy change, leading to significantly modified forest management practices, tangible redistribution of benefits among stakeholders, etc.

2. For example, the fact that the author of this study has spent his research career in Sweden should have affected his beliefs, such as that the consensus-based policy-making is preferred to strong institutional hierarchies; or that economic efficiency should be an important objective in forestry of a transition economy.

3. Such contextualization may be seen as an attempt to bridge the causal and narrative approaches; Hysing and Olsson (2008) serve an excellent example of narrativizing ACF in a forest policy study.

4. State forests constituted 84% of the total estimated forest area in 1938 (Brukas 2003b), the rest of the forests being in hands of small-scale private landowners.

5. The partisans are commonly referred to as ‘forest brothers'.

6. Industrial production was 40% lower in 1994 than in 1989.

7. Although with national particularities, analogous gravities of impact are very likely to challenge also other ex-socialist countries. For example, Winkel and Sotirov (2011) found three advocacy coalitions in Bulgaria: state-oriented forestry coalition advocating strong state role in forest management; private sector-oriented forestry coalition in favour of market orientation, liberalization and further privatization; and nature protection coalition concerned with threatened ecological and social forest benefits.

8. In terms of employees, DGSF roughly has twice as many resources as the Forest Department.

9. He also served as Vice-Minister of Environment in charge of forestry matters in 2001–2004. In 2004, the Vice-Minister position was abolished which is a further indication of a weakening positioning of forestry at the governmental level.

10. Email inquiry to the chairman of the association yielded no answer.

11. President Valdas Adamkus served two terms, 1998–2003 and 2004–2009. With his background as environmental administrator in the USA, Valdas Adamkus was a passionate patron of the environmental cause.

12. The informants include both, representatives from national forestry administration and from environmental NGOs.

13. Notably, forestland zoning does not exactly coincide with the system of protected areas, as there are commercial forests in protected areas as well as forests with non-commercial forest group status outside the protected areas (Brukas, Felton, et al., 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP 7) under Grant 282887 (INTEGRAL project).