Improving communication among stakeholders through ex-post transactional analysis — case study on Romanian forestry

One of the most visible components of the Forestry Development Project, carried out between 2003 and 2009 by the World Bank and Romanian Government was “PR support, Awareness Campaign and Development of PR products”, meant to improve the communication between all stakeholders involved in sustainable forest management. The awareness campaign mainly consisted of nine meetings with the forest owners and nine workshops with all stakeholders, i.e. representatives of the forest inspectorates, county headquarters of the national forest administration, mass media, forest landowners, forest managers, logging companies and local authorities, including police and gendarmerie. The discussions, facilitated in each meeting by the three authors, were recorded and the minutes produced there have been further used for diagnosing the main interaction bottlenecks occurred between stakeholders. These discussions have been examined through the transactional analysis method in order to find out the main communication problems needed to addresses at national, regional and local level by the representatives of the public authorities in charge with implementing and supervising the forest policy. The main results of this analysis consist of a list of problems supposed to generate conflicts of various kinds (legal, technical, managerial and communicational) in Romanian forestry. The study has also revealed some important and frequent pitfalls that jeopardize the communication between prevailing stakeholders. Explaining them and their root causes could be a very useful input for further PR training programs and for the academic curricula.

Research Highlights
► When a person conveys something, s/he behaves like Parent, Adult, or Child.
► Crossed transactions deter sheer communication between two partners.
► Whenever complementary transaction occur, the two partners keep on exchanging ideas.
► As long as the officials show the Adult state off, crossed transactions are inevitable.
► Transaction Analysis is a powerful tool for improving communication.