Public participation in forestry in Turkey

Recently public participation in forestry has been seriously considered in Turkey. Participation is however quite a challenge for a country with a long tradition of top-down management and a strong bottom-up dependence on public provisioning. In such a setting, it may not be surprising that the experiences with public participation in forestry in Turkey are mixed. There are some positive initiatives like the creation of farmer's cooperatives and NGOs, but their role is quite limited and small of scale. This paper is bringing together different views based on existing studies in Turkish related to Turkey's experience with implementing public participation in forestry.