National Forest Programme for Austria

National forest programmes in a narrower sense should ensure sustainable management, conservation and sustainable development of forests; in a broader sense they servce to the adaptation of forest policy to changing societal conditions. A national forest programme is characterised by a series of basic principles (e.g., participation, iterative, continuous planning process, decentralisation). The effects of these principles (internal influence factors) as well as those of external factors (e.g., international legally binding instruments; financial incentives; multilevel governance) to the structure and relationship of the political actors and, therefore, the content of sustainable forest management, are investigated.