Interpersonal and interorganizational communication during the transposition process of habitat directive in Croatia

The Council Directive 92/73/EEC on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora (the EC Habitats Directive) is, alongside the EC Birds Directive, the legislative basis upon which the EUwide network of protected areas (Natura 2000) is built. The first step in the implementation of the Network is the national proposal of Sites of Community Importance (pSCI), which should be based just on scientific criteria. Croatia is now in the process of designating pSCI's, and has formed a working group dealing with forestry section of Natura 2000 under the leadership of State Institute for Nature Protection. This working group is composed of representatives of many organizations coming from nature protection and forestry sectors, which also have a task of setting management guidelines for the conservation of these species and habitats. The designation process is characterized by strong need for improvement of scientific knowledge on the consequences that different forest management regimes have on the conservation status of forestry species and habitats. Another momentum is a policy learning process on the legislative framework of Natura 2000 and on its implementation practices. Although primary based on science, the process is best characterized as a participatory policy negotiation process, in which parties are approaching to a common-ground decision. The objective of this paper is to explore the non-scientific elements of the transposition of the Habitats directive and its influence on the decision making process. Two main variables that set the “position” of the decision in the process are the policy learning process and the power relations among stakeholders, which are based on former cooperation, organizational interests, resource dependencies and communication networks. These elements are structured into organizational network of resource dependencies and individual (members of the working group) networks of communication and influence. The parameters of the influence network of individuals shows similarities with the resource dependencies network of their organizations. The strength of the relations among organizations shows relation to the similarity of their interests. This indicates that the interorganizational relations are a reference framework in which the discussion of the working group is set. Such network model can facilitate the policy formulation process by giving new insights to all the parties, which would help them to assess the claims of other parties. This would also increase the “ease” of the implementation of the decision, since it would be more embedded in the context of the policy subsystem. However, disclosure of the parameters of these interorganizational relations during the policy formulation should be done with great prudence, as it would be an intervention to the process.