From a Forest of Policies to a Forest Strategy? For an Institutional History of the European Forestry Strategy (1986-2013)

Starting from the first attempts of cooperation, dating back to the Eighties of the 20th Century, this contribution aims to explore how the European Union policies concerning the forest sector followed both an internal and an external path. The European Commission used the forestry sector as a privileged way to move away from the productivist approach to an agroecological paradigm. This arduous political operation was favoured by the prevailing attention devoted to the climate change topics and, particularly to one of its main causes, i.e., deforestation. Then, the contribution examines how the European Union greatly contributed to the forestry policies, through the adoption of many regulations and the establishment of committees able to create an original European governance, nonetheless the exclusive competence of Member States in forestry policies. In this line, the adoption of a European Forestry Strategy could represent a good example of this attempt to create a common space of cooperation among Member States and between European Union and European States, eventually leading to the affirmation of a new paradigm able to overpass the boundaries established by Treaties.