Os Serviços Florestais desde a sua criação até às leis do Regime Florestal

This research work is a study of one of the most striking facts in the history of forestry policy and the activities of the Forestry Services in Portugal, since its creation, at the beginning of the 19th century, until the present day, specifically: Portugal is a country where the weight of private forestry property is dominant, however, public policies for the sector and the Public Administration body most directly responsible for its design and execution have not paid due attention to this reality. Why? With this research we intend to contribute to an answer to this question. Using a theoretical framework based on the concepts of path dependence, sources of bureaucratic power and the “advocacy coalition framework”, explanatory hypotheses will be formulated here for the problem identified above, hypotheses that will then be analyzed in light of historical facts that have occurred since the creation of the Forestry Services in Portugal, at the beginning of the 19th century, until the publication of the Forestry Regime legislation, at the beginning of the 20th century, legislation that would constitute the legal framework for forestry policy during the following century, until today. As will be shown in this analysis, the initial conditions for the formation of the Forestry Services had a great influence on the trajectory that their activities later followed, as well as the country's forestry policy, thus contributing to explaining the above mentioned problem.