Research Report
This study reviews the recent paradigm shift in forest management and analyzes current regulations of forests and forest lands in Korea and their effectiveness in governance of forest resources, by employing the analyticalframework provided by CHUN (2009) with specific cases. The results of analysis provide the basis of proposals for improving the regulatory systems of forest lands in line with the new paradigm of sustainable forest management.
The regulations under study are limited to those affecting forest owners, forest managing enterprises and forest users benefiting from utilization of forest resources. The forest regulations intend to safeguard the provision of forest services to the general public, in particular to villagers in mountain areas by intervening forest owners’ and enterprises’ activities affecting the flow of services from forests. The study found out that the forestry regulations have incorporated more market-based or self-regulatory instruments in recent years.
The contents analysis revealed there are some regulations lacking the effectiveness in reality. For example, the forestland management act has been failing to prevent conversion of conservation forestlands to other land uses. The act on construction and management of forest resources has been deregulated such that forest owners’ freedom of utilizing their forestlands can be enhanced in the last two decades. From the result of cross analysis we found that there is a big gap between the governmental policies of purchasing protected forestlands and actual governmental budgeting in reality.
This study has found out that the regulatory mechanism has a limitation in internalizing the externalities of forest services, demanded by the public. Thus we suggest that forest regulations aiming at providing public forest services should be reformed into a newmode of governance system based on market mechanism, which can make the beneficiaries of forest services to pay the cost of services supply.