Forests are expected to do a lot at once: climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity conservation, bioeconomy development, recovery from disturbances, and meeting evolving societal expectations. Forest advisory and extension services play an important role in helping forest owners and other actors navigate these challenges.

Research on forest advisory services has expanded considerably in recent decades. However, advisory services are often analysed as individual organisations, programmes, policy instruments, or knowledge-transfer mechanisms. Less attention has been paid to the wider systems through which knowledge exchange, learning, innovation, and governance processes emerge.

Why a systems perspective?

This Special Issue of Forest Policy and Economics starts from the premise that forest advisory services are best understood as components of broader forest advisory systems that include diverse actors, institutions, policies, knowledge flows and values interacting across multiple scales. The guest editors invite contributions that examine how these interactions shape advisory activities and outcomes. A systems perspective means attention to context, interconnectedness, multiple actors and governance levels, formal and informal institutions, and change over time. Contributions need not adopt a particular systems methodology but should engage with one or more of these characteristics.

Topics of interest

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Evolution of forest advisory systems
  • Governance, policy, and institutional dimensions of advisory services
  • Relationships among actors, organisations, knowledge processes, and governance levels
  • Trust, values, legitimacy, power, and inclusion in advisory systems
  • Comparative and methodological analyses of advisory systems
  • Advisory systems in changing social, political, and environmental contexts

The Special Issue welcomes conceptual, theoretical, empirical, comparative, and methodological contributions from all world regions. It aims to advance understanding of forest advisory services as complex, evolving systems and to stimulate new research on advice, learning, innovation, and governance in times of change.

Guest editors

Prof. Dr. Anna Lawrence
anna.lawrence.perth@uhi.ac.uk

Dr. Ivana Zivojinovic
ivana.zivojinovic@boku.ac.at

Prof. Dr. Stephen Wyatt
stephen.wyatt@umoncton.ca

Dr. Doris Mutta
d.mutta@landscapealliance.org

Authors can submit through the journal’s online submission system. When prompted to “Select Article Type”, choose the Special Issue “VSI: Forest advisory systems”.

Submit your manuscript
Guide for Authors
Explore the full Special Issue

  • Submission deadline: 30 April 2027
  • Journal: Forest Policy and Economics

Questions? Feel free to contact the guest editors.