Browsing by Subject "typology"

Forests are highly valued for the wide range of ecosystem services they provide and are increasingly expected to play a role in providing solutions to both rural development and global challenges. In countries where forest ownership structure is characterized by a high share of private ownership, non-industrial, private forest owners eventually determine the type and extent of management of a large part of national forest resources. In Italy, where this is the case, the potential of forests remains largely unexploited, and the alleged lack of active management even threatens to increase forest vulnerability. In this context, the new Italian Forest Strategy aims to untap the forests’ potential and enhance the delivery of their services by promoting an active, sustainable management, but is faced with the challenge of reviving the interest of private owners in managing their land. Despite being implicitly entrusted with the responsibility of stewardship of forest resources, the Italian forest owner is still a mysterious figure, due to data scarcity, and is mostly absent from the political and economic scene. Characterizing forest owners, understanding their values, objectives, and other factors affecting their behavior is crucial to develop appropriate and effective policy instruments that will sensitize and incentivize them to “own” their land in the way that society would expect of them. This work contributes to filling the data gap on Italian forest owners by presenting a case study from a region of the western Alps, the Autonomous Region of Aosta Valley. By the way of a structured questionnaire and in-depth semi-structured interviews, we investigated how forest owners perceived forest management and the role they played, could play, or would be willing to play in forest stewardship. The results show that forest owners unanimously believe that forests need to be managed, a term which they mostly associate to maintenance, intended as taking care of the forests in order to keep it healthy and prosperous. However, they still hold a rather traditional view of forest uses, in which social and societal functions of forests are rarely addressed or related to owner’s responsibility. Also, they do not perceive the forest as economically valuable, and the current lack of economic sustainability of forest operations is driving forest abandonment, which indicates that economic factors are a driving force for stewardship decisions. Five stewardship types, ranging on a gradient of low to high stewardship behavior, characterize the Aosta Valley forest owners: the oblivious and self-willed stewards (types that emerged from participants’ narratives), and the wishful, dutiful, and committed steward types (types represented by the participants). The wishful and dutiful types offer two targets of interest for policy intervention: the first is longing for a greater role in forest stewardship but needs guidance to act, and the second, whose stewardship behavior is driven by their moral norms towards their heritage, could be motivated to extend their existing range of action or diversify the ecosystem services they foster. Overall, we found that forest owners displayed willingness to increase their stewardship behavior but lacked the capacity to take on this responsibility alone in the current context. Raising stewardship levels will require regional forest authorities to engage more deeply with private owners and their forests, as well as strong supporting policies that should not neglect financial incentives in the difficult context of mountain forestry but should also aim to revalorize the forests and forest sectors, including the non-wood sector, which can help tackling the challenge of ensuring the societal outcomes of forest stewardship.