Exploring synergies in the collaborative governance of European forests supported by the EU-funded LIFE Programme

With the EU Green Deal strategy in the background, the European Union (EU) is developing a new policy framework related to forest ecosystems and forestry aiming to address global environmental challenges, especially through the new EU Forest Strategy for 2030, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, the “Fit for 55” package for climate neutrality, and the new Common Agricultural Policy 2023- 2027. All the policies mentioned above recognize networking and collaboration fundamental to achieve effectiveness of activities. Integrating multiple actions implemented in European forests in a sharing effort perspective and diffuse them through the replication of good practices, potentially could contribute to a wider societal transition able to address global environmental challenges affecting not only forests but, more generally, all ecosystems. The LIFE Programme could represent one example of an EU program devoted to concretizing the collaborative governance in forest ecosystems through the proposition and implementation of LIFE projects by partnerships of multiple actors. In effect, the LIFE Programme in the last programming period (2014-2020) promotes multiple projects dealing with environmental challenges related to forests, e.g., due to climate change. Exploring concrete examples of collaborative governance implemented in forests through LIFE projects, could be helpful to get insights valuable to enhance the governance of forests and, more generally, the collaborative environmental governance. In particular, enhancing knowledge of connections and synergies is strategic for promoting coherence between multiple actions, which need to integrate different and specific social needs and policy objectives with global environmental challenges. Thus, this study focuses on the identification of synergies between (i) projects key elements, (ii) projects beneficiaries, (iii) policies fostering LIFE projects, performing the Social Network Analysis. From selecting projects in the LIFE Programme database, we get 61 LIFE projects co-funded from 2014 to 2020. They are implemented in the whole European territory. Additionally, we identify 113 keywords, 282 beneficiaries and 28 EU policies. Results evidence the high value of forests for nature and biodiversity as the main source of synergies between multiple activities. This is confirmed also by the analysis of policies. Conversely, central issues like bioeconomy and soil protection are not equally shared by projects. Additionally, forests emerge as tools to create synergies for adaptation to climate change in rural and urban areas. Actors creating networks of collaborations are especially public bodies or NGOs placed in south Europe.