Alexander Dietrich, Jale Tosun
Forstzertifizierung in Europa: Eine Analyse der Beitrittsmotive von Staaten

Zeitschrift für Umweltpolitik & Umweltrecht, 2013: 36, issue 3, pp. 292-316
ISSN: 0343-7167

In the early 1990s, 36 European governments worked as participants of the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe on criteria and indicators of sustainable forest management. The indicators developed served as the basis for the 1999-founded Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), today’s biggest forest certification system worldwide. Surprisingly, most members of the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe either joined the PEFC immediately in 1999, or not at all. This paper examines the European governments’ motives of membership with the PEFC by employing parametric models of survival analysis. The regression models show that most important determinants of states’ participation in PEFC are the extent to which revenue from forestry contributes to a state’s overall revenue and the share of privately owned forests. Put differently, participation is mainly driven by economic concerns and not social or ecological ones.