Last week, four members of the FITFORWOOD team attended the 6th International Forest Policy Meeting at the Czech University of Life Sciences (CZU) in Prague. The conference brought together researchers from across Europe working on forest governance, sustainability transitions, environmental communication, and socio-political dimensions of forestry and land-use change.
For FITFORWOOD, the conference was especially valuable because our project operates at the intersection of several fields that do not always strongly overlap in research and practice: forest policy and forestry on the one hand, and urban timber construction on the other. While architecture, engineering, and construction planning are central to debates around timber construction, socio-political perspectives on these transformations are still comparatively underrepresented. The conference therefore offered an important opportunity to connect with researchers working on governance, institutional change, communication, and sustainability transitions more broadly.
Over the course of the event, the FITFORWOOD team engaged in numerous conversations with scientists and practitioners from different countries and disciplinary backgrounds. These exchanges included discussions with researchers involved in recently completed, ongoing, and upcoming projects related to forests, governance, circular economy, sustainability transformations, and environmental communication. Beyond presenting current research and discussing shared interests, the conference also provided valuable opportunities for networking and future collaboration.
One contribution that resonated particularly strongly with the themes of FITFORWOOD focused on pathways for alternative forest management in Sweden. The presentation by Lucas Dawson, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, explored why transitions towards alternative forest management remain relatively slow despite increasing societal and political interest in more multifunctional and sustainability-oriented approaches.
Rather than identifying purely technical or economic obstacles, the research highlighted the importance of socio-cultural norms, established professional routines, fragmented knowledge structures, and weak or ambiguous institutional support systems. These factors contribute to reinforcing existing forestry practices and slowing down broader transformation processes.
For FITFORWOOD, these discussions were especially relevant because similar dynamics can also be observed in urban timber construction. Questions surrounding sustainability transitions often extend far beyond technological innovation alone. They also involve governance structures, actor constellations, institutional routines, planning cultures, communication processes, and underlying societal values.
This aligns closely with the core perspective of FITFORWOOD: understanding urban timber construction not only as a technical or material transition, but as a broader socio-political transformation process embedded within the transition towards a circular bioeconomy.
The conference highlighted once again how important interdisciplinary exchange and cross-sector dialogue are for addressing complex sustainability challenges. We leave Prague inspired by the many fruitful discussions and excited to continue building connections across disciplines, sectors, and countries throughout the project duration.
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