Public participation in "River Basin Management" projects is deemed to be crucial and the framework states clearly that caring for Europe's waters will require more involve­ment of citizens, interested parties and non-governmental organizations. To that end the Water Framework Directive will require information and consultation when river basin management plans are established: the river basin manage­ment plan must be issued in draft and the background docu­mentation on which the decisions are based must be made accessible. Furthermore, a biannual conference is said to be important to provide for a regular exchange of views and experiences in implementation. The Framework Directive underlines the need for establishing very early on a network for the exchange of information and experience between water professionals throughout the community (Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council, 2007).
     To   facilitate  the  implementation   of the  EU  Water Framework Directive, the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government in Ireland as well as the En­vironment Agency in England and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) are promoting the establishment of river basin management projects by local authorities for River Basin Districts in relation to all inland and coastal waters that will facilitate participation by all stakeholders and lead to the identification and implementation of effec­tive measures for improved water management. The overall objective of these projects is to develop a River Basin Man­agement System, including a program of measures designed to maintain and/or achieve at least good water status for all waters and to facilitate the preparations of River Basin Management Plans. In order to implement this Directive the government of France has for instance established the Rhine Network for a better participatory management of the Rhine River. This network's primary role is to identify and encourage water management based on local participa­tory practices as well as reinforce European cooperation at the watershed scale.

6.4.4.2 Fisheries issues
One of the main areas where research can be developed in this domain concerns the regulation of the access to marine resources and their exploitation, for instance:
•     Better define the rights of use and the rights of property of marine ecosystems: the regulation of the access to ma­rine resources and their exploitation leads to the separa­tion of the rights of property and the rights of use. The inadequacies of many present regimes and particularly where the property of the resources is declared com­mon, results mostly from the absence of a clear regime of access and rights of usage. The evolution of access and property regimes is an essential condition for the establishment of a sustainable exploitation of fisheries resources. Alternatives for resource management could be built on scenarios allowing for the testing of vari­ous property regimes (e.g., private/collective), various systems of rights exchange, at various resources levels (stock/ecosystems).

In addition, in this area the importance of local governance and the integration of stakeholders' advice in governance

could be underlined. Models where stakeholders' advice is taken into account could be developed to help build scenar­ios of sustainable fisheries management. This could be done by either strengthening or improving existing institutions (e.g., Regional Advisory Councils in the EU). In this context, the creation of localized Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries (TURF) and the granting of the TURFs to fishing communi­ties offer new opportunities to provide local control over the resources within a territory with local determination of the objectives to be derived (Christy, 1982). The community would be in a position to choose whether it wishes to extract resource rents, to increase the income levels of its fishermen, to increase employment opportunities, or to achieve some combination of these goals. It could also determine the kind of gear to be used, the technological innovations to adopt, the time and seasons of fishing and other management mea­sures. Exclusive territorial rights could be a strong incentive for ensuring that the management measures are respected. Further studies are necessary to develop this TURF concept such as (1) detailed examinations of the conditions permit­ting the creation of localized TURFs or the maintenance and enhancement of traditional territorial rights; (2) defining the ways in which the benefits of traditional systems are shared or distributed and identify the kinds of controls over newly created TURFs that would ensure equitable distribution of benefits both within communities acquiring the rights and among neighboring communities of fishermen.

6.4.4.3 Forestry issues
The forest sector has been affected by important changes in terms of modes of governance and management since the beginning of the 1990s (Tikkanen et al., 1997). The con­ventional mode of decision-making in the forestry sector is basically a top-down, command-and-control, centralized system, where the technical expertise of the state forest ad­ministration staff is exclusive. With time, this framework has slightly moved towards new modes of governance and management, where participation (in fact consultation in most of the cases) and deliberation among stakeholders (mostly production-based ones) are becoming more promi­nent (FAO/ECE/ILO, 1997; GoFOR, 2007).
     The main changes identified in the forest sector are highlighted below:

Schemes of certification. Under strong pressure from some major environmental NGOs, the idea has been introduced that the evaluation of the sustainability of forest manage­ment could work completely differently from what has been the case, where forest managers were more or less their own evaluators. It is admitted today that a certification proce­dure carried out by neutral actors is the only way to en­sure a label of sustainable forest management (Viana et al., 1997).

Three main certification schemes are coexisting today. The FSC (Forest Stewardship Council): promoted by environ­mentalists (mainly WWF) and based mainly on performance indicators; the PEFC (Program of Endorsement of Forest Certification  schemes),  promoted  by  producers,  includ­ing private forest owners in Europe and based on system indicators; and Smartwood, basically a North American