Abstract
The chapter evaluates and explains the effectiveness of the external action of the EU on forests. Despite its lack of competence on forests, the EU seeks to promote sustainable forest management through various policies and measures. Some are explicitly focused on forests, such as the EU’s participation in the United Nations Forum on Forests, while others rely on related fields to achieve sustainable forest management, such as the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Voluntary Partnership Agreements. The various external forest policies of the EU are characterised by varying levels of effectiveness. Despite the EU’s effort to create synergies and complementarities between them, different objectives are not always reconciled and EU external forest policies remain incoherent.
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Notes
- 1.
There is no single definition of “sustainable forest management” and the concept is sometimes politically contested. Yet, for this chapter, we consider sustainable forest management as the stewardship and use of forests to achieve balanced and sustainable socio-cultural, environmental and economic objectives, serving the present and the future.
- 2.
In this chapter, a venue is a locus that can be activated by the EU to carry out external action. It can take the shape of an international organisation, but also of an international agreement.
- 3.
The signatories to Forest Europe are 46 European countries and the EU.
- 4.
Interviews of two European Commission officials involved in EU forest policy-making and EU international forest negotiations, November 18, 2014, and May 5, 2016, Brussels . Interview of an EU Member state official involved in international forest negotiations on behalf of the EU, July 8, 2016, Louvain-la-Neuve.
- 5.
Interview of a European Commission official involved in EU forest policy-making and international negotiations on forests on behalf of the EU, November 18, 2014, Brussels .
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Pirlot, P., Delreux, T., Farcy, C. (2018). Forests: A Multi-sectoral and Multi-level Approach to Sustainable Forest Management. In: Adelle, C., Biedenkopf, K., Torney, D. (eds) European Union External Environmental Policy. The European Union in International Affairs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60931-7_9
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