Search

In the context of the prevalence of anti-gender politics in Europe, political institutions such as parliaments have become arenas of political struggles around gender and gender equality. While feminist scholarship has studied anti-gender politics, less attention has been paid to feminist responses to such opposition. The contribution of this article is to conceptualize feminist responses to anti-gender politics within political institutions, which we name feminist institutional responses. This conceptualization entails proposing a set of analytical categories for capturing forms of feminist institutional responses – namely, knowledge, coalition building, rule making, and everyday pragmatic engagement. We analyze 50 plenary debates on gender equality and two plenary debates on the State of the Union, as well as 135 interviews with members of the European Parliament and political staff during two terms that witnessed a rise in anti-gender politics, 2014–2019 and 2019–2024. The conceptualization of feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics in parliaments is important for identifying how institutional actors are countering the destructive potential of anti-gender politics and safeguarding parliaments as democratic sites for the advancement of gender equality policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, sustainable forest management has proved to be a crucial issue for forestry companies becoming more and more sensitive to environmental problems. This resulted in the inherent expansion in forest certifications formally promoting long-term environmental sustainability and a wider spectrum of forest ecosystems. In this context this study aims to assess the main motivations that encourage the adoption of sustainable forest management certification for PEFC and FSC standards and how these motivations vary depending on the characteristics of the companies. Specifically, online questionnaire surveys were submitted to a sample of Italian and German forest owners and managers considering five main motivational factors offered by the economic literature: three external mechanisms represented by the market, signalling and legal mechanism and two internal mechanisms consisting of the moral and learning mechanism. Results highlighted that the main drivers are represented for both countries by the reporting mechanism, in particular certification is seen as a tool to demonstrate externally the implementation of sustainable forest management practices. Other mechanisms that guide the intentions of forest owners and managers include the legal mechanism, in particular in the Italian case, especially for publicly owned forest areas, more driven by the interest of complying with forestry regulations and the moral mechanism, in the case of Germany. The implications of this research are seen in development of forest certification, through understanding forest owners' reasons for adopting it and providing background information to improve the design of certification programs to attract greater adoption by forest companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multifunctional forest management should provide the opportunity to create, conserve, modify or eliminate forest roads. Within protected areas, it is difficult to make a single assessment of the degree of accessibility to different forest areas, having to mediate among productive forestry, protection needs and other benefits deriving from forest stands. A GIS-based methodology, with the support of a Forest Information System (FIS) and available Forest Plans for the study area, were applied to create an accessibility map (based on the forest roads network) for the Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise National Park (PNALM). Results were related to several FIS metadata, highlighting that accessibility in the study area was sufficient, but not optimal, in the productive management units, being rather poor in those where soil protection and biodiversity conservation are the main functions (only 38.8% of them were accessible). Forest roads density (28.5 m ha−1) was not homogeneously distributed within the study area and the ratio between forest road length (199.4 km) and planned forest surface (13,355.3 ha) is only 14.9 m ha−1. In contrast to what is commonly found in forest accessibility works, the innovative element of this study was the involvement of PNALM's technical office in evaluating the results and exploring the opportunity to adopt a different policy for forest roads network management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the symbolic construction of the 'people' and the 'homeland' in Spain's left populist party Podemos by exploring the gender and class meanings that Podemos leaders evoke in their representation of these two key elements of populist rhetoric. Distinguishing between the official symbolic presentation of the constituency, that purposely selects certain symbols to evoke particular meanings about the people and the homeland, and the subtext of gendered norms that symbols evoke, allows us understanding the possibilities of the Spanish left populist party to contribute to feminist politics. Podemos has a role in the process of meaning-making that envisions gender and class-aware societal projects through the symbolic representation of 'the people' and 'the homeland'. Yet, ambivalence in the egalitarian discourse and a symbolic subtext of unequal informal gendered norms in the party culture undermine the feminist commitments of the leadership adopted in the official presentation of the constituency. By capturing the gap between the official purposeful symbolic representation, that conveys a message of inclusive and feminist people-homeland, and the symbolic subtext of the party's discourse and performance, that reproduces exclusionary gendered norms, the article contributes to reflect on the inclusionary potential and contradictions of left populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]