Наукові праці Лісівничої академії наук України (Mar 2019)
Forest Policy in the Interdisciplinary Scientific Context: Trends and Develop-ment Prospects
Abstract
The article explores and generalizes the characteristic trends of forest policy development as scientific discipline. Taking into account tendencies of the processes of environmental and forest policy and forest economics paradigm shift, social changes and global problems, the understanding of theoretical essence and economic content of forest policy as a modern scientific discipline and its interrelationa with other disciplines, epistemological approaches to forest policy studies systemized. Main research fields in forest policy are overviewed and their classification proposed. The approaches that are relevant to forest policy studies are generalized on the basis of relevant scientific papers review and in the wider context of publications on environmental and conservation policies. The prospects for forest policy studies de-velopment are explained due to its importance for solving the urgent problems that other sciences do not give answers: the analysis of mutual influences of policies in different sectors and their interaction, institutional analysis, the study of markets, so-cig-economic research of the needs in forest products and attitudes towards forest ecosystem services of the different categories and groups of stakeholders. Analysis of modern scientific research on forest policy allows us to make their categorization, highlighting the three main trends: research within the legal field of forest policy, that is the point of view of the legal prospects; research that are based on political sciences perspective; a study of the economic prospects of the forest policy, in particular such studies base on the application of ecological economics approach. The introduction of the principles of ecological economics into theoretical fundamentals of forest policy call for determination of ecological boundaries (re-strictions, limitations) of forest exploitation, coverage of commercial markets for ecosystem services and taking into account the role of their social functions. In line with the SDGs of the UN 2030 Agenda, the circular bioeconomy concept is consid-ered as gaining greater policy research interest. This new concept implies a more ef-ficient resource management of bio-based renewable resources by integrating circular economy principles. Therefore its ideas have to be conceptualized at theoretical level for forest sector business models and policies.
Keywords
