Professor Max Krott, Director of the Institute of Forest Policy and Nature Conservation at the University of Göttingen, Germany, introduces the most important political players and stakeholders, including the forest owners, the general population, forest workers and employees, forest associations and administration, as well as the media. He illustrates the political and regulatory instruments using examples in current forest policy. Forest Policy Analysis places a special emphasis on the informal processes that are indispensable in understanding practical politics. References made to current English and German-language publications on forest policy studies enable further information to be found with concern to special issues.

Any reader eager to gain a comprehensive insight into forest development policy, praxis and reality shouldn’t miss this excellent publication. Hard to find a comparable reading where the author is digging as deep into Forest Development Policy. The author discovered numerous highly relevant theories as well as inspiring cases about forests and people from around the world, focusing on ‘change’ rather than ‘development’ and on the role of various actors in creating or preventing ‘change’. The exciting results uncover reality and lead to inspiring discussions on concepts of development cooperation. All individual theoretical arguments and empirical proofs are well based and shed light into the political process of Forest Development Policy. The book is an essential contribution to scholarly debate and research on forestry in the South, and its relations to development cooperation, for both, readers with theoretical and practice related interests.

This book, containing 31 chapters grouped into two parts, provides rich and multi-faceted documentation of current progress being made in creating the political, economic and social conditions indispensable for sustainable and multi-functional use of forest resources, and notes the obstacles that needs to be removed to reach this goal. The first part (chapters 1-9) introduces general and global aspects that have to be considered in the context of cross sectoral policy coordination. This include discussions on the impact of external shocks such as a sudden oil price increase on forest management, the impact of energy or trade policies on global wood markets and the role of decentralization in integrating multiple demands on forests. The second part of the book deals with regional, national and local issues of cross-sectoral policy linkages. The chapters on Africa (chapters 10-15) focus largely on the improvement of land management practices such as agroforestry, land tenure and gender issues, more integrative policies in promoting reforestation and afforestation, multiple stakeholder planning processes and external policy impacts in protecting and managing Miombo forests. In Asia (chapters 16-20), important subjects appearing in several chapters are the need to develop environmental and economic accounts for forestry, and to demonstrate more clearly the great importance of non-timber forest product linkages, road construction and population effects of forest conversion, community forest management contributions to the local and national economy, and cross-sectoral policy links in the development of mountainous areas are other issues addressed. In the Europe part (chapters 21-24); both environmental problems as well as strong trends towards developing a competitive forest and wood-processing sector determine public policy development to a considerable extent. This can be seen from leading policy scenarios that have been identified from the changes in perceptions with regard to the forest sector and from the policy issues at national level that are presented. A somewhat similar pattern of competing policy demands between resource use, industrial expansion and strong environmental demands emerges from the contributions dealing with the Americas (chapters 25-31). These chapters contain the experiences of the USA in cross-sectoral impact analysis, the lessons to be learned from the long and confliction history in managing the national forests, as well as from the resource conflicts described between forestry uses, oil and gas development and environmental protection in the boreal regions of Canada.

This paper identifies the essential features of the forestry economics literature emphasizing what is different about forestry and what are forestry's important features for project and program analysis. The important conclusion, is that economic tools are both available and appropriate for the analysis of a wide range of forest policy problems. The report is divided into two parts. The characteristics that received special attention in the first part are the embodiment of both productive capital and final output in any standing forest inventory, and the long time periods that often distinguish forest production. A third distinguishing characteristics is the joint production nature of many forest resource services. The second part of the paper visits seven special topics that are important to forestry and economic development: (1) timber production; (2) smallholder forest management; (3) forestry research, education, and extension; (4) tenure; (5) policy spillovers from other sectors of the economy that can substantially alter forests and forestland management; (6) non-timber multiple use values; and (7) deforestation, timber famine or its counter, sustainable forest management.