Published in Scientific Papers. Series "Management, Economic Engineering in Agriculture and rural development", Vol. 24 ISSUE 2
Written by Felix ARION, Bozhura FIDANSKA, Bridget MURPHY, Cristina Amaro da COSTA, Juan Antonio LAZARO MENENDEZ, Mark REDMAN, Rike STOTEN

The main aim of the article is to explore essential aspects of mountain governance, with a particular emphasis on the principles of Good Governance. This includes emphasizing soft skills, knowledge, innovative solutions, and the allocation of necessary resources. The core concept centres on adopting a community-focused governance model, which establishes a structure for proactive stakeholder engagement and sustainable conflict resolution. The primary audience includes practitioners, communities, businesses, and others, providing them with potential strategies to enhance their involvement in the decision-making process. The paper aims to offer pertinent insights into effective practices within European mountain governance. The goal is to extract distinct experiences and glean valuable lessons, evaluating both the potential and constraints for their applicability in varied geographical contexts. The methodology used includes identifying comparative study cases – studying good and bad lessons to be learned – from Europe, and their analysis based on how much the community the contributed to build governance. Commencing with detailed contextual backgrounds, objectives, and developmental trajectories, these practices undergo comprehensive analysis, considering the essential elements outlined earlier. It was observed a large variety of governance models, and there were examined in details 6 of them (2 from Romania, from Spain, from Bulgaria, from Ireland and from Portugal). The results emphasised that the specificity of each mountain is of a major importance for a resilient governance, and the replicability of each governance is possible only on certain conditions, including a real bottom-up and participatory approach, flexibility and local adaptability, but, also, conserving the traditions and landscape.

[Read full article] [Citation]