Evolution of Private Forest Owner’s Cooperation: A Bibliometric Network Analysis

Abstract Forests play an important role in adapting to and mitigating the negative effects of climate change and environmental degradation through sustainable forest management. In Europe and North America, where private forest ownership dominates, private forest owners play a crucial role in achieving diverse policy objectives. Given the importance of private forest owner cooperation to support the sustainable management and the achievement of policy goals, this paper systematically reviewed the international scientific publication on private forest owners (PFOs) cooperation using bibliometric network analysis complemented with a literature review to examine the development over the last two decades (2000–2021) and to determine where the trend of the research has been heading. The analysis provided a general overview of PFOs cooperation and focus more specifically on two main aspects of PFOs cooperation: “Reasons for joining forest owners’ organizations” and “Factors influencing PFOs cooperation”. The data was retrieved from the Scopus database and analysed using the VOSviewer software. The results showed that the number of publications on PFOs’ cooperation is more or less constant and that the most prolific authors’ institutions in this topic area come from the United States, Finland, Sweden and Germany. The keyword cluster analysis showed that there are three topic oriented clusters for both aspects of PFOs’ cooperation – “Reasons for joining forest owners’ organizations” and “Factors influencing PFOs cooperation”, while the trend of keywords showed a change in the perspective of PFOs’ cooperation over time: from cooperation for “timber production and supplying to the market” to cooperation for “multifunctional and sustainable forest management”, “biodiversity conservation” and “climate change mitigation”. The results also showed the influence of forest policy on PFOs cooperation.