Urban and peri-urban forest area stakeholder identification, case study of ‘Bernāti’ and ‘Ogres Zilie kalni’ nature parks

nature areas and more remote peri-urban areas have objectively the most complex management issues due to the potentially high density of visitors and a diverse range of stakeholders. Such areas can also be valuable nature conservation and biodiversity hotspots, further making stakeholder interactions more complex. In this research, we conduct stakeholder identification for two case study areas – an urban forest nature park and a peri-urban forest nature park, with the aim of developing detailed lists of involved parties, including both public and private entities. We identified three main blocks of stakeholders (regulatory, usage, management), and detailed each group and sub-group for the case study areas. Our main results and conclusions include the identification of minor differences particularly explained by geographical and socio-economic contexts for each of the areas, with the regulatory stakeholder group overlapping the most between the two areas. The potential use of such analysis can improve or develop cooperation between previously unobserved stakeholders, and in research contexts, allow for a greater input from various parties that could have been missed in a more broader analysis of a research area.