Social participation into regional forest planning attending to multifunctional objectives

• Local participation is relevant to know social demand towards forest's multiple functions.
• We have applied the Analytic Hierarchy Process to prioritise some forestry planning measures.
• Society demands economic, environmental and social forestry functions, giving a similar priority to each of them.
• The weighted measure has been to increase rural development of populations associated with forests.
• Measures weights obtained are a very useful tool to political decisions makers.

The main aim of this paper is to determine the adequate forest strategy to fulfil the multi-functional objectives that society demands. To this end, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been applied as a quantitative technique to prioritise various forestry planning measures in the Autonomous Region of Castilla y León, based on the opinion of a group of stakeholders representing the region's forestry sector. The need to promote this forest multi-functionality is a matter of priority for forest policies at international, national and regional levels. The final results indicate that society prefers clearly multi-functional forests, judging from the highly balanced weightings given to social, environmental and economic objectives and action measures.