Based not only on the production scale but also on the evaluation from various points of view, I showed that it was necessary to argue about the business development of forestry enterprises. After the 1990's, improvement in productivity, securement of business sustainability, and development/securement of workforce have advanced, and it was not until 2000 that the consideration for sociality started to be fully taken into account. I introduced the Hisatsune Forest as a model of forestry enterprises which systematically position these ideas in a sequence of the management improvement flow. In addition, through analysis of "Forestry New-Employee Training Project", I showed that the problems of forestry workers are facing a new phase. Employment improvement measures (improvement in the work conditions and work environment etc.) advanced in the first half of the 1990's. The matching of employer and employee support measures advanced in the latter half of the 1990's. After 2000, it has become a major target of the forestry labor policy to systematically educate new employees ("Forestry New-Employee Training Project" as the initial education) and to settle them. Aiming at the integration of initial education, intermediate education (training projects for forestry workers conducted by prefectures) and advanced education (participation in business planning, process control technology, development of forestry business planners etc.) and supporting their career development will likely to become a challenge in the future.

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The solutions to increasingly complex environmental problems necessitate new governance based on the cooperation of diverse actors. The role of civil society in creating new forest governance is important, and forestry volunteering is a specific example of the kind of action required. Japanese forests have traditionally been preserved by agricultural communities. However, the current forest volunteer activities were started by residents in cities through their participation in forestry preservation work and are characterized by the volunteers' efforts in promoting the use of domestic wood and in making political suggestions. The number of forestry volunteers has increased dramatically in recent years, and have formed networks with other actors from the community to the national level. It is essential that the work of these forestry volunteers help form a "New Commons" connecting cities and rural villages.

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In order to resolve the problem of insufficiency, it is important to reconsider forest management in Japan. This paper discusses forest management through the use of public policies focusing on strategic policy design. To formulate an effective forest policy for private lands, it is essential to design the policy such that it places importance on the private actors' decision making. The development of the informational foundation, including a wide variety of knowledge and various technical matters concerning forests, is considered to be crucial for supporting relevant decision making. In order to improve forestry competitiveness, indirect support should be employed as the main policy instrument. With regard to policy measures aimed at public interests, such as environmental conservation, an effective monitoring system is the key to ensuring regulation. Further, voluntary based instruments will help expand forest management for environmental conservation in private forests. Local forest management supported by local foresters, who could give owners the appropriate expert advice, play an important role in formulating an effective forest policy.

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In an effort to enhance our understanding of the dynamics of Japanese forestry, I estimated the simultaneous equations system consisted of demand and supply functions of domestic softwood sawlog market and forestry labor market. Although there has been a sizable literature on demand and supply model in sawlog and stumpage markets, to which the results in this study agree in many aspects, modeling of forestry labor market is the first-ever attempt as such. The estimation employed the yearly time-series data for the nation from 1971 to 2004. Estimation results show that during the thirty years the Japanese forestry had been faced to demand decline in sawlog market on one hand and supply decline in forestry labor market on the other hand, and thereby that market-clearing quantities of sawlog and forestry labor had both fallen, which meant the downscale of the forestry sector. Estimated system crossing over the two markets makes it possible to calibrate the effects of exogenous variables on both markets. It is observed among others that rising rural wage affects not only forestry labor market to decline forestry labor supply but also sawlog market through a rise of forestry wage to decline sawlog supply.

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This study investigated systems for the management and planning of national parks in England, using the Peak District National Park as an example. National parks in England are managed such as to integrate nature and landscape conservation, services to visitors and regional socioeconomic revitalization. Each national park establishes its own National Park Authority, with staff dedicated to park management. National Park Authority members, a majority of them are local, make fundamental decisions about park management. Because local governments are responsible for developing policies for national parks (other than land-use policies) and because more than 90% of the national park area is privately owned, it is difficult for National Park Authorities to manage parks by themselves. Thus they work with various entities, including local governments, NPOs and local residents. The legal basis of park management is the planning permission system established according to The Town and Country Planning Act. Each national park combines various resources and measures for implementing park management projects, and makes independent efforts to obtain subsidies or to make use of existing subsidization systems or other policies.

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It has been over 150 years since the plantation forests are established by using the taungya system of Myanmar origin. Soon after its emergence, the system was widely introduced into Asia, Africa, and Latin America due to its efficiency. However, researchers view the connection between Forest Departments of the various countries that apply taungya system and the rural people who take part in taungya system as top-down approach. However, this paper makes an approach to clarify that taungya system is a form of decentralization. While doing so, it tries to connect decentralization regarding to three different types of forest plantations with the forest occupants, through plantation participants. It claims that private owners and communities now have the decentralization and devolution rights in forest plantation establishment, and the plantation participants at State-owned plantations also have some form of decentralization rights. However, it admits the experience of negative human impacts in State-owned plantation areas. For this reason, an impact analysis is carried out to examine the effects of decentralization so that more up-to-date measures can be identified. Findings from the TwoStep cluster analysis reveal that the present decentralization pattern of forest plantations in Myanmar has no long term sustainable effect on the forest occupants. Especially the people living in permanent villages without taungya plot allocation seemed to be the most vulnerable in socio-economic terms.

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This study presents the estimation methodology of sustainability gap between forestry labour supply and demand in 40 years considering typical forest management works such as silviculture, thinning and clear cutting with reference to the indicator 6.3.a in the Montreal Process. The developed methodology applied for the private forest management in the town of Nichinan as a case study in order to assess the sustainable forest management of them from the labour force perspective. The estimation result showed a huge gap between forestry labour supply and demand in the standard management plan. In addition, the assessment of sustainability gap showed the possibility of the improvement of sustainability in the long-term clear cutting plan and no clear cutting plan compared with the standard clear cutting plan. This result suggests that the improvement of forestry labour supply as an exogenous variable is a critical point for achieving sustainable forest management in Japan.

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