Descriptive Indicators of Sustainable Forest Management

Abstract

The changing role of forests in society provides new challenges to forest management planners, as conceptualised in ‘sustainable forestry’. Using an end-means rationality, there is a need to develop criteria for sustainable development and indicators to measure whether development goes in the desired direction. Recent European efforts of operationalising sustainable forest management have focused on forest output and ecological processes, whereas socioeconomic processes and structures, how they affect output, and what processes and structures are considered legitimate by the different actors, have been ignored at large. However, operationalisation of sustainable forest management implies policy formulation, and the question appears: whose sustainability are we striving at? With the 1998 Lisbon resolution L1 on socioeconomic conditions, the issue has been highlighted again, however, without providing means to monitor the social sustainability of forestry. The present paper aims at filling a methodological gap by developing a framework for descriptive indicators of socially sustainable forest management. The framework is based on the Helsinki and Lisbon resolutions, but the overriding idea of providing valid and reliable descriptive (qualitative) indicators could be transferred to operational level planning with only slight modifications.