An integrated decision aid for identifying and prioritizing strategies in forest management

Local conditions have important effects on strategy-making processes in natural resources management and also in forestry. From this viewpoint, the aim of the paper is to investigate how the strategic priorities differ among local forestry services. Thus, the research was conducted on a regional forest directorate as a sample case that has seven forestry enterprises that have close locations. On the other hand, as it is known that disciplines related to natural resources management must consider multiple factors in stages of decision making and also maintain their activities in a dynamic structure. Thus, there is a need for an easily applicable and flexible method for strategy prioritization in these disciplines. Therefore the paper also aims to introduce a decision model adaptable and simply applicable for provincial forestry organizations. For this purpose, first of all SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis is proposed for identifying the related strategies. Then, the usage of a multi-criteria decision model based on an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is utilized for assigning priorities to these strategies. The findings of the case study showed that local scale planning is the key factor for effective strategic planning. Moreover the AHP method used in the study has both apparent and easily applied characteristics.