Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Forest Policy and Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/forpol Influence of the geographical scope on the research foci of sustainable forest management: Insights from a content analysis Andrea Sutterlüty a,1 , Nenad Šimunović a, ⁎ ,1 , Franziska Hesser a , Tobias Stern b , Andreas Schober b , Kurt Christian Schuster c a Team Market Analysis and Innovation Research, Kompetenzzentrum Holz (Wood K Plus), Feistmantelstrasse 4, 1180 Vienna, Austria b University of Graz, Institute of Systems Sciences, Innovation and Sustainability Research, Merangasse 18/1, A-8010 Graz, Austria c Lenzing Aktiengesellschaft, Department Global Sustainability, Werkstraße 2, 4860 Lenzing, Austria ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Quantitative content analysis Corporate social responsibility CSR Sustainable development Forestry ABSTRACT Individual approaches to sustainable forest management have to be operationalized according to the regionally specific environmental conditions and stakeholder requirements. Unique regional socio-economic conditions also significantly impact stakeholder requirements of globally acting forest sector companies. Therefore, forest- based sector decision makers have to be aware of regionally-specific and context sensitive sustainability con- cerns, when assessing and prioritizing sustainability issues. Sustainability research is considered to have a re- gional focus and a problem-driven perspective. Hence, research foci of scientific discussion on sustainable forest management can provide insight into regional differences and problems of sustainable forest management. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of 643 scientific abstracts in the context of sustainable forest man- agement. We observed 16 different topic categories, out of which the topics of forest health and conservation and forest management practices represent the dominant foci. Furthermore, our results confirm a strong impact of geographic scope on the research foci. For example, the issues of climate change mitigation and adaptation are significantly more investigated in the Global North while social impacts of forest management are more re- searched in the Global South. Our findings suggest that decision makers should consider more than environ- mental issues when selecting corporate social responsibility activities or when making environmental policies. Otherwise, they can potentially overlook the impacts of forest management which are of high regional im- portance and intensively investigated by the scientific community. 1. Introduction Sustainable forest management (SFM) is one of concepts which were significantly influenced by the publication of the Brundtland report (WCED, 1987). Main notions of the report (e.g. intra- and inter- generational equity, solidarity and environmental limits to global de- velopment) (Langhelle, 1999) prompted the policy debate on environ- mental governance to include multiple stakeholders and their diverse interpretations of sustainability (Sneddon et al., 2006). An under- standing of the concept of SFM developed in a similar fashion. Although the modern understanding of SFM still retains some conceptual va- gueness (Wang, 2004), its two main hallmarks are a theoretical foun- dation in the concept of sustainable yield management and an inclusion of a wide range of social demands through the adaption of participatory processes (Hahn and Knoke, 2010). Together with the rise of sustainability discourse, the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) experienced a powerful resurgence in its activity (Vogel, 2005; Carroll, 1999). At the time, new theoretical contributions of stakeholder theory and business ethics theory sparked an increased interest in CSR (Carroll, 1999). Also, structural changes in the socio-legal and socio-economic framework over the last decades of the 20th century (e.g. globalization, liberalization of trade) were an- other driver of the increased interest into CSR because they further bolstered the role of large corporations as major social and political actors (Vogel, 2005; Keinert, 2008). At the same time, rising environ- mental consciousness has sparked an increasing social pressure on companies to take responsibility for the full extent of their impacts on society and environment. Hence, implementation of CSR has become one of the main priorities for business leaders (Porter and Kramer, 2007; Maon et al., 2010). CSR and the related achievement of a social license to operate are of special importance in forestry and other extractive, resource intensive https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2018.02.003 Received 28 June 2017; Received in revised form 23 December 2017; Accepted 8 February 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. 1 Equally contributing authors. E-mail address: n.Simunovic@kplus-wood.at (N. Šimunović). Forest Policy and Economics 90 (2018) 142–150 1389-9341/ © 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V. T