Cât de bine este ca silvicultorii să facă politică? [How good it is for foresters to do politics?]

• Main Author: Drăgoi M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: ”Ștefan cel Mare” University of Suceava, Faculty of Forestry and “Marin Drăcea” National Research-Development Institute in Forestry - Station Câmpulung Moldovenesc 2018-07-01
• Series: Bucovina Forestieră
• Subjects: forest policy; NGO; foresters
• Online Access: http://www.bucovina-forestiera.ro/arhiva/2018/18(1)/00_dragoi_3-6.pdf

This editorial tackles a very intriguing issue: should the foresters be involved in policy? Such a question really makes sense because in the last almost three decades, Romanian foresters have been complaining about forestry politicizing in the sense that forest resources and forestry staff have been used by ruling parties as electoral means, without any concern for forest sustainability. It has happened so because the forest policy must be contextualized in a broader perspective of conceiving and keeping consistent quite a long array of public policies, where the environmental protection public policy actually engulfs the forest policy. The argument that some professional groups shall keep away from making policy is logically dismantled by the fact that conceiving public policies implies a lot of technicalities that cannot be grasp without having a deeper understanding of what is going in different sectoral economies. Keeping some professionals, like physicians, foresters and militaries out of the political parties is not good at all for these domains (supposedly public policies) because all technical provisions will have been produced or amended by non-processionals. Especially the parties based on the neo-liberal doctrine shall be heavily packed with foresters for the simple reason that liberal politicians, in general, are prone to disregard the positive externalities produced by forests. In general, any political party shall have more technical lenses for domains where its own political doctrine tends to be sightless.