Presentation short abstract

Climate-driven forest decline sparks debates in France over how to renew or restore forests. Our study reveals two opposing discourses, with institutions positioned on a gradient between them. These discourses reflect diverging expectations for forests, management practices, and desired governance.

Presentation long abstract

As climate change raises concerns about forests, various approaches are proposed to restore and conserve forests, their biodiversity or their productive capacity (e.g., clear-cutting and plantations, exotic species introduction, assisted migration, natural regeneration). In France, a political, technical and ideological debate has emerged on the need for forest renewal for adaptation to climate change and on its definition and implementation. Our study analyses the divergent discourses of institutions involved in forest renewal or restoration in France. We combined the argumentative framework (with storylines that may be shared across discourses) and the Values-Rules-Knowledge framework (to identify storylines about expectations from renewal, its governance, and recommended practices). We coded eighteen semi-structured interviews and then applied correspondence analyses and fuzzy clustering. The results confirmed that forest renewal is a contested notion and revealed an opposition between two major discourses. The first discourse corresponded to a “business-as-usual” forestry, emphasizing timber production from human-controlled forests and interventionist management supported by public incentives. The second discourse highlighted social and environmental benefits provided by conserving or restoring natural forest, with no or limited intervention practices, and rejected intensive practices and current governmental policies. The interviewed institutions fell along a gradient between these two discourses, with positions that depended on the types of institution. Our study shows the need for a genuine stakeholder dialogue and greater transparency in government policies for renewal. In particular, the modalities of the financial incentives need to be reconsidered, as they are currently aligned with the production-oriented discourse.