A study on assessing the governance of urban forests: A case study of nopporo national forest

Abstract

Establishing forest governance through stakeholders’ participation and collaboration is becoming an important issue for realizing sustainable management of urban forests that receive diverse demands. This study examined a method for assessing governance to ensure better governance in urban forests. First, the paper discussed the concept of governance of forests and then examined methods to assess the present condition of governance. Next, Nopporo National Forest was assessed using 14 indicators available to assess governance that were extracted from a questionnaire survey distributed to citizen groups that are involved in a forest regeneration activity and other forest related management and conservation activities as a case. It was found that the governance condition was not highly evaluated as a whole, and financial support, in particular, was lowly evaluated. Moreover, evaluations were different between the citizen groups that had different relationships with the National Forest Office. The study indicated that governance evaluations of stakeholders differ by their relational differences with the forest, which suggests the necessity of conducting a more comprehensive assessment that involves diverse stakeholders.