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ŠUMARSKI LIST 7-8/2019 str. 23     <-- 23 -->        PDF

conservation issues in Europe: 1) stakeholder analysis (February-April 2018); 2) preparation and administration of the semi-structured questionnaire (April-July 2018); and 3) statistical analysis of the collected data (August-September 2018).
The survey was implemented in 10 European countries: six EU28 member countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Italy, Slovakia and Slovenia) and four non-EU28 member countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, North of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia). The countries involved in the survey were identified based on the official list of participants to the COST Action “CAPABAL” balancing the number of respondents of the EU and non-EU countries. According to Gaston et al. (2008), the total protected areas of the six EU28 member countries involved in the survey is around 70,000 km2 with a range of protected area on total area (%) from more than 21% in Slovakia and around 9% in Bulgaria. The protected area of the four non-EU28 member countries is around 8,000 km2 with a range of protected area on total area (%) between less than 1% in Bosnia and Herzegovina and more than 25% in Montenegro (Gaston et al. 2008). In the EU28 member countries, the Natura 2000 sites – Special Protection Areas (SPAs) for the conservation of birds as established by Directive 2009/147/EC and their habitats and Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) targeting the protection of rare and threatened species as established by Council Directive 92/43/EEC – have a key importance considering that approximately 37.5 million ha of forests are included in the Natura 2000 network in the EU28 (Marchetti et al. 2017). The Natura 2000 network area represents more than 20% of the total forest area in the EU28 and around 50% of Natura 2000 total area (EEA 2016).
In the first step of this study, the researchers involved in the COST Action Targeted Network TN1401 “CAPABAL” have implemented a stakeholder analysis in order to identify 2 to 7 key stakeholders in each country. The stakeholder analysis can be defined as an interactive process to define aspects of a social phenomenon affected by a decision (Mitchell et al. 1997, Grilli et al. 2015). The aim of the stakeholder analysis is to identify individuals and groups who are affected by or can affect parts of this phenomenon and prioritizes these individuals and groups in respect to their involvement in the decision-making process (Reed et al. 2008). The categories of stakeholders to involve in the survey (i.e. individuals and/or collective actors) and the variables used to identify the stakeholders are the key aspects in the stakeholder analysis (Grilli et al. 2015). In the present study, we focused only on the collective actors with special regard on these four groups of interest: public administration at national and local levels (e.g., Ministries, regions/departments and other public agencies); actors of forest-wood chain (e.g., public and private forest enterprises, forest owners’ associations); universities and research institutes; environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Only one representative for each group of interest in each country was involved in the survey. According to Gallo et al. (2018), the variables used to identify the stakeholders were as follows: 1) expertise in forestry and/or nature conservation, 2) past involvement in the participatory process concerning the implementation of the Natura 2000 network or the establishment of protected areas. However, the preliminary list of stakeholders identified by the researchers involved in the COST Action “CAPABAL” was integrated with a snowball sampling method. The snowball sampling is a non-probability sampling technique used to identify a purposive sample, whereby the researchers ask respondents for other persons to involve in the survey based on their knowledge (Cohen, Arieli 2011; De Meo et al. 2011). In this study, during the questionnaire administration some stakeholders have brought out other institutions or organizations to be included in the survey.  
During the second step, the stakeholders’ opinions were collected through the administration of a semi-structured questionnaire by email. A first version of the questionnaire was developed and pre-tested face-to-face with two stakeholders in February-March 2018. The final version of the questionnaire was formed by questions divided in four thematic sections. The first thematic section focused on the personal information of the respondents (i.e. country, name of organization, role and years of work in their organization); while in the second thematic section the potential conflicts in protected areas have been investigated. The respondents indicated the importance of 15 conflicts divided in three types of conflicts using a 5-point Likert scale format (from 1=very low importance of the conflict to 5=very high importance of the conflict). The main types of conflicts considered are: (1) conflicts between forestry activities and nature conservation; (2) conflicts between hunting activities and nature conservation; and (3) procedural conflicts related to the establishment of new protected areas. According to the classification proposed by Weiss et al. (2017), the first two types of conflicts of this study are included in the interest-related challenges, while third is included in the ideological and knowledge-based. The first type includes some aspects related to trade-offs between the management of forests for timber and bioenergy production and for biodiversity conservation. The second type considers trade-offs between the management of protected areas for nature conservation and hunting activities. Conversely, the third type of conflicts is in the institutional challenges considering the main aspects related to the procedural process (e.g., identification and mapping of protected area boundaries, stakeholders’ involvement in the participatory process, and restrictions to the property rights).
The third thematic section of the questionnaire investigated whether protected areas can be considered as an