Abstract translation
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.