Fragmentation and lack of legitimacy of the international and European forest regime complex in legal perspective

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Peter-Tobias Stoll
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Forstwissenschaften
• Förderung: Förderung von 2012 bis 2017
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 225168579

The project will assess the fragmentation, which exists in the international forest regime complex and the resulting lack of legitimation. On this basis, it will explore options to advance coherence and legitimation for an international forest policy and means of its legitimation and legalization. As will be analysed in detail, it appears, that the international forest regime complex suffers from fragmentation in two ways. Firstly, forest issues did probably lag behind in the development of the contemporary international system of environmental law as they lacked the legitimation by a dedicated international agreement, which so many other issues such as biodiversity, climate change and desertification do enjoy. Secondly, due to this and other developments of the international legal system, particular aspects of forest policies are intensively dealt with separately and – arguably - without much coordination by diverse international regimes like, for instance, the FCCC, the CBD and the ITTA. To the more, relevant measures for such forest policy, like, for instance, certification, compulsory labelling schemes and related trade restrictions are nowadays subject to rules and standards of the WTO and thus need to be carefully designed in order to prevent any inconsistencies. In order to complement this global assessment, the legal frame of forest policy within the European Union will be analysed, which also suffers from a lack of legitimation, but apparently nonetheless developed a number of activities.

• DFG-Verfahren: Sachbeihilfen