The project "Research into the Organization of Private Forest Owners' Interest Associations in the Western Balkan Region (PRIFORT)" focused on the following four countries of the Western Balkan region: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia. The main objective of the project was to reveal the preconditions for the formation of independent interest associations of private forest owners in the region by theory-oriented empirical social research. For this purpose, quantitative door-to-door surveys of randomly selected private forest owners and qualitative in-depth interviews of consciously selected forest policy decision makers were carried out. The report comprises the main results of the work. In Chapter 1 the main hypotheses of the interest group theories are scrutinized by empirical evidence of surveys of private forest owners and in-depth interviews of forest policy decision makers. Chapters 2 to 5 present a synopsis of the preconditions for the formation of private forest owners' associations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia, based on the results of quantitative and qualitative research. Finally, Chapter 6 deals with a comparison of the four countries with regard to all relevant aspects obtained by the surveys of private forest owners.
