The Unit 9.05.04 focuses on forest policy and governance in the Baltic & Central and Eastern European (CEE) region. Its goal is to consolidate the available and encourage the future research regarding actual issues related with this region.

Baltic region includes countries on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In wider sense these countries also belong to the CEE region, together with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic and Slovenia. The common denominator in this region is the unprecedented transition from authoritarian regimes to democracies and from centrally planned to market economies that has been ongoing since 1990s. Yet, each of them went its own way. Today, some of them are parts of the European Union, others not, in some of them private forest owners are stronger than in others, process of restitution is at different stages, etc., which all creates a very exciting variety. The working party "Forest policies in the Baltic and CEE region" has this variety in focus, aiming to consolidate the available knowledge as well as to promote the emerging forest policy research in the region. It focuses on questions, such as: What are the key drivers behind policy stasis versus change? What are effective paths of institutional reforms? What can the (relatively) new democracies learn from each other or from the old democracies?

The current state of knowledge can be roughly grouped into:

(1) Country specific
It includes issues common for the region but having different country-specific emphasis. For example, the issue of National Forest Programs is actual in Czech Republic (Balest et al., 2017), Natura 2000 in Slovak Republic (Brescancin et al., 2017), forest owner associations in Estonia (Põllumäe et al., 2014-2016), strategic options for the state forests in Poland (Chudy et al., 2016), forest carbon and sustainable forest management alternatives in Ukraine (Egan et al., 2017; Keeton et al. 2015), or forest scenario modelling in Lithuania (Mozgeris et al., 2017).  

(2) Comparative studies
* between old and new democracies (e.g. Lithuania and Sweden –Brukas et al., 2015),
* among new democracies (e.g. state forest institutions of Balkan countries – Stevanov et al., 2018; energy wood production in Serbia and Croatia – Halder et al., 2014; restitution process in Slovak and Czech Republic - Jarsky et al., 2018; urban forests in SEE – Krajter-Ostoic et al., 2017; forest owner associations in CEE – Sarvasova et al., 2015),

(3) Overarching studies
encompassing either the whole country (e.g. A Narrative of the Lithuanian Forestry Transition -   Brukas, 2015) or part of the whole region (e.g. Multiple use forestry – Hoogstra-Klein et al., 2017).