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A. Sutterlüty, N. Simunovic, F. Hesser, T. Stern, A. Schober, K. C. Schuster:
"Influence of the geographical scope on the research foci of sustainable forest management: Insights from a content analysis";
Forest Policy and Economics, 90 (2018), 142 - 150.

Individual approaches to sustainable forest management have to be operationalized according to the regionally
specific environmental conditions and stakeholder requirements. Unique regional socio-economic conditions
also significantly impact stakeholder requirements of globally acting forest sector companies. Therefore, forestbased
sector decision makers have to be aware of regionally-specific and context sensitive sustainability concerns,
when assessing and prioritizing sustainability issues. Sustainability research is considered to have a regional
focus and a problem-driven perspective. Hence, research foci of scientific discussion on sustainable forest
management can provide insight into regional differences and problems of sustainable forest management. We
conducted a quantitative content analysis of 643 scientific abstracts in the context of sustainable forest management.
We observed 16 different topic categories, out of which the topics of forest health and conservation and
forest management practices represent the dominant foci. Furthermore, our results confirm a strong impact of
geographic scope on the research foci. For example, the issues of climate change mitigation and adaptation are
significantly more investigated in the Global North while social impacts of forest management are more researched
in the Global South. Our findings suggest that decision makers should consider more than environmental
issues when selecting corporate social responsibility activities or when making environmental policies.
Otherwise, they can potentially overlook the impacts of forest management which are of high regional importance
and intensively investigated by the scientific community.

Quantitative content analysis; Corporate social responsibility; CSR; Sustainable development; Forestry;

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2018.02.003